Adam & Steve are in the All Stars Rivals final, but they’ve already etched a spot in Challenge history. The team has tied the franchise record for most elimination wins in a single season: five.
Only three other people/ teams have achieved this over the course of Challenge history: Sarah Greyson on The Gauntlet, Wes & Casey on Fresh Meat, and Horacio on Ride or Dies. But somehow, Adam & Steve’s accomplishment doesn’t quite seem as impressive as their predecessors.
There are many reasons their victories might feel this way, and it mostly boils down to the formatting of All Stars Rivals. It wasn’t a season with a balanced gender distribution. As such, the team was able to compete against many opponents who didn’t seem to pose much of a threat. No one really anticipated Beth or Aneesa would outperform Adam & Steve, and those assumptions proved to be correct.
In fact, Adam & Steve have set another record, but probably no one that they want to brag about. On All Stars Rivals, they eliminated more women in a single season than any other person/pair. Seven women went home because of Adam & Steve: Beth, Jonna, Kellyanne, Sylvia, Aneesa, Ashley, and Nany.
It’s not like Adam & Steve had to outrun any of these women, nor did they need to use their physical strength, but this poses another issue. Because of the unbalanced teams, most eliminations were puzzles or some type of coordination game.
While some of Adam & Steve’s elimination wins were fairly impressive (objectively, they should have been disadvantaged as the larger team in Pole Position), the randomness of these eliminations make the wins seem less merit-based. Now that the daily challenges and Jungles are over, all of Adam & Steve’s elimination wins will probably blend together. They won’t have stand-out moments like Sarah Greyson’s Dead Man Drop against Irulan, Wes & Casey zipping past bigger teams like Tonya & Johnnie, or Horacio schooling Jordan in Balls In.
There’s also the fact that Adam & Steve are the fourth team to reach the five-win accomplishment. As more people join the club, it becomes less shocking because we’ve seen the achievement before.
We also shouldn’t ignore the fact that Adam & Steve didn’t pick the format of this season, nor did they want to go into all of these Jungles. Every time they were sent into an elimination, they rose to the occasion, and they certainly had to work a lot harder to get to the final than most of the other finalists. Nothing in this post is to discredit their victories, but if you’re not super impressed by all of their wins, there’s probably a reason.
Stop Being Polite 