[Warning: The following post contains spoilers for The Challenge Season 41 Episode 10, “A War Brewing.”]
Is this #JusticeForLeka at last? On Wednesday’s (October 1) new episode of The Challenge, Chris “C.T.” Tamburello finally reached the end of his road on Vets and New Threats, arguably long after he was due to.
In the episode, he faced another heights over water challenge and had another awful showing, and he knew it. This time, the daily saw the contestants using stairclimbers positioned on a crane over water as they answered trivia questions on their little iPads but otherwise weren’t allowed to use their hands to stay steady. CT was the first to fall, insisting that his feet were just too big for the machine. His partner, Tay Wilcoxson, didn’t fare much better, so they earned a ticket straight to the arena.
“I’m trying to look at the silver lining here. We’ve been there before. We have the experience. We’ve gotta just execute,” CT said of their auto-entry into the next elimination bout.
Michaela Bradshaw and Cedric Hodges were the daily winners and strategized with Yeremi Hykel and Dee Valladares about who the house should choose to send in with CT and Tay (or C-Tay, as their team name would have it). Instead of picking Jonna Mannion and Gabe Wai, the most dysfunctional pair in the bunch, they wanted to go after a bigger target: Theo Campbell and Adrienne Naylor of the U.K. alliance.
CT, however, made his own play to get Leroy Garrett and America Lopez sent in with them. Though he thought it was an easy enough ask, the others disagreed and voted in Theo and Adrienne instead.
In the arena, “Ball Buster,” the pairs had to shoot a set number of balls at a series of targets, with one person blindfolded and the other guiding their movements to release the shots. It came down to just a one-point difference, but Theo and Adrienne walked away victorious, and CT was finally sent home from a Challenge he seemed to know he didn’t deserve to win.
He got a little ribbing from host T.J. Lavin, who noted that Tay won two arenas before she had a “scrub” teammate, but then said on a more serious note, “CT, you’re a GOAT. Pleasure having you, as always. I really cannot wait to see what you come back as.”
“I will come back,” CT promised. “Wait ’til you see me next time.”
Then, he said of Tay, “I finally had a partner I could work well with,” which, of course, wasn’t exactly fair to Leka, before adding, “I’m looking forward to going home, getting some training and come back proper for the next one for sure.” (As his Instagram feed shows, he’s been putting in the work to do just that in the off-season, for what it’s worth.)
Elsewhere in the episode, there was an eventful dust-up between Nany Gonzales and fellow long-timer Aneesa Ferreira. Aneesa griped that Nany didn’t take her side enough in the spat with Ashley Mitchell that took place days before, and Nany was not having any of that. She didn’t feel like she owed it to Aneesa to cut Ashley off for her, and she shut that whole thing down in spectacular fashion, even earning a public apology from Aneesa to the whole house for her outburst. Yow.
The Challenge, Wednesdays, 8/7c, MTV