This article contains spoilers for The Challenge: Vets and New Threats episode 4, “Wish I’d Been Practicing.”
Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio knows he only has himself to blame for his early exit on The Challenge season 41.
In this week’s episode of The Challenge: Vets and New Threats, the seven-time champion made the call to clear his and his partner Leka Sodade’s Sudoku board to start their puzzle over right as the 45-minute time limit ended. With zero correct answers on their board, they automatically got last place, sending Bananas directly into elimination against “hangnail” Gabe Wai. And in a moment reminiscent of the iconic “Bananas Backpack,” the veteran lost what he tells Entertainment Weekly was an “unwinnable” strength-based elimination against the massive rookie.
“Even though I once again had the entire house against me, the one thing that I’m happy about is I went out this season and I have nobody to blame but myself,” Bananas tells EW. “Well, actually, partially my partner, Leka, for absolutely fumbling our Sudoku puzzle. But this big storyline that was created about the Brit alliance vs. Bananas, Olivia vs. Bananas, even though they had all these numbers and they were all coming from my head, I went out on my own. I caught a really bad string of luck at the worst possible time, my puzzle curse once again reared its ugly head, and then I got put in unwinnable elimination. So you win some, you lose some.”
Below, Bananas reveals what wasn’t shown in that challenge and shocking elimination upset, shares an update on his showmance with Survivor 45 winner Dee Valladares, and more.
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ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So … what happened?!
JOHNNY BANANAS DEVENANZIO: The wild part is, of all the seasons that I’ve done, I can’t even tell you how many daily challenges I’ve done, and I’ve won 50 or 60 or something like that. Never, ever in the history of my career have I come in last and gone directly into elimination. It was crazy how it all went down — [I’ve got] a lot of issues with the way that all went down. There was no time warning given. There was no like, “You guys got five minutes, you got a minute, you got 30 seconds… ”
I kept reiterating the fact that I don’t know much about Sudoku, but I do know that if you make a mistake early on, the entire rest of your board now has been built on that mistake, and it’s basically all wrong. And I was of the opinion that we should have cleared it a lot sooner than that. Leka disagreed — she thought she’d be able to somehow fix the mistakes. We weren’t able to do that. And by the time she finally agreed to take it down, it was too late. The second I wiped the last piece off the puzzle, we timed out, which was wild because we weren’t given any sort of warning. We would’ve just left them up and just hoped that we had less wrong answers than other people, which could have potentially happened.
But you always look back on things you should have done or could have done. S—, I wish going into this elimination that I would’ve strapped a refrigerator to my back. I might’ve had a shot. Or CT could have strapped me to his back. That’s the only way that I’m winning that elimination against that raging bull of a human being.
Why did you and Leka pass on solving an easy Sudoku puzzle earlier in the maze before attempting to solve a medium one?
No, it was actually the opposite way around. The deeper you go, the easier the puzzles get. We were at the head of the pack, and you saw some other teams run into the problem where yes, you can get in and get the easiest puzzle, but now you’ve got to find your way out. We knew there were seven puzzles for seven teams, we’ll pass a couple, we’ll get to the medium difficulty ones, and Leka had assured me before we started that she was great at Sudoku. I’m not, I’ve never claimed to be great at Sudoku, but going into it, I had the utmost confidence that she would know what she was doing.
What they didn’t show is it wasn’t a team effort between her and I. The role I took on was sorting and handing her the numbers. You saw it with Ashley and Leo, for example, when you have two different people trying to do two different things in a high stress situation, it sometimes leads to more problems than it solves. So I immediately just was like, “Leka, you’ve got this.” And I was on the ground sorting and handing numbers, until I guess she hit a wall. It wasn’t until then that I took my first look at the puzzle, and even for a guy who knows nothing about Sudoku, the second I looked at it, I spotted three different mistakes.
