Piledriver (professional wrestling)

A piledriver is a professional wrestling driver move in which the wrestler grabs their opponent, turns them upside-down, and drops into a sitting or kneeling position, driving the opponent head-first into the mat.^[1] The technique is said to have been innovated by Wild Bill Longson.^[2]

The name is taken from a piece of construction equipment, also called a pile driver, that drives countless massive impacts on the top of a large major foundation support, burying it in the ground slowly with each impact. The act of performing a piledriver is called "piledriving". Someone who has recently been the victim of a piledriver is said to have been "piledriven" (e.g. "The wrestler was piledriven into the canvas").

Notable wrestlers who have regularly used a piledriver during their career include Jerry Lawler, Bret Hart, Harley Race, Paul Orndorff, Abismo Negro, The Undertaker, Kane, The Brain Busters, Buddy Rogers, Minoru Suzuki, Karl Gotch, and Kazuchika Okada.

The piledriver is often seen as one of the most dangerous moves in wrestling. The reverse piledriver is directly responsible for shortening the career of Stone Cold Steve Austin when his opponent, Owen Hart, inadvertently botched the move, legitimately injuring Austin's neck. Due to this, the move is banned in the WWE with the exceptions of Kane and The Undertaker due to their experience and having already established the Tombstone (kneeling belly-to-belly variant) as a finisher. However, in recent years, certain variations of the piledriver have been allowed to be performed by experienced wrestlers and it is not banned in some other wrestling promotions such as All Elite Wrestling.