Yahoo Movies The Challenge: USA eliminated team says trivia question still haunts them: 'Madonna beat us'
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Wednesday's episode of The Challenge: USA.
On this week's episode of The Challenge: USA, Madonna brought about one team's downfall.
After Survivor's Domenick Abbate and The Amazing Race's Cayla Platt won the demolition derby daily challenge, they immediately knew they were going to throw Big Brother alum Kyland Young and Love Island alum Kyra Green into elimination. But Young and Green weren't too worried about their chances against Big Brother alums Alyssa Lopez and Enzo Palumbo… until they found out their elimination had a trivia component, and a question about Madonna's number of marriages stumped them. They ultimately lost to Lopez and Palumbo and were sent packing.
"Going into it, I felt good having a partner like Kyland," Green tells EW. "We both were super, super strong, so when they threw trivia in, I was like, 'Damn.'"
"Trivia is never something that they throw into eliminations," Young adds. "I think this is like the second time in 20 seasons, or something like that. As someone that doesn't like to lose, I'd rather lose to Madonna than losing a race or Pole Wrestle or puzzle or something else. But like, all right, Madonna beat us, and you can't think your way or will your way out of not knowing how many times Madonna was married. And nobody was allowed to help us."
After the elimination, Young and Green asked the rest of the cast if anyone knew how many times Madonna had been married, and no one knew the answer. "We had to like Google it later," Young says. "And they didn't show it, but TJ in his goodbye was like, 'I definitely expect to see you guys again,' and so to get a stamp of approval from TJ is is pretty cool."
Below, Young and Green break down their elimination, how they feel about Madonna ending their season, and more.
Laura Barisonzi/Paramount (2) Kyland Young and Kyra Green
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: With TJ sending you off with one of his rare "hope to see you again" goodbyes, are either of you interested in coming back for another season of The Challenge?
KYRA GREEN: This is definitely something that I never thought I would do, especially coming from a show like Love Island. There's all these people and legends like Tyson coming from all these different shows. But I feel like I proved myself wrong in the way that I thought I could never do these things. Just with the first challenge alone, going off the side of that building with my ex from Love Island, I was like, "What are you doing here?!" Watching it back, I just feel super proud. Hell yeah, I would want to do it again and do it even better next time, obviously learning my lessons from this one.
KYLAND YOUNG: Yeah, absolutely. It's the most fun game in the world. Everything about it is all the things I love.
How did your time on The Challenge: USA compare to your original shows?
GREEN: Coming from Love Island, you're on an island, you're trying to find love, you're flirting, you're drinking, you're having a good time. To come into a show where it is more of a strategic game and making allies and you can't necessarily be cool with everyone, it was really a realization for me that I had to switch up the way that I was acting but still trying to be true to who I am. That was the biggest difference; I had to be somewhat more calculated and also know maybe people were going to tell me stuff that wasn't true just to get me to move this way or that way.
YOUNG: Yeah, for me it was — it was different. They call it the craziest social experiment in the world, and that's exactly what it is. It's a fairly traumatic experience to be that isolated from the world for that length of time. Every Big Brother person is like, "I would do Survivor." Survivor, I don't think I've encountered anyone that wants to do Big Brother. [Laughs] They're like, "Nah, I'm good. Four weeks was enough. I don't need three months." Especially the no-sunlight aspect. It's so isolated, and I didn't realize it until The Challenge. I was like, wait a second, not only do we have 28 people here instead of 16, but also we see production, we get daylight. In Big Brother, you don't get sunlight five days a week because normally the backyard is closed for the competition setup. We got to drive to the challenges [on The Challenge], so we're in the car, we go out to the club like twice a week, we get the phone calls home every week, so it was just so much more chill. I still love Big Brother, I just love the game so much of it, but this was just so much more fun and freeing. Summer camp is the vibes I get.
Take us back to the moment when Dom and Cayla said your names. Did you know you were being thrown into the elimination, or was it a total surprise?
