BOSTON — For all the well-documented disdain among WrestleMania’s newly-minted main-eventers — open Twitter if you dare — Ronda Rousey, Becky Lynch and Charlotte Flair’s shared path to their historic moment has been defined primarily by their distance between each other. With Rousey savaging challengers and security guards on Raw and Becky and Charlotte trading barbs on SmackDown LIVE, it’s been difficult for any competitor to establish the upper hand, so Raw’s Beat the Clock Challenge (short version: fastest victory wins) provided an opportunity for one of these women to separate from the pack.
In the end, Becky Lynch got the leg up by posting the fastest victory and raining on what was looking like a perfect opportunity for Rousey to display her dominance over her two challengers. After all, The Baddest Woman on the Planet’s victories have gotten nastier, more brutish and shorter since she broke bad a few weeks ago; despite not knowing what a Beat the Clock Challenge was, she quickly got the gist of it and submitted Sarah Logan in 1:25. Charlotte was knocked out of the running when she couldn’t defeat Ruby Riott any quicker than that, and despite taking a frustrated big boot from The Queen, Lynch topped Rousey’s time by just seven seconds with a jackknife pin of Liv Morgan. Rousey didn’t seem all that impressed by Lynch winning a match where nothing was at stake, but just because nothing was on the line, it doesn’t mean it was meaningless: If there was a lesson to be learned, it’s that Becky can end a match just as quickly as Ronda can — if not quicker.