The Challenge: USA 2 recently aired its grand finale with two deserving stars crowned the winners of the spinoff season.
The final featured eight worthy competitors earning a chance to compete for their share of $500,000.
Among them were previous MTV Challenge winners Tori Deal and Johnny Bananas and former finalists Faysal “Fessy” Shafaat and Cory Wharton.
When it was all said and done, Survivor stars Chris Underwood and Desi Williams were the competitors to reach the finish point ahead of the rest of the finalists.
While their fellow finalists, host TJ Lavin, and many fans felt it was a well-deserved win for these two individuals, many criticized the final’s format.
That included Wes Bergman, a two-time MTV finalist and winner of the All Stars 3 spinoff, as he shared his thoughts about the season’s big competition.
Wes Bergmann reacts to The Challenge: USA 2 final
Based on comments from Wes, he liked that the USA 2 final didn’t involve the finalists having to work in pairs as he said it was great there was “No partner bulls**t” and that “they lived & died by their own performance.”
However, there was an aspect of the final’s design that Wes felt wasn’t good when determining the season’s winner.
“Too much came to down to those two equalizers,” he wrote with an axe and scale emoji, adding, “If ‘anyone can win’, it’s not well designed.”
The emojis Wes added to his comment represented two checkpoints in the final that the competitors had to complete. The axe was an axe-throwing checkpoint, where Desi advanced quickly, although she admitted that she’d never really thrown an axe.
Meanwhile, MTV’s Ride or Dies winner Tori Deal struggled with the axe checkpoint, which cost her a win as she was eliminated soon after.
Another portion of the final featured a large scale. The competitors had to take rocks from a nearby pile and properly balance a specific amount of weight on the scales. This involved being able to guestimate just by looking at the rocks and placing them in the hanging scales.
Competitors who got the scales part right received a serious advantage, as they got to ride in an ATV for the next mile of the final. Meanwhile, competitors who didn’t get it correct had to continue the trek on foot.
Desi got to the scale with Michaela but solved it first, giving her an advantage. Chris and Cory also got it right, while Bananas didn’t.
Chris said an unaired part of the final was his ‘least favorite’
Many viewers may have felt the USA 2 final was lacking when compared to some of the grueling tasks treks that competitors had to endure in finals for MTV’s The Challenge.
However, winner Chris Underwood revealed after the episode aired that another part of the final never got shown in the final footage.
It was similar to what viewers have seen in other finals, where competitors had to stand on top of a stump or pole for a specific amount of time at night.
In this particular task, all competitors were involved in the nighttime event, and each had to stand on a stump measuring about “12 by 12 inches.” They had to count out an hour without using any clocks or watches and step off their stump between an hour and an hour and five minutes after the event started.
“We got it wrong twice,” Chris told US Weekly, adding, “So, we were counting second by second to an hour for three hours straight while standing up on these columns in the middle of the night — and then a couple hours later [we had to] wake up to run the final. It was pretty miserable.”
Chris shared that the competitors mostly tried to work together by counting seconds and minutes. He said Johnny Bananas got it right first and “got the most sleep” there.
However, Chris still gained that serious advantage at the rock weighing checkpoint, where he placed them correctly, and Bananas didn’t get it right just ahead of the finish point.
Interestingly enough, Chris said defeating Wes in one of his several elimination wins of the season was his second-favorite moment, just behind winning the whole thing.
The Challenge: USA 2 episodes are available on Paramount+. The Challenge: Battle For a New Champion premieres Wednesday, October 25 at 8/7c on MTV.