YOUNG: When we were still at the car derby thing, as soon as Dom won, I leaned over to Kyra and I was like, "We're going in. My bad." [Laughs] We knew it because Dom had told me and Angela back when we threw him in, he had been very upfront, he's like, "If I get my shot, then I'll take it. It's all game." He was going to hold on to that, he had been consistently saying that. We also knew that he had a super tight relationship with Enzo, and that was Angela's partner. So we could have the conversations, but unless it was something really basic-looking that Sarah knew that she could win and then in the moment, she could tell him, "Throw us in," but when you get out to that elimination, you see something and you're not 100 percent certain of what it is, people err on the side of caution. So yeah, we were pretty certain.
GREEN: I felt good going in because I didn't win any money yet and he was a super strong partner, so I knew if it was something super physical or endurance, which it somewhat did look like that, I was like, "We're going to be fine." But then they throw in the whole trivia thing, and we got all of them right except for Madonna — who knew she was only married twice like normal people? I thought celebrities were married like 50 million times! So we just kept on going up and up and up in our numbers.
YOUNG: Especially someone famous for so long!
GREEN: Exactly! I swear I've heard about her in the news being married, or maybe dating, I don't know. Maybe I just piled her together in the celebrity boat of being married and divorced a billion times.
It's all Madonna's fault, clearly.
GREEN: One hundred percent.
YOUNG: It's our fault for not knowing. But Madonna beat us, and that's kind of iconic.
GREEN: Obviously if we go back on, we have to do a lot of Madonna research just so she doesn't get us twice.
YOUNG: Oh, it's done.
What was it like competing in that elimination? It looked brutal with how heavy those medicine balls were.
GREEN: Yeah, they were heavy. Heavier than they look. And then the ledge that I had to get it on was super, super high. I felt good because we had height on our side and Leo and Alyssa are way shorter than us. It was hard at first, but once I got my strategy of just jumping on his back — I'm sure it hurt the next day — but we got a really good flow. We were in the lead for a hot minute, but once again, Madonna.
YOUNG: Even unchaining those balls usually took a couple of minutes per ball, just because those chains were really wedged in there. We had a minute to get into a rhythm, but once we did, we were killing it and we had a pretty good lead. We went through a lot more guesses than they showed. We just couldn't figure out that Madonna one.
GREEN: TJ even said, "This is one of the hardest ones I've ever seen," so to go out on one where he was like, "This was hard, good for you for even going through it," I was like, "Okay, I feel good about this."
Kyra, with how sick you were in last week's episode, how bad did it get, and were you still feeling less than 100 percent in this week's episode?
GREEN: Everyone knows when you're sick and have a really bad stomach bug, it takes a second to come back from that. I was feeling better by the time that me and Kyland went into elimination, which I was happy about. But they didn't show I was in the hospital that whole day before that challenge that I was with Tyson. They had to put me on medication so that I could just hold food down, hold water down. In the real world, if you had a workout class the next day you'd be like, "I'm calling out." But on The Challenge, they don't care. They're like, "You're doing it."
Kyland, you had some really nice things to say to the cast on your way out of the elimination arena, but there's also been a lot of drama with the Big Brother season 23 cast both on and off the show from this season. How is your relationship with everyone from your original cast now?
YOUNG: My relationships are fine. I think that almost all of us from the show understand the difference between a game and then personal, and when you're set in that competitive environment, it's like MMA mentality. When you're in the arena you kick each other in the face, and when you're outside of it you shake hands once the game is all said and done. Most of us know that. Even X being mad at the end during his elimination, we were on the phone like the day after my elimination, and everything was all good. Virtually everyone else has that same mentality. There may be some people that take things a little bit personally and hold on to them, and for them all we do is we just keep wishing them best and holding out your hand in kindness, should they want it.
Is there anything that happened this season that didn't make it on camera that you want fans to know about?
YOUNG: It's funny when we all watch it together because we're cracking up. Somebody will say something about someone else and then both people are in the room, and they're just like looking at each other like, "Oh!" It's awkward, but more funny than awkward.
GREEN: That happened to me last night. Literally the first time that Leo comes to one of our things where we're watching it, and I'm like, "Whatever, no one wants to be partnered with Leo anyways." And he's sitting right next to me! [Laughs] And I'm just like, "All love, homie! It's all good!"
The Challenge: USA airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
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