Paulie Calafiore (‘The Challenge: USA’) on being eliminated by Johnny ‘Bananas’: ‘Might as well go down against one of the greats’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

Denton Davidson
·3 min read
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Paulie Calafiore became the third contestant eliminated from “The Challenge: USA” on Thursday night, following his loss to Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio in the arena. In the game “Fire & Ice,” each man was tasked with standing on a block of ice while holding one hand up in the air attached to a bucket of fish guts. With fire burning beneath them, it was simply a contest of endurance. In the end, Bananas pulled off the win, leaving Paulie covered in muck and emotional over his defeat. Watch our exclusive video interview with the eliminated contestant above.

“That’s the beauty of ‘The Challenge,'” Paulie says. “You never know what you’re going to have to do down in the sand. When you have to go up against somebody who has that much experience over the span of the seasons that he’s done — he has seen quite literally everything. But, if you’re gonna go down you might as well go down against one fo the greats.”

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“I take it as a badge of honor that people wanted to vote for me as somebody who could take out Bananas,” he admits. “If Johnny and I go into 10 eliminations it could go either way. We match up pretty well in terms of things that we’re good at, as well as things we’re not good at. The mutual respect is definitely there on the competitor side.”

This season Paulie returned without the chip on his shoulder many fans of “The Challenge” have seen from him in the past. He expands on the discussion he had with Tori Deal in Episode 3, revealing his conflicted past. “I just want people to know that there’s a lot of layers to me,” he explains. His more aggressive moments are “a part of me that exist. It’s existed my whole life when I’ve felt like I needed to protect myself and when I needed to put up a shield. Growing up in athletics you almost always have to put a shield on. People are always looking to find a weakness to try and get an edge. It was hard to express myself growing up. People would throw a lot of things in my face with the way that I dressed. A lot of people would call me ‘sunshine’ and say I was gay, but in a negative way, not like ‘live your truth.’ When I got on TV I kept that version of me a secret. Suppressing that and being in these environments, where it is competitive, it is cutthroat, I reverted back to what I knew as a defense mechanism, which was fight, fight, fight.”

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