In The Challenge: USA finale, viewers saw ten competitors learn that they’d officially qualified for TJ Lavin’s final, including six Survivor stars.
Ben Driebergen was amongst those Survivors as he played a strong season, kept himself tight with his allies, and stayed out of the eliminations at The Arena.
However, Ben got some unfortunate news when he and his castmates arrived at the final’s starting site in Patagonia.
TJ revealed that after Ben suffered an injury during the last daily challenge of the season, the medical team decided that it wasn’t best for him to continue competing.
That meant Ben was eliminated from the final before it started, and based on his details in post-show interviews, it was the right decision.
This report will contain spoilers from The Challenge: USA, including the names of other competitors in the final and the winners.
Ben suffered tough injury in The Challenge: USA finale
For The Challenge: USA’s final episode, the 11 remaining competitors, had one last daily challenge called Getting Tired, which involved retrieving tires and tokens worth points from a dark, abandoned town.
Competitors could solve puzzles to get certain tires worth more points or grab lower-point items they found within the town and then had to run them back to a checkpoint to add to their stack.
The objective was to accumulate the most points during the two-hour time limit. Tyson Apostol and Domenick Abbate seemed to lead the way early for the men, so Ben was looking to rack up points and try to edge them out.
Along the way, he was carrying a tire around his upper body so he could run. However, he tripped on something on the ground, fell, and ended up smashing his shoulder.
Despite that, he kept competing but ultimately got checked out by medical professionals, and they deemed he was medically disqualified from competing in TJ’s final.
That took him out of the running. Ultimately, his Survivor friends Danny McCray and Sarah Lacina were the ones to complete the final, becoming The Challenge: USA winners. Still, Ben and fans are probably thinking he would’ve been a strong contender if he’d competed.
Ben gives details on his injury, post-season surgeries
During an exit interview for Nerdtainment (below), the host asked Ben about his injuries in The Challenge: USA finale.
Ben explained that before the “mini-final” the competitors did with collecting tires, he went on a 10-mile walk that morning. That came into play when trying to run in the daily challenge.
“My legs were tired and burning. And so there was just this little chunk of concrete, and I had the tire wrapped around my head and my arm so I didn’t have to carry it and I could use my arms to run. When I fell, it just squashed- the shoulder had nowhere to go but to break. It was unfortunate. I did it twice too,” Ben shared, adding, “In the end, it was too broke to compete.”
When asked to talk about how bad his injury was, Ben elaborated that he had to get surgery to repair that and another injury he had.
“So there’s a screw in it now. The collarbone is sticking straight up and out. There’s a big ol’ bump there. There’s a screw in it with some rubberbands holding everything back in there, and the rotator cuff was torn as well. Then I had surgery on my knee as well, so I got home and went and had surgeries done at the same time,” he explained.
Ben still wanted to give the final a go, so he took the plane trip with the rest of the cast to Patagonia and was ready to give it a shot. However, TJ revealed that wasn’t going to happen. Ben said the on-site staff and medical professionals possibly saved him from more harm.
“Me the competitor, I would have loved to compete,” Ben said, adding, “But then again, that’s why they’re there, because I would’ve just went and tore it up, and who knows, because of that could’ve injured something else…So in the long run, they made the right call.”
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