WWE star Raquel Rodriguez talks Evolution, pro wrestling and more ahead of major event
On Sunday, she will get a chance to defend her tag-team championship with Roxanne Perez in one of the toughest matches on the card. The duo will put the titles on the line in a fatal four-way tag match against Charlotte Flair and Alexa Bliss, Sol Ruca and Zaria, and Kairi Sane and Asuka.
Rodriguez expressed to Fox News Digital what Evolution meant to her the first time she saw the premium live event take place back in 2018.
"This is a very exciting time for all the women in WWE, all the women that are just in general invested in wrestling around the world," she said. "We only had one Evolution and I remember that was back in 2018, I was training at the performance center, I was biting my nails because I just wanted to be a part of it so bad. But it was a beautiful representation of women in wrestling, women in sports, and women of culture from just all over the world.
"So, to know that we are able to have a women's Evolution 2 and have more women from our history and our future coming out to represent, I think it is going to be an absolutely amazing show. I can't wait to see all the women, little girls, and the abuelitas and tias that are gonna be in the stands cheering us on. I am just very grateful and very excited to be walking in as a WWE Women's Tag Team champion and walking out as a women's tag team champion. That's not going to change."
For Rodriguez, pro wrestling was in her blood. Her father, Rick, was an independent wrestler in Texas in the 1980s and 1990s, and she would watch him compete.
She said that while Chyna and other female wrestlers of that time were inspiring, her interest in wrestling really was drawn from her father.
"There was not just one person that I looked up to and wanted to emulate, I mean I looked up to many. I, obviously, cherished Chyna and Beth Phoenix for being the woman that they were, representing strong, tall woman," Rodriguez said. "I think for me and my life, I mean, I was already 6 foot my freshman year of high school and I was taller than anybody and everybody since the young age of 4. I constantly felt different and not always in the best ways. And so, to see these women who were bigger than some of the men and stronger than some of the men was something I could relate too. I felt very seen and very heard and so I always loved watching them and looking to them for any inspiration.
"I also always look to my dad as well. I am a daddy's girl and I say that in and out he has really guided me in a lot decisions I made in my life and I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him, for sure, and the sacrifices he made. Watching him and his work in wrestling really inspired me obviously from a young age because I have been saying I wanted to do this since I was a little girl. But even today, he keeps me very grounded, he keeps me at home. I am very, very blessed to have so many people I consider role models."
Rodriguez is a six-time women's tag team champion, four of which came with Liv Morgan. However, Morgan has been sidelined with a shoulder injury and Perez stepped into her place to fill in – at least for the time being.
Rodriguez said she has all the confidence in the world that they will defend their titles successfully despite never actually teaming up with each other in an official match.
"It is definitely going to be a challenge for us," Rodriguez told Fox News Digital. "But I look at the other teams, and Alexa Bliss and Charlotte haven't really been together for that long. So, I would say they are in the same playing field as us. Asuka and Kairi – yes, Kabuki Warriors have a staple name in the women's tag division. They have been champions before. However, Asuka is just coming back from injury, and they haven't really done much tag work either since she has been back so I think she is in the same boat.
"Then we have Zaria and Sol and I have seen what they have been doing on NXT and I think they are doing absolutely tremendous work. Both very, very talented women, both seem to be a very good connection when it comes to women tag wrestling, but Sol has kind of been doing her own thing and so has Zaria. So I am not going to be too worried about their connection and their teamwork. I feel like they are kind of on the same playing field. Overall, I would say our tag matches have been pretty even, except for the fact that I am the most experienced in the women's tag division and I have the many titles."
Follow Fox News Digital's sports coverage on X and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Washington Post
6 minutes ago
- Washington Post
The Latest: 'Severance' and 'The Studio' lead Emmy nominations
LOS ANGELES — Nominations for the Emmy Awards were revealed Tuesday in Los Angeles. Two categories were announced early on 'CBS Mornings' —the nominees for talk series and reality competition series. Actors Harvey Guillen and Brenda Song later announced other nominees. 'Severance'' leads the nominees with 27, while 'The Studio'' tops the comedy nominations with 23.
Motor Trend
9 minutes ago
- Motor Trend
The Future Of Porsche's Racing Tech Transfer to Street Cars? Software.
