At some point during the endless indie night circuits, in a bingo hall outside Birmingham, or maybe a Turkish casino sponsored by Red Bull and regret, Shanna stopped being “the girl from Portugal” and became Shanna, The One Who Outlasted Them All.
She’s the sparkplug with a joystick, the high-speed queen of nowhere and everywhere, and your favorite female champion from that promotion you can’t spell without autocorrect. She’s won belts on three continents, lost title shots to legends, got ghosted by AEW, and still walked away grinning—because you can’t cancel someone who refuses to log off.
Shanna 1.0: The Eurogrind Era
Alexandra Barrulas didn’t get a contract handed to her. She got train rides, cold gym floors, and audible groans from half-interested promoters in Warsaw. She wrestled in Germany. She conquered the British scene in fringe promotions that lasted longer than your last diet. She even made history by becoming the inaugural Kamikaze Pro Fighting Females Champion, a title that sounds like it was stolen from a Tekken DLC pack.
She beat Kris Wolf in Stardom. She challenged Io Shirai, Mayu Iwatani, and Toni Storm—and lost to every one of them like a goddamn professional. Her tour in Japan from 2016 to 2018 was a masterclass in how to lose beautifully, sell like Shakespeare, and walk away with a belt when no one expected it.
In 2017, she won the High Speed Championship in Stardom—a belt usually reserved for human hummingbirds. Shanna, bless her, is built like a brawler and fought like a crash-test dummy. Watching her in that division was like watching a pitbull in a dog show: out of place, wildly entertaining, and clearly about to bite someone.
TNA’s Brief Fling and the Stardom Sizzle
Before Stardom, she got a one-night stand with TNA (now Impact Wrestling) in 2014. She beat Alpha Female, which sounds impressive until you realize it’s the wrestling equivalent of beating a boss on easy mode. The next night she was fed to Gail Kim, who ended that dream with the grace of a guillotine.
Still, for someone from Portugal—a country better known for footballers and fado singers—Shanna was making moves.
All Elite… Until She Wasn’t
In 2019, AEW was the shiny new circus in town, and Shanna got her trapeze. She debuted on Dynamite by losing to Hikaru Shida, but she lost stylishly. The fans noticed. The hair was flowing. The moves crisp. The charisma: just enough.
She even inked a three-year deal, which in AEW time is approximately two pay-per-views and one CM Punk suspension.
Then… radio silence.
She vanished for eight months in 2020. When she came back on Dark, she beat Tesha Price—which is the wrestling equivalent of defeating a warmup act at a county fair.
By mid-2021, AEW quietly let her go like a badly booked flight. No “thank you Shanna” post. Just a silent fade into the twitch-lit shadows.
Queen of the Side Quest
Shanna didn’t whine. She logged into Twitch, booted up Final Fantasy, and kept grinding—this time in real life. She returned to the indies, bouncing from Turkish Power Wrestling (yes, it exists) to German Wrestling Federation to whatever interdimensional promotion happened to have a vacant women’s title that week.
She won the ABC Women’s Championship twice. What’s ABC? No one knows. But she’s holding their belt like it was carved from Olympus. That’s the magic of Shanna: she can make even the most obscure promotion feel like Madison Square Garden, if only for a night.
The High-Speed Enigma
What makes Shanna special isn’t the hardware—it’s the hustle. She doesn’t have a WWE resume. She doesn’t have a Netflix deal. She’s not dating anyone famous or retiring in a splashy docuseries. She just keeps going. Keeps fighting. Keeps showing up in places you least expect and turning the crowd into believers, one missile dropkick at a time.
She’s the journeyman’s champion, the kind of wrestler you forget until she’s halfway through a match and suddenly you’re on your feet wondering where this person’s been all your life.
