Things got off to a jaw-dropping start on The Challenge: Vets and New Threats‘ premiere, with a shocking elimination that no one in the cast saw coming.

The episode began with the 16 pairs of competitors engaging in the first Season 41 challenge, called “Mud Ball Madness.” In it, the teammates were strapped together and challenged to go into a mud pit and retrieve balls that’d been dropped from a helicopter, with various point denominations indicated by color.

With a U.K. alliance quickly forming — Olivia Kaiser led her boyfriend Theo Campbell and other Brits in that crew, it seemed — the American veterans were desperate to eke out a win. Indeed, new flirtmance partners Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio and Dee Valladares managed to walk away victorious. This gave Bananas even more power in the house than he already had just by reputation; he could choose one other team to protect from elimination consideration.

Placing last in the challenge were Rogan O’Connor, the War of the Worlds 2 champion himself, and his partner Adrienne Naylor, who sliced her foot open during the challenge and was given stitches and orders not to walk on her wound for five days. Being thrown into the elimination meant certain defeat for her, but luckily, host T.J. Lavin flipped a coin that decided it was a men’s elimination.

After that, Rogan began campaigning for his friends to send in Justin Hinsley, who was much slighter in size than him and not part of the U.K. alliance. The vets wanted to target another U.K. rank, though, in Jake Cornish (even though he was Cara Maria Sorbello‘s partner), so they schemed with Johnny to try and make that happen. Leroy Garrett talked Bananas into saving Theo so that it would take another U.K. ally’s vote off the table in the jury decision, but that backfired when T.J. announced that the saved team would still be able to vote for who to send in. With that, the U.K.-ers had the numbers to send in Justin over Jake.

In the end, though, the vets still got their way. In the arena elimination, called “Inertia,” Rogan and Justin were challenged to move a human-sized hamster wheel device across a set of bumpy tracks both ways, with the first to do so emerging victorious. Rogan’s strength was only part of the equation, which gave Justin a fighting chance. Though they both got completely worn out in the effort, Justin managed to get enough, ahem, inertia to move his wheel back and forth across the tracks before Rogan made it past the second bump. With that, one of the muscliest members of the house — and a U.K. alliance member at that — was sent home packing first.

What this means for Adrienne remains to be seen. T.J. said she was a “hangnail” and would have to make friends in the house to get back into the game. He also teased that there’d be some changes to the teams on the way, too. Dun dun dun….

For now, the power team is undoubtedly Johnny and Dee — although she seems less happy about being on top (and thus an automatic target) than him.

The Challenge, Wednesdays, 8/7c, MTV