‘The Challenge: USA’ Season 2 Winners Reveal Toughest Part of the Final Was Edited Out

variety.com:

Emily Longeretta SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from the Season 2 finale of “The Challenge: USA,” now streaming on Paramount+. “The Challenge: USA” was even harder than it looked, in part because one of the competitions was cut from the final edit.

When asked about the toughest part of the final — a multi-day race with numerous legs — winner Desi Williams tells Variety that it was “sheer amount of uphill running on rough terrain” — especially since she was “dehydrated, because we had stayed up all night the night before doing an overnight challenge that wasn’t shown.” The season’s other winner, Chris Underwood, describes the edited-out overnight challenge, which is shown in the photo above. “After Day 1, we had set up camp, we built a fire, and 30 minutes into us doing our ‘Kumbaya’ stuff, TJ Lavin came in and basically told us that we had to stand up individually on these 12×12 pillars, that had barely enough room for your feet to stand on,” Underwood says.

The group had to guess when an hour had passed, counting the seconds. After they thought they reached an hour, they could step off.

However, if they stepped off before the hour was up or after an hour and five minutes had passed, they had to restart. The cast — minus Johnny “Bananas,” who chose to do the competition alone — counted together and got it wrong three times, which meant they were stuck standing for more than three hours. “It was just one of those terrible, torturous, aggravating things,” Underwood says. “The final was hard and that uphill climb, it was vertical.