Meet Viper, the vixen of violence!

AS I’M held high in the air by two strong arms I begin to regret having breakfast.

“If we were in the ring for real I would drive you into the floor right now,” says a voice from below as my 5ft 9in frame dangles awkwardly in her grip.

I’m being put through my paces by Viper, or Kim Benson as she is known to her friends, wrestling champion and star of new ITV series World Of Sport Wrestling.

Feared by her opponents “the vixen of violence” has wrestled with the WWE in the US, taken on the best in the business in Japan and has adoring fans around the world.

She currently holds two titles: Insane Championship Wrestling Women’s Champion and Stardom World Alliance Champion. Lowering me back down to the floor Kim manoeuvres me into a headlock with ease.

As the 27-year-old Scot tightens her grip around my neck I ask her about her favourite move.

“My signature is the Viper Driver because it always gets me the win,” she says.

This involves turning her opponent upside down and falling backwards, driving her opponent head first down to the mat.

I gulp Viper releases her grip. “Don’t worry, I won’t do that to you.” I almost pass out with relief. A vision of blonde curls, false eyelashes and black spandex Kim oozes confidence.

“Wrestling makes me feel strong,” she tells me. “Not just in a physical sense but it makes me feel strong-minded and brave.”

But as we sit down, me nursing sore knees and possible internal damage, Kim having barely broken a sweat, she confides that this wasn’t always the case.

At 5ft 8in and weighing 14st 9lb she says it has taken a long time to learn to appreciate her body.

 “As a teen I was very insecure. I’ve always been bigger and I hated it. I longed to be a little, dainty, petite girl. But it was obviously never going to happen.

“I believed for a long time that I was weird and ‘unwantable’. I thought terribly of myself and never had any confidence.”

At first wrestling actually made her feel worse.

“I was teased at school for being weird. So for a long time I tried to keep my love of wrestling a secret.

“To this day I’m known in my home town as ‘that mad wrestling lady’. It definitely didn’t help with the self-esteem.”

When she first took up the sport at 16, plus-size athletes were thin on the ground. “There weren’t many girls on the scene and they were all slim,” she recalls. “So trainers would say to me, ‘Oh great, you’re big.’ And they meant it in a good way. But for me hearing that I was ‘big’ was horrible.”

And wrestlers with fuller figures were often pigeonholed. “You had to be grumpy, you had to wear black, you had to be a monster.

After a few years I said, ‘No, this isn’t me.’ Now while I like my black costumes I like pink too and I like my big blonde hair. Viper is very glam.”

Kim, who grew up in the small Ayrshire town of Kilbirnie, discovered wrestling by chance at nine years old.

“I was flicking through the channels when I paused on one and watched some poor soul being driven into a mat by an enormous wrestler. I remember the commentators saying, ‘Oh my god, he broke that man in half.’ I completely fell in love.”

But it wasn’t until she was 16 that Kim had a go for herself when her then boyfriend discovered a wrestling school nearby. “It never occurred to me that you could train as a wrestler until then,” she says.

“When I turned up it was very shoddy, dingy and unclean, sandwiched in between a bakery and a Chinese takeaway. The gym mats looked like they had come from a school.”

Nevertheless Kim threw herself, quite literally, into learning the ropes.

“I got battered that first time. It was a tough love approach back then – they were not gentle.

They hit you hard and if you could handle it you were tough enough to be a wrestler. I woke up the next day aching all over but I was hooked.”

Kim, who trains up to five times a week, says there has barely been a day since then when she hasn’t woken up with aches and pains.

Indeed there were times her parents Niven and Yvonne worried.

“One time I couldn’t walk for three days because I landed wrong and strained all the muscles in my back. At that point they told me they didn’t want me to wrestle any more but I carried on.

“Since then I’ve had plenty of knocks, sprains and strains but nothing too serious. You get used to being bruised. You always have a stiff neck or a sore back.”

I tell her I’m pretty sure I’ll wake up unable to walk tomorrow and she laughs.

“There is a lot of safety involved. You learn how to protect yourself and your opponents,” she assures me.

Kim is certainly one tough cookie, something she puts down to having to prove her worth when she first starting wrestling as a woman.

“In the 1980s women’s wrestling was huge, especially in Japan and the women were hardcore. Then inthe 1990s the trend in America became to not use real wrestlers but instead to train up models to go through the motions.

“Unsurprisingly they weren’t very good. And as a result women got a reputation for being rubbish wrestlers.”

But Kim was determined to break the mould.

She made her debut in front of her first paying crowd in 2008 aged 17 and won the match. After finishing school she began working in her family’s coach company but spent all her spare time in the gym training and perfecting her technique.

She competed first in matches around Scotland and then bookings began to come in from further afield including Nottingham. It was there she caught the eye of a Japanese promoter.

“They asked if I wanted to come over for a tour,” she says. “So now I take Viper around the world.”

But Kim admits there were times she thought about giving up. “It was hard at the start. People didn’t want to book me because I was a woman. It took a long time to prove I was as good as the boys.

“It’s frustrating because our male counterparts don’t have to prove themselves in the same way.