On The Challenge: Battle of the Eras, Paulie Calafiore faced one of his rivals from a previous season, Theo Campbell.
Both competitors were part of the Era 4 team, but since Theo finished last in the daily challenge for the Eras Invitational, he called out Paulie as who he wanted to face in the elimination.
Horacio Gutierrez and Michele Fitzgerald were the team’s first-place winners, and they gave Theo what he requested.
While Paulie was eager to return to the show and received a physical elimination, it didn’t quite go how he’d hoped.
The Era 4 teammates battled in what many cast members and viewers call a classic headbanger, Hall Brawl.
Theo, taller and heavier than Paulie, was able to seize victory from his opponent in the event quickly. Unfortunately for Paulie, he was eliminated from the season and received rough post-elimination injuries that took weeks of recovery.
Paulie revealed injuries he suffered in his Season 40 elimination
Hall Brawl has become a Challenge classic and fan-favorite elimination over the years. It requires two opponents beginning at opposite ends of a narrow hall featuring plexiglass sides.
Once the horn blows to start, they run at one another, attempting to be the first to get to their end of the hall and ring a bell. In the case of Season 40, they had to press a buzzer.
Era 4 drew this as their event for the eliminations in the Era Invitational. In the women’s battle, Nurys Mateo was outmatched and overwhelmed by former friend-turned-rival Olivia Kaiser.
Theo also easily defeated Paulie, and according to the former Big Brother star, the event knocked the memory out of him.
During a Season 40 elimination interview on YouTube, Parade’s Mike Bloom asked Nurys and Paulie to recall a memorable moment from Season 40 that they wish production showed viewers.
“I’m gonna be honest. I don’t even remember much. I suffered two concussions from the elimination,” Paulie shared, surprising Bloom.
“You saw it. You saw my head hit his head. We’ve watched football games, right? Concussion is a movie. Will Smith was the actor. I lived the real-life version of that,” he said.
“I remember pieces of stuff. Like my memory, for sure, has been coming back from a lot of the stuff. It took about a full six weeks to recover. I had to stay in Vietnam for two weeks. I had to go get a CT scan and get checked up on and stuff,” Paulie shared.
“It was serious. You guys just see the finished product, and then you see us on social media. You don’t see the recovery time after these things,” he said.
Paulie didn’t participate in any eliminations on his previous MTV season, War of the Worlds 2. He reached the final as part of Team USA but suffered from exhaustion while competing. Team UK, which included castmates Jordan Wiseley and CT Tamburello, picked up the win.
Paulie said BMP and MTV were ‘extremely accommodating’
Taking to his Instagram Story, Paulie shared an additional post-filming update regarding how Bunim Murray Productions and MTV handled his recovery in Vietnam.
He said that BMP and MTV ensured he received a CT scan “immediately after the elimination and was extremely accommodating in [his] recovery in Vietnam.”
“I had to spend two weeks there before getting cleared to fly back to the US and they made sure someone from production was there with me every day monitoring my health and on the flight home as well in case something went south,” he wrote in his IG Story slide.
As seen in the clip above, as Paulie got run over by Theo during the first round of Hall Brawl, castmates reacted to the sound of the collision.
“That’s the sound of Paulie’s soul leaving his body,” castmate Johnny Bananas said in a confessional interview.
The Season 40 elimination loss was another early exit for Paulie following his previous runs to the final in Final Reckoning and War of the Worlds 2.
Previously, viewers saw Bananas defeat him in an elimination several episodes into CBS’s The Challenge: USA 2, Paulie’s return to the competition series before MTV’s Battle of the Eras.
The Challenge: Battle of the Eras airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on MTV.
Episodes of The Challenge are now streaming on Paramount+. Try it FREE!
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