The Challenge: USA showrunner reveals which players he worries might not finish the final

Sydney Bucksbaum
·4 min read

The Challenge showrunner Justin Booth has seen a lot of finals during his time on the franchise. Since he joined the long-running competition series in the early '00s, he's had a major hand in shaping just how tough and intense the show and its final race have become. So when Booth sat down to develop the final challenge for the new CBS version, The Challenge: USA, he decided to go back to one of the most iconic — and difficult — finals the franchise has ever seen.

"This is the same location as the Rivals finale, and then in All Stars [season] 1 we were in a similar area, so we're familiar with the terrain, the mountains are awesome, and you'll see some of the same stuff," Booth tells EW on set in Buenos Aires, ahead of the last elimination of the season. "But it's a different game."

The Challenge: USA final will have many of the classic elements that fans have come to expect over the past two and a half decades. "It's multiple days. We'll do one overnight [leg]," Booth says. "The weather has gotten so bad, though — we have plans to summit on a mountain peak and the weather is changing, and it's getting freezing and they can't climb on ice. We're going to see if we can pull it off."

The 10 finalists, who will be confirmed in the first hour of Wednesday's two-hour season finale after the last women's elimination sends someone home, have all gone through different experiences on Survivor, Big Brother, The Amazing Race, and Love Island, but none of them have ever encountered anything like a Challenge final. "For these guys, it's all going to be very brand-new," Booth says. "For the first time ever we're going to run basically a 30-hour final without sleep. We've never done that; we usually give them some modicum of sleep. This time there will be an option [to rest], but the work never stops. We're going to drop them into a lake, they're going to see elements and things that they've ever seen, they're going to constantly be confronted with different types of puzzles that they have to solve along the way, while they're freezing, while they're wet, and while they're tired."

The competitors of 'The Challenge: USA'
The competitors of 'The Challenge: USA'

Jonne Roriz/CBS The competitors of 'The Challenge: USA'

Booth smiles and added, "It's next-level. It's not easy. But if they get on the other side of it, they'll be better people who have discovered something about themselves."

Looking at the five men who have locked in their spot ahead of the finale, Booth does worry that not all of them will be able to finish the exhausting two-day race. "There's a few that are that are very deserving and I think they will do well, and then there's a few that kind of got in through the back door," he says. "There's a little concern about Enzo [Palumbo], we have some people who are kind of broken a little bit like Domenick [Abbate]."

Without spoiling who makes the final for the women after the last elimination of the season, Booth does admit there's one female player he thinks might not have the mental strength to finish. "We've got somebody that isn't sure she wants to do it, and those kinds of doubts with these things that we do, these adventure-race-type finales that we run, it's not the best recipe for success," he says. "But I hope that everybody can do it. You never know what's going to happen, because even the people that you're going to do the best sometimes don't finish, and the people that you don't think will do well end up doing well."

After getting through most of the first season of CBS' new spin-off, Booth still isn't ready to compare The Challenge: USA players to the competitors on MTV's original series just yet. He's holding his judgement until he sees who crosses the finish line. "I think that they have to prove to me that I can categorize them in the same space as the kids who oftentimes finish our finals," he says. "It's not to say that they can't, but most of them, 90 percent of them, haven't shown me that they have what it takes to to be in the same conversation as our other [Challenge competitors]. But I'm looking forward to being proven wrong."

The two-hour Challenge: USA finale airs Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.

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