Eighteen minutes and four seconds: the amount of time that women wrestlers were featured in this week’s WWE Raw event at the Barclays Center.
Ten seconds: the amount of time pro wrestler Xavier Woods played his trombone, lovingly named Francesca 2.
That’s a glance at Kate Foray’s infographic of the three-hour wrestling broadcast earlier this week. It’s part of the Richmond, Va.-based graphic designer’s Raw Breakdown Project, which she has done every week since May of last year.
You can check out all her past breakdowns here.
Foray, who is currently working for the State of Virginia, started this project when she noticed how little time WWE seemed to be giving to women superstars. She started timing all the women’s wrestling matches — last month, she looked into the dedicated airtime they received over one year (4.8 percent airtime in the year before what was known as “The Divas Revolution” and 7.92 percent after it).
Now she’s gathering statistics on things like which wrestlers appear in the ring, how much time is dedicated to in-ring competition and how long the opening and closing segments are. While the timing and breaking down of all this info might seem like it detracts from the watching experience, Foray said it’s made her enjoy wrestling even more. If anything, it’s a good break from the sometimes-tedious work she does for her day job, she said.
“Designing for wrestling is literally the opposite end of the spectrum on what I do from a day to day basis,” said Foray. “It’s organized chaos. I think that’s what makes it even more fun for me, trying to organize chaos into information.”
The project has gained a following from the passionate wrestling community, to the point where she’ll receive suggestions and criticism for what to time and study next, which she’s open to.
“That’s really my job, being able to generate feelings and emotions out of people,” she said.
It makes sense then that Bayley, who made her Raw debut in Brooklyn earlier this week, is her favorite wrestler: “She just makes you feel something with her wrestling,” Foray said.
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