Kyra & Kyland on ‘The Challenge: USA’ Elimination: ‘Cool, Madonna Stopped Us’

“How many times did Madonna get married?” That was Kyland Young and Kyra Green’s downfall on The Challenge: USA.

The Big Brother and Love Island pair were sent into elimination by the daily challenge’s winners Domenick Abbate (Survivor) and Cayla Platt (The Amazing Race) to face off with losers Alyssa Lopez (Big Brother) and Leo Temory (The Amazing Race) in the latest episode. And it was a rare elimination that included a trivia component: The teams had to lift medicine balls with the answers to trivia questions up on a platform.

Young and Green break down their elimination and discuss how show alliances fell apart.

Kyland, Angela spoke about how while she was working with you, she had to look out for herself. Talk about that alliance you two and Tyson had. How much did you trust each other?

Young: Oh, pretty well. These confessionals are very piecemealed. Me and Angela talked about going into that elimination, knowing that Dom was only looking at one of us two, and then also knowing he had such a tight bond with Enzo. We were like, “it’s definitely gonna be one of us, because he had said point blank that he was gonna take a shot back at us, back from when we put him in.” And then I was like, “honestly, if it’s gonna be between us, I’d rather it be me because me and Kyra are such a strong pair because Kyra’s just such an all-around amazing strong competitor.” So I was like, I think we have the best odds of coming back from whatever the elimination is. And I think that in most elimination scenarios we would’ve come back. It was just Madonna got us. We couldn’t think our way or run our way or lift our way or puzzle our way out of Madonna. It just is what it is.

Kyra, do you think there’s anything you could have done between the daily and the elimination that could have kept you guys from being thrown in?

Green: They didn’t show it. I did have a couple conversations, but I think just because of the history and Kyland putting them in, I pretty much got the vibe that whatever I said or did was not going to change what they did. But at the same time, I hadn’t won any challenges yet. So I was ready to go in there with a strong partner and win the money so that I could qualify for the final. So I had a mix of emotions. I was pretty OK with going in, but at the same time, I was like, I don’t want to. But I knew whatever I said, they were putting us in.

Jonne Roriz, courtesy of Paramount

Cayla brought up that you didn’t have a one-on-one with her, Kyland. How much do you regret that?

Young: Yeah, that’s not necessarily accurate. We had had previous conversations in the show, in the game. We had already landed on separate sides. Also there’s the fact of Dom being so committed to putting us in. And then you have the second layer of all these confessionals happen after the elimination already happened, so you’re getting the clips of rationalizations.

Cayla’s just such a strategic, smart player, so she had reasons to put in anyone that she wanted. And obviously, because we went in, she had to express those reasons and focus on them because, at the end of the day, I don’t think that we would’ve actually been her top choice. Because she’s so loyal and she wanted to protect Leo, I don’t think that anybody thought that me and Kyra were Leo’s best chance of coming back. But at the same time, we were on the other side. So her having a partner that was just so committed to me going in and the fact that she still had all these other relationships, that was the decision that made the most sense for her.

Talk about that elimination. Lifting those medicine balls looked brutal, Kyra.

Green: They were so heavy, honestly, but I really trained hard before going into this whole game. So I felt pretty confident, and I almost wish that it was just fully physical because once I got my strategy down and we had height on our side — it was so high too, the platform that you had to put it on top of. Watching it back on TV, I was like, it doesn’t look like it’s that tall, but it was super high. But we’re both very tall people, so I felt good about it, but it was rough. Once those trivia questions started hitting us and the Madonna one came, I was just like, damn. I would’ve loved for it to be fully physical, but I think we did pretty well. We had a lead for a hot minute, but Madonna.

Jonne Roriz, courtesy of Paramount

Young: What Kyra said. We had the height, we had a good combination for it but it is so tall. Unchaining the balls was actually a big part of the game and that was something that we did really well. And like Kyra said, once she found her flow, we had a good system going. She’s lifting up this heavy weight with one arm while balancing herself, so she’s just crushing it. We had all the answers and pretty high confidence in all of them, just being stopped by Madonna was the only thing, which honestly feels kind of good because, at the end of the day, it’s like, I’d much rather have Madonna take us out than like a race or pole wrestle or a puzzle or something like that. It’s like, “alright, cool. Madonna stopped us.” And they never do trivia in eliminations. This is the second time, I think they said, in 20 years or 20 seasons or something. So it’s not even typically something that happens. And the fact that we were able to get as many as we could off the jump from seeing them … We just got stuck on one. That feels pretty good, as far as losses go.

Trivia seems like the worst part, but TJ loves it so much.

Young: Yes. And normally we do.

Green: He’s always laughing. That’s the best part of the season for me is just watching him laugh at our pain. I’m like, wow, TJ, really?

Jonne Roriz, courtesy of Paramount

Is there anything else we didn’t see you think viewers should know about?

Young: For me, it’s just the fun, in the sense that we had super funny people with us. We laughed a lot. The standouts for sure are Derek, just super goofy, always funny, Tyson had me cracking up a lot, but Danny is just so funny. They obviously show him talk about Kiki and that’s my favorite part of watching every episode, but he’s just funny. He had me cracking up all the time. And so I think that showing more of his personality and showing more of all these jokes and laughs we had. But I get it. That’s not part of the game.

Green: We had a couple fun nights out. We all came from these different shows, but at the same time, you put some music on and you get some drinks flowing and everyone was just vibing like one big family. I think that’s the best thing that came from the show is a lot of us have long-lasting friendships before and now after it, too. So they show a lot of the gaming, but at the same time, we had a lot of just quirky, fun moments that I think didn’t make it to TV.

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Big Brother’s show alliance was falling apart, while it seemed like Love Island‘s was doing pretty well.

Green: Yeah. I think all of us not coming from a very gaming background, we were pretty much just on a show to have fun, make connections, possibly fall in love. I think we all came in there being very genuine and true. Seeing people underestimate us and think that we were the underdogs, I think, really gave us a fire to stick together and be like, we’re gonna prove them all wrong. And I think just to still have two Love Islanders in there and the fact that we lasted so long, I feel like we proved a lot of people wrong.

Young: Yeah, I think that we walked in and we had thought that that would be something that we could do: work together, going into the first elimination. Then afterwards, TJ drops the algorithm on us and we realized, we can’t do that. We have to be adaptable to the game. We have to look at playing an individual game, which I was pretty excited for because during my season of Big Brother, we had the Cookout alliance. So I had to prioritize that above my individual game in multiple moments to my own detriment.

And so this time I was like, you know what, whatever makes the most sense each week, that’s for me the optimal move that I’m gonna do. Also, show alliances started breaking. You saw week 2, a Love Islander sent in a Love Islander. You saw week 3, Survivor people all wanted the Survivor person to go in. We put in Dom because that was the house vote essentially. And so by that point, show lines had already started breaking, going way before our week with me and Alyssa. So people can see what they want to see or they could see the actual game play out and the fact that we’re in the house and we’re actually having conversations and the show doesn’t really show the alliances that we’re forming outside of the shows. Going back to week 1, myself and others had started forming different alliances outside the shows and people just didn’t know that.

The Challenge: USA, Wednesdays, 9/8c, CBS