Shannon St. Clair is amongst the competitors appearing on the spinoff show, The Challenge: USA, which features cast members from her show Love Island along with those from Big Brother, Survivor, and The Amazing Race.
Shannon, 26, is one of the smaller competitors in terms of height but proved she’s relatively athletic despite never being on a reality show of this nature.
While she was initially portrayed as someone who didn’t want to be there, she’s managed to survive the season and is still alive in the game in the spinoff’s fourth episode.
She recently revealed during a podcast interview that she’d been asked to appear on MTV’s main The Challenge for the 38th season. However, she said she turned it down “right away” for several reasons.
According to Shannon, she didn’t have the best experience on The Challenge: USA, indicating that she probably wouldn’t compete on the show again.
However, she also mentioned a caveat that could bring her potential return appearance to the popular reality competition series.
Shannon St. Clair didn’t like The Challenge: USA
While speaking with Mark Long and Emily Longeretta on Spotify’s exclusive podcast, Reality Rundown, former Love Island star Shannon St. Clair talked about her experiences on The Challenge: USA.
While she had good things to say about host TJ Lavin and enjoyed the challenges, some things rubbed her the wrong way regarding the overall experience.
“I’m just gonna say no again because of my living experience in that compound,” she told the podcast hosts. “Like the living conditions I think, were what really got me. It wasn’t the challenges. It wasn’t the people. It was the living conditions.”
“So for me, the hardest challenge was living in a bunker with strangers, and the food was not great. People got like food poisoning and had to go to the hospital. It was not very ideal at all for living conditions, and I think that I’m very adaptive to my environments, so that’s just why I say I wouldn’t,” she added.
The Challenge: USA was filmed in the beautiful country of Argentina. Some of the outdoor environments look fantastic, but as viewers have seen, the cast members are living in a huge room together inside a warehouse-like compound.
During the Reality Rundown podcast, Shannon said it was like walking into a Home Depot with a bunch of bunk beds stacked together.
For comparison, Shannon’s previous CBS reality show was Love Island USA 3, where gorgeous cast members stayed at a beautiful villa in Nīnole, Hawaii. That’s like a dream vacation for some casts from MTV’s The Challenge, such as those on Total Madness who lived in an underground bunker in Prague, Czech Republic.
Shannon St. Clair shares why she turned down Season 38
While viewers are getting to see Shannon compete on The Challenge: USA, she revealed during the podcast she originally thought she would only be there as an alternate. However, she quickly learned she was part of the cast.
She said she also got a call for MTV’s main show, The Challenge, but rejected the offer.
“I did get asked for Season 38 of MTV, but it was very last minute. It was the same case [as USA] with the alternate. It wasn’t the same network compensation, so I turned it down right away,” Shannon shared on the podcast.
She said upon watching back some of the episodes of the CBS spinoff she’s on that she thought they looked “cool as s**t” competing in the various events.
“I think if I ever were to consider doing a season of The Challenge again, I would need to have a little more insight and train beforehand and maybe get a little DL about what the living conditions would be like,” she mentioned.
Shannon has been one of the entertaining cast members on the CBS spinoff, along with fellow Love Island castmates, including Cashay Proudfoot and Justine Ndiba. However, if she doesn’t get some early intel on future living conditions first, viewers may never see her back on any form of The Challenge.
The Challenge: USA airs Wednesdays at 9/8c on CBS. The Challenge Season 38 is TBA for MTV.