Photo: Megan Elice Meadows via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped. This adapted image is also licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.
Daniel Bryan is WWE Champion again. In the main event of SmackDown LIVE on Tuesday night, he beat AJ Styles to win the title for the fourth time and earn a match against Universal Champion Brock Lesnar at Survivor Series.
It wasn't a clean win. Bryan tweaked his leg early and fought through it, and when Styles accidentally flattened the referee with a Phenomenal Forearm, Bryan kicked him below the belt and finished him with the Running Knee. He then kept attacking Styles after the bell, the crowd stunned.
Whatever comes next, this is quite a comeback. Bryan retired in 2016 because of concussions, and only returned to the ring this spring, lasting 76 minutes in the Greatest Royal Rumble.
He is also WWE's best-known plant-based star. Bryan went vegan in 2009 after doctors found elevated liver enzymes and he suffered several staph infections, and PETA named him its most animal-friendly athlete in 2012. Later that year he explained that a soy intolerance had made a strict vegan diet on the road too hard:
I became a vegan for health reasons. I developed a soy intolerance. I've been getting really sick lately... Being on the road and being vegan and trying to get your protein in other than soy, there's just nothing to eat because there's soy in everything.
Since then he has eaten mostly plant-based, getting much of his protein from eggs, and not much meat. He doesn't call himself vegan, but plants still make up most of what he eats, and at 37 he has just beaten one of the best wrestlers in the world.
Bryan isn't the only plant-powered champion in wrestling this year. Austin Aries won the Impact World title and completed the Impact Grand Slam, and Tyler Bate won the NXT Tag Team titles with Trent Seven. We also met the WWE heavyweight who is vegan because he "gives a damn".
Yes! Yes! Yes! Powered by plants.