Kyland Young and Kyra Green clearly weren’t big Madonna fans before The Challenge: USA and they probably won’t be after their Wednesday, August 17, elimination either.
The Big Brother and Love Island alums, who were thrown into the arena against Alyssa Lopez and Leo Temory, were seemingly in the lead until one question about the Queen of Pop’s love life tripped them up.
“I wanted to obviously make it through and kill the elimination, but me and Ky joke about it. We were like, ‘Madonna got us,’ because it was just that one freaking question that we just couldn’t get,” Kyra exclusively tells Us Weekly in our exit interview, which you can watch above. “But I’m still super proud of how the whole season went for me.”
Kyland agrees, “As someone who’s super competitive, I’d much rather it be, like, ‘Madonna got us’ than we lost in a race or a puzzle or lifting something. … Trivia is just so uncommon. I don’t know, but the experience – it was a newer dream – but it’d become such a dream because I love competing.”
“Trivia is just the worst,” Kyra adds. “I one hundred percent [agree] with Kyland as a partner, I wanted something super physical. And if that was the only thing that we had to do, I think we would’ve killed it. It’s just those trivia questions. You never know what they’re gonna ask you.”
As for daily challenge winners Domenick Abbate and Cayla Platt deciding to throw them into elimination, Kyland and Kyra weren’t that surprised given the former had said Dom’s name earlier in the game and knew that he, Angela Rummans and Tyson Apostol were “pretty tight.”
“Dom had already said that before, back when me and Angela put him in, that he was gonna take a shot back,” Kyland tells Us. “And it just made sense ‘cause as a male competitor, it would make more sense that would be the shot you’d wanna take. And then also [he] had a super tight relationship with Enzo [Palumbo], so that was Angela’s partner.”
Kyland also received some heat earlier in the season when he and Alyssa threw Big Brother 23 castmate (and winner) Xavier Prather into the arena, a decision a lot of fans thought might be too early given that they had the numbers at the time.
“That decision is easy to stand by because we know being in the game, numbers are great. So you have to count the numbers of people that you actually are working with,” Kyland explains. “And that just wasn’t someone that I was working with. … The personal relationship was good, so on a personal level, it actually sucked because I was like, ‘Oh man, this is someone I like personally and respect.’ But on the game side, it was like, ‘OK, wait, no one trusts him.’ Unfortunately, he hasn’t built the bonds yet in this game, not just with Survivor people, but Big Brother people and some Love Island people. So it was just, like, even his best friend in the house is against him. So I’m like, ‘All right, cool, like, this isn’t a good partner for me moving forward in this game.’”
He adds, “It’s only early if you forget that this is like chess, not checkers. We have this algorithm at play. So that means that his next upcoming partners, which people forget ‘cause they don’t consider that are Kyra, Desi [Williams], Angela, all people that I want to stay in the game. So if we’re gonna take the shot, it has to be at the time when it would actually be beneficial were it to land. So if I waited at any other time to do it, then I would’ve been eliminating someone who I wanna keep in the game as a potential partner because often the final, we know, is ran with a partner of the opposite sex, or because the algorithm, we have all these dailies. So I don’t wanna get rid of any of these women that I actually wanna work with in this game. So it just made too much sense.”
The Challenge: USA airs on CBS Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET.