TNA's Kurt Angle reinjures his hamstring before Lockdown and Olympic trials

Slightly lost in our wall to wall coverage of WrestleMania 28 was the biggest TNA news story of the weekend, as things went from bad to worse for their star Kurt Angle. Thankfully our fan poster Rawuncutnxrated picked up our slack, but this warrants a further post on the main site.

Last weekend, I covered how Kurt Angle was scheduled to wrestle at Lockdown despite his upcoming U.S. Olympic wrestling trials and speculated that an injury, real or otherwise, could force him to pull out of the latter event. Moreover, a bizarre meltdown on Twitter where he took unprovoked shots at Shawn Michaels and "Stone Cold" Steve Austin begged the question of whether he was even in a fit state of mind to take part in the amateur wrestling competition.

His week got off to a bad start when he revealed to TMZ and on Twitter that his mother had been scammed out of several thousand dollars by Dominican Republic fraudsters who falsely claimed that her grandson was in jail and needed money for bail. Hopefully she can get her money back somehow and Angle doesn't have to make good on his promise to track down the scum who did this to her.

Shortly thereafter he was back talking to TMZ again, this time revealing that he had torn his hamstring again in training:

Look I injured my hamstring this morning. It is a tear. I went to my doctor, I have an MRI scheduled for tomorrow. The unfortunate thing is I had this tear about seven months ago, it's a reoccurring injury. I plan on going, I still plan on going, I've been training for a whole year now, I've been very serious about this, TNA has backed me up one hundred percent, so it all depends on how it heals, but you know I do have to work for TNA as well, they've been having me go part time, but if this tear is really bad, there's a chance I may not go.

Dave Meltzer of f4wonline.com confirmed on his April 1st Observer Radio show that the injury was apparently legitimate, saying that his right hamstring is a mess, and that he never fully recovered from a tear in that muscle he suffered in the run up to Bound For Glory last October and further aggravated by wrestling against Robert Roode on that show.

Whether or not he'll wrestle at Lockdown against Jeff Hardy, yet alone at the Olympic trials, is up in the air, as TNA's creative team only found out about Kurt's injury from TMZ. Given that Angle performed at BFG with a similar injury he'll likely want to gut it out again and try to perform at both events, but I hope TNA does the right thing and stop using him until that nagging injury is fully healed up. We should know TNA management's decision after this week's Impact tapings. I can't imagine that USA Wrestling will allow him to compete with such an injury if it will make him uncompetitive, so TNA should do the same thing.