On April 12, 2025, Porsche made history, becoming the first automaker to win three classes of professional motorsports with three different powertrains on the same day. In California, a 963 hybrid won the LMDh class and took the overall win at the IMSA Long Beach Grand Prix while a 911 GT3 R won the GTD Pro class in the same race with pure combustion engine. Across the country, the 99X Electric won the Miami e-prix in Formula E on pure battery power. Different as they may be, each shares a common link with the Porsche road cars you can buy today and in the future. Porsche uses motorsport to drive tech innovation, focusing on software as the key to improving road cars. Software impacts drivability and efficiency, with lessons from racing series shared across projects. This approach is cost-effective and enhances both performance and development. This summary was generated by AI using content from this MotorTrend article Read Next Racing Technology for the Street 'We have a philosophy that, yes, motorsport is part of our DNA,' Porsche vice president of motorsport, Thomas Laudenbach, told MotorTrend , 'and I cannot imagine Porsche without motorsport, but we are not doing motorsport for the sake of its own. We do motorsport to give a contribution to the company, and this is exactly what we are talking about.' In the past, tech transfer from racing to the road consisted mostly of more power and better aerodynamics, but as everything on a car has become linked and controlled by computers, the next frontier is in the software that controls them. Hard parts like engines, suspension, and aerodynamics are fairly mature technologies, but automotive software is still in its relative infancy. 'It is still a very steep curve,' Laudenbach said. 'It's growing so fast, it's changing so fast…I mean, if you look at the combustion engine, obviously development [today] is slower like this because you know, it is more and more difficult to make the [next] step. If you look at the software, not only software itself, how we approach it, the tools…I would say [it is] still very steep, the curve, how fast it changes.' It's All in the Software In all three racing series, physical parts on the cars are heavily regulated, particularly when it comes to batteries and electric motors. Software, though, isn't and has become the most important factor in improving lap times and efficiency. 'Everything you can do on the software has a much bigger impact and a much bigger effect in the drivability,' Porsche Formula E driver and reigning champion, Pascal Wehrlein, told MotorTrend , 'because yeah, there's also software things in in a combustion engine, but the effect is just smaller than an electric car. We pay a lot of attention to the software and I would say that is our biggest toolbox for setting up the car and getting quicker and so on. And there's just so many more things you can do on the software compared to a combustion engine. 'How much we are going into the details,' he continued, 'into the smallest details, I would say on the software side is even more than what I did when I was in Formula One, just because there are so many different options on, you know, the four-wheel drive, how to set up the four-wheel drive. How much work do you want to have at the front? At which point in time in the corner you want to have more front torque or less? What you can do on the braking side, on the [energy] recuperation, setting it up for different corners? In certain corners, where it's high speed, you need something different than in the low-speed corner, but then also when the track is bumpy, or not bumpy. We are going so much into the details.' Lauderbach agrees. 'It's absolutely right. We always love about talking about hardware. And I did develop combustion engines for 18 years, so I'm a real mechanical guy, and it's absolutely right, probably the bigger part is software. And but this is the good thing about it because some things [physical] we are not allowed to touch [under the regulations]. But we have a big freedom of software, and I think that's good because racing should give freedom where it is beneficial also for your brand. And that's certainly in software and I think this is probably also the biggest change between the projects.' Because the applications are so different, it's not as simple as just sharing code between teams in different series or with the engineers working on the road cars. Instead, it's the exchange of knowledge and ideas which brings this tech to cars like the 911 GTS T-hybrid. 'It's for sure not a carryover part,' Laudenbach said, 'but it's from learning about the difficulties, about the weak points, about the solutions, for sure they benefit from each other. 'When you have more than one project,' he said, 'you just work it on in a wider range and then you always find synergy. These two programs (Formula E and LMDh) benefit from each other in various areas. And at the same time, this is linked so close to our road car development. We work a lot on road cars as well in the motorsport department and do benefit from each other. If you tell your engineers, oh, please sit together with these guys from this program, then you know what they do? They sit together for an hour, they chat, and they go to it. If you sit side by side, if you meet each other with a coffee, this is the best way to benefit from each other. These two programs benefit, but also this is very beneficial to what we do on road cars, even inside the motorsport department.' It's not just about making the cars faster, either. Power makes heat, and heat needs to be dealt with before it breaks things, on a race car or a road car. Efficiency matters in racing because using less fuel or electricity allows you to go farther between pit stops, and it matters for the same reason on the street. 'Look at Formula E,' Laudenbach said. 'It's not our battery, but we control the thermal system [and] energy management. That's a lot of control systems. That's a lot of software. I mean, if we work with AI in the meantime and there you can learn a lot of the one side and transfer it to the other. Sometimes then you figure out that, okay, I can only take this because this [other technology] is not allowed. It's never carry over one to one. 'But you still learn a lot about how to handle it. It's software functions, it's control systems, it's sometimes also just the tools that we use, the approach that you take is not always [about] the final product. In the end, you have the product, there, no matter if it's software, hardware, but it's also, how do you approach it, because you're always looking for being most efficient. Especially Formula E, [where] we have a cost cap. It's a factor to say, okay, can I reach a certain goal with the smallest amount of money? These kind of things we always exchange because it's in the background.' Cheaper and Easier Not only are software learnings easier to transfer between programs, software is also easier to iterate on and less expensive to develop. 'Compared to hardware,' he said, 'it's not that cost intensive. Yes, you have you have the labor. But you know, you' not always having to change your bits and pieces. And don't forget, if you talk about bits and pieces, you always have to stop and throw parts away. So it's a lot more, let's say, cost efficient.' Whether in the office or trackside, the way data is managed and analyzed has changed a lot in the past decade. 'If we would do it like 10 years ago,' Lauderbach said, 'where the engineer himself goes through all the raw data, that doesn't work anymore. You got to feed your data through automatic analysis. It's just more [a question of], how do you analyze? How do you get something out in order to make the car quicker? This is a lot more or this is high sophisticated, a lot more automation and algorithms, than 10 years ago. 'It's a software basically to calculate what the car's doing because you got sensors. Obviously, you want to calculate some figures, you see what the car's doing in order to feature simulations. The simulation then gives you back again in which direction you have to go.'
Geek Tyrant
11 minutes ago
- Geek Tyrant
James Gunn Reportedly Cut a NSFW Joke From SUPERMAN — GeekTyrant
James Gunn has never been shy about injecting irreverent humor into his movies. Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad are proof of that. But, when it comes to Superman , the tone is a little different. The Man of Steel isn't a rebel or an antihero; he's DC's symbol of hope. So while Gunn still brings his trademark wit style, and direction, it's not shocking to hear a NSFW joke got the axe before the film's release. The cut gag didn't come from Superman himself, but from one of his new allies. According to X user @ViewerAnon, the joke appeared during a major action sequence where Superman (David Corenswet) battles a kaiju-sized monster unleashed by Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). The fight is a big spectacle and it's also where the Justice Gang joins in on the fun: Guy Gardner's Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabella Merced), and Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi). The heroes team up to bring the beast down, though Superman insists on avoiding killing the creature. In the aftermath, things get lighthearted, at least in the original cut, when Guy lobbed this NSFW line at Supes:
