We open the week up with the gang at a virtual snowboarding studio/game place. They all watch Gus, Louie, and Lindsey blow them away with their speed on the boards; it is nice they get to show off how athletic they are. They are competing in the Champs realm, which is nothing like their sports, it’s easy to understand football, and you can easily see how fast a track runner is, it’s hard to comprehend the athleticism and core muscles of Winter sports Olympians.

Challenge time: The Challenge, is based off of the first daily mission on the Duel where Big Easy was able to win due to his massive size. It’s essentially a tug of war, where they carry Nerf footballs to the end-zone. They have 1 hour, at the end of 1 hour, whoever is closer to their end-zone wins, or when a team enters the end-zone.

Before the round, Victor announces that each team must nominate two captains, a male and female, as they will be sending both a male and female competitor home in elimination this week. For the captains: winners are safe, losers go straight to elimination. Wes and CT each want to be captain, as they know if they win, they get to be safe from elimination. Wes owes CT one for winning him the last elimination against Jordan. Likewise, all the girls want to be captain as they see it as a possible path to a final without an elimination. In the end it is CT and Cara. The Pros let Louie and Lolo be captains. Cool of Kam to let Louie be captain, even though it is somewhat a “football” mission.

The girls round begins and we get a match-up of Lolo-Louise-Lindsey against Cara-Camila-Ashley. The Champs believe the Olympians have the athletic edge, but they have the edge of doing this stuff before. Which is true, they lost in 10 minutes, instead of 1 minute, like expected. They shouldn’t have tried to put their footballs in the goal, they should have dropped them and clawed themselves as deeply as they could in the sand.

For the guys round, the Champs had the advantage of Darrel being bigger than Gus, Wes being a good deal bigger than Louie, and then you had gigantic Kam being bigger than CT. Ironically, they’re about the same weight, except Kam has a ton of muscles, and these days CT has a ton of dad bod.

The Champion males take the early lead, forcing a lot of weight onto Gus and Louie, taking advantage of their weak sides. As it gets down to the last 10 minutes, Kam takes it upon himself and rush as hard as he can down. He even runs toward the Champs in order to get a better running start. Kam is annoyed by how little he is moving them. He does not understand that he is trying to move 700 lbs, as well as people who are creating more weight by digging themselves into the sand. Kam’s end effort is valiant, and he moves the Champs quite a bit. In the end, it’s a tie game. CT looks dead. He’s taken the blunt of Kam’s hits as his chord was directly tied to Kam’s. CT says that he can’t even feel the left side of his body.

As the tiebreaker, Victor announces it will be a ten minute captains match-up of CT-Cara against Louie-Lolo. The Pros are disappointed as there is a 100 lb difference between CT and Louie, meaning they will be losing. CT looks disappointed that he has to compete again. The game begins, and Lolo wants to pull them with all her might. That doesn’t happen, CT wins it for them, using his weight, and they also employ the strategy of CT-Cara getting as close as they can in order to create one big weight bulge.

Victor announces that the elimination will be Champs vs Pros, finally. He also announces that it is now the job of CT and Cara to nominate someone. This is tough for Cara Maria, she’s not a big fan of Ashley, but Ashley saw the first two eliminations, so it would be cruel to send her in. She chooses Ashley as she can guarantee that Camila is stronger in a final athletically, and that as friends, she knows Camila would throw in Ashley. Ashley chooses to throw a fit, running off into the van. I’d be pissed if I had to see a 3rd straight elimination too. The way she acted was terrible, considering this is a game for charity and fun at the end of the day. Surprisingly, the Pros are sympathetic for Ashley, they think her team is doing her kind of dirty.

When CT has to make his choice, it’s a tough move. Darrell does his classic stare down of don’t pick me or you’ll be sorry, while Wes keeps his head down. CT asks for help or a volunteer. After a long pause, Wes volunteers himself. Wes knows that Darrell is the better athlete, and that CT is his friend who he has been through shit with. Wes v Louie, and Ashley v Lolo.

Elimination Time: The arena shows a low to the ground, fence-like jungle gym with ropes tied all around it. It’s Knot So Fast, instead low to the ground, and the ropes already tied. This is most likely due to CT solving the elimination on Invasion, where he made one giant knot. Wes and Louie go first, where Louie looks like a little spider monkey, traversing the contraption and he unties a bunch of rope immediately. Wes plays with the strategy of holding all the rope he untangles in a spool. He knows what to do with the rope, as this was how Wes lost his first ever elimination when playing against Cohutta on the Ruins.

Midway through the game, Louie thinks he is in the lead. Then as he gets about 65% of his rope untied, he takes a deep breathe realizing how tiring it is to pull out all the rope and deal with the total slack of it all. He looks over at Wes to see his entire spool, nice and organized in a bundle. This leads to a Wes victory, as it is too late for Louie to recover. A great showing by both, and it’s all good fun. Whatever you say about Wes, he can say he beat an Olympian in elimination.

Ashley goes against Lolo. They both use the Wes strategy, where Ashley performs admirably and makes some good moves to cut down on time. She’s much better at puzzles than Lolo. Lolo wins as she is the best athlete in the game, and Ashley is the worst athlete in the game left. Ashley cries and runs off, taking her jersey off, wanting to leave. The producer has to talk her off the cliff to say her goodbye. Lolo feeling compassionate, decides to donate Ashley 5000 dollars for her charity. I didn’t like Ashley’s attitude, she performed well, but she shouldn’t be rewarded after her tantrum.

In the end, Ashley was not ready for this. She went from facing off with Underdogs, to now competing in the Champions bracket, to then facing a dual sport Olympian and world champion sprinter. That’s a lot to handle. She also saw more eliminations (3), then her first two seasons of the Challenge combined (2).

Post log: Next week is the final, and it looks like a mix of things. The Champs team weakness is probably Wes and Camila, they’re the two worst players currently on the team. Wes will be fine as long as it is not long distance endurance, and Camila will be fine as long as she doesn’t talk.

The Pros weakness will be doing the weird shit the Champs are accustomed to.