This Monday night, The Evening of the Year IV, the fourth installment of the virtual celebrity boxing event organized by Ibai Llanos, was officially announced. The content creator from Bilbao has filled the Teatre Victòria in Barcelona to clear up doubts about the date, the venue and several of the fights that will take place. The designated night is Saturday, July 13, when the Santiago Bernabéu stadium in Madrid will witness the action.
However, one of the announced fights has generated stupor and questions on social networks: the King of the Track. A format similar to that seen in other disciplines such as basketball, but adapted to the rules of boxing. For 20 minutes, ten fighters will face each other in one-minute bouts. At the end of the established time, the judges must decide the winner, who will remain in the ring, while the loser will make way for a new combatant.
Roberto Cein, Aldo Geo, Folagor, Karchez, Peldanyos, Unicornio, Skain, Sezar Blue, Will and Pelizcanger are the streamers chosen for this experiment, which has first brought up two words on platforms like X (Twitter): Royal Rumble. It is one of the five most important annual events of the American wrestling company WWE, along with SummerSlam, Survivor Series, Money in the Bank and WrestleMania.
Royal Rumble is a style of combat implemented in 1988, in which two wrestlers start the fight and every 90 seconds another opponent joins them, until the 30 selected combatants have participated and only one remains standing after eliminating them by taking them out of the ring. A format that shares relative similarities with this King of the Ring, but that varies due to the impossibility of allowing more than two people to box in the ring at the same time.
The reaction of users to this fight, more similar to the Gauntlet Match that WWE also offers from time to time, comes after statements by Ibai on Twitch at the end of December: “But I thought, what if we do a Royal Rumble really? That is, if this is not agreed upon at all? A real fucking Royal Rumble?” The initial reactions from several followers have been positive and excited.
“I was disenchanted with the Evening and now I have crazy hype, as a WWE fan since I was little, bringing a format like the Royal Rumble adapted like this is really cool to me,” said one user. However, doubts also permeated the Spanish wrestling community from that first hint. The main concern was the danger of carrying out a possible format of such a scale without the certainty of predetermined results and movements.
“It’s obvious that he says it as a joke, but sometimes nonsense like that comes in handy to make visible the importance of wrestling being agreed upon. Because you’ll see that someone other than Ibai thinks of it and it ends badly,” said COPE journalist Luis Calabor. It should be noted that WWE, which has not returned to Spain since canceling two events in Madrid and Seville in 2019, will hold one of its next annual specials near our borders: Backlash, in Lyon (France), on May 4.