Again, this is on me. I’m the one that has the experience. I’m the veteran. I should have taken the lead from the beginning and, if not done the puzzle, trust but verify. I just blindly put my trust in thinking that she’s going to be able to nail this thing. By the time I got involved in the puzzle, it was too late and we were already so deep. We hadn’t heard a time check yet, so maybe we just take ’em all down and start this thing over from the beginning. And unfortunately once we did that, the horn blew. We timed out. The rest is history.
Was Gabe always going to be your elimination opponent or did you try to get someone else thrown in?
It was always going to be Gabe. They showed the dust up between Nia and Gabe, but they didn’t show [how] he was already in a very deep hole, just as far as bridges he had already burned in the house. This was Gabe’s first time being on reality TV, he’s obviously a fan of The Challenge, and he wanted to make a splash. They didn’t show it, but Gabe made up a lot of stories. He embellished a lot to create drama or storylines or friction. And what that ended up doing was putting him in a bad situation with a lot of people in the house, because if you’re saying something that’s untrue, it’s going to rise to the surface. He went on an apology tour like the day before that challenge, and he had to apologize to essentially everyone in the house for basically making a bunch of mistruths.
What lies was he telling?
He apparently made up a rumor that him and Adrienne had a little fling where they were romantically involved. He also created a story, I forgot what it was, but early on he was trying to create drama between Justin and Derek saying that one of them said the other one’s name. He tried to plant these little seeds everywhere and drop these little bombs and stir up all this drama. The only problem is there’s a paper trail and it follows you back. It wasn’t really highlighted in the episodes, but make no mistake, Gabe was a dead man walking going into this elimination.
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It looked like you had a great strategy going in the elimination by faking out Gabe on which rope you were on, but it only worked because people on the sidelines were silent. Were they told not to say anything or help at all during the elimination?
Yeah. It helped me, obviously, having people not be able to say anything. But the only way they could have helped me is if eight of them would’ve came down and helped me hold him back or pull. I had to make a judgment call early on, if I sprint this thing through, which I was pretty much able to do, I was able to confuse him enough of which rope I was going to be on by doing misdirections. My concern was, if I do this too quickly, he then is still going to have so much in the tank [when it’s his turn].
What they didn’t show was there [were] a few times I would let him pull me through the sand. I would just sit there and let him yank me through because I’m like, “If this guy drags me enough times, it’s going to wear him out.” And we all saw that that wasn’t necessarily the case. That guy’s a monster. That elimination was tailor-made for somebody of his stature. There was nothing I could do about it. That’s the thing about eliminations, you never, ever, ever know what you’re going to walk into. It just wasn’t my day.
The worst eliminations to lose are the ones where you could have done something differently and potentially won. I can lay my head down at night and take solace in the fact that there’s nothing that I could have done differently that would’ve made the outcome of this elimination any different.
Did you get any flashbacks to the Bananas Backpack moment?
No, this was a whole different scenario. I did kind of have Ride or Dies flashbacks when I left Nany to her own devices in the final, and we were building that monstrosity of a cinder block puzzle. That was something that I wish I would’ve been a little more vigilant and just taken the veteran role and been a little more strategic about how we put it together. That was similar with this.
What’s your relationship with Dee like now? Did your showmance continue after filming ending?
We were just texting back and forth yesterday. She’s in Africa, and climbed to the top of the highest mountain there. That makes sense, because she is a big fan of being on top. [Laughs] Yeah, we’re good. We still talk a lot. She’s in Miami, I’m in Boca. I’ve been traumatized so many times, I just automatically assume the worst. And I think she felt the same way. We both kind of held back a little bit because she heard all the rumors about me, and I’m this f—ing second coming of Satan. So I think she was a bit hesitant. I was, too, just knowing what her background was on Survivor and how she played the game and how she made it to the end. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised with our relationship and how it’s maintained now that the show’s over and we’re still super close. It’s still budding, I would say.
So is it a showmance, or is it a romance?
More than friends, less than lovers. [Laughs] Hey, I’ve met the parents. How about that? Met mom. I’m not sure what they thought of me. Moms love me. They usually warn their daughters about me and then they end up running off with me.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Challenge: Vets and New Threats airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on MTV.
