Nurys Mateo Saved The Challenge: Battle for a New Champion From Being a Mockery of Itself

The Challenge franchise seems very aware of its rookie problem, but continues to make vain attempts to fix it. The latest trial for the decades-spanning franchise was an elongated season, Battle for a New Champion, that put fresh meat and newer vets on the cast with only one criterion: no one on the season has ever won before.

The idea was admirable, to allow some of the most promising new faces of the show and other Paramount reality tentpoles the chance to get a champion belt without series stalwarts like Johnny Bananas or CT Tamburello dominating and taking the prize. However, the execution was terrible and the real winner of this season is not their new champion. It's the runner-up Nurys Mateo.

To understand how Nurys ended up on top without taking first place requires looking back at the foibles of the entire season. Battle for a New Champion was divided into three sections: Control, Chaos, and Conquest. The initial phase consisted of four episodes where the entire cast had to work together in group challenges to add money to the prize pot to be collected by the winners at the end of the season. The group then voted on who to send down to the sand and the nominated person could pick anyone who voted for them to join them in elimination.

If the producers were hoping this would create new strategies within the social sphere of the game, they were sadly mistaken. The house quickly divided along nationality lines of Team USA vs everyone else, with smaller cliques in each of those larger alliances. Team USA not only had the larger numbers, but also more people familiar with the format of the game so the usual politics took place. People with little or no connection to the game and the inability to perform in daily challenges made for easy pickings. Bye Jessica Brody (The Bachelor: Australia), Chauncey (The Challenge: Ride or Dies), Jujuy (Dancing With the Stars: Argentina), and Hughie (Big Brother UK 17)!

The real problem with this season became obvious in the second portion of the game: Chaos. The main complaint with the franchise for multiple seasons now has been how boring it has become to watch legends like Bananas, CT, Wes, Laurel et. al, waltz into a season, line up, and then pick off promising newcomers to skate their way to another final and big payday. You know what's worse than watching Bananas run circles around a new crop of Big Brother alums and winning again? It's watching players who have never seen a final use his playbook to run the season.

Enter Jay Starrett and Michele Fitzgerald, Ride or Dies partners and Survivor alums ready to make Battle for a New Champion their path to glory. From the jump, it was apparent these two had done their homework and cleaned up their respective messy social games from previous seasons. The Chaos portion of the game illuminated how they cultivated a massive alliance and expertly manipulated the house into voting with them to eliminate potential threats on their path to total victory. The game plan, as Jay reiterated multiple times in the final, was to skate through the season without ever seeing an elimination and then win the whole show.

It's the "Perfect Season" strategy deployed by Paulie Califore in War of the Worlds 2, and it undoubtedly led to the "Red Skull" rule change in the subsequent season of the series, Total Madness. The "Red Skull" rule required everyone on the show to win an elimination before being allowed to run in the final, which Battle for a New Champion could have benefited from, because watching Michele and Jay target better performing and more entertaining cast members from the safety of their giant alliance went from tedious to downright enraging throughout the season.

Fans have tolerated the vets’ elimination strategy because they have already proven themselves in the sand and in multiple finals. No one wants to see a champion crowned when they haven't proven themselves in all arenas of the game, including eliminations. It's terrifying how close we came to Jay and Michele stealing the season, but luckily for fans, there was Nurys.

Battle for a New Champion was Nurys' second attempt at the coveted title after an underwhelming stint as Nelson Thomas' partner on Ride or Dies. She came into the season as part of "The Fantastic Four," the seemingly impenetrable inner squad of Jay and Michele's voting force. Nurys may have tried to skate her way to elimination-less victory if it wasn't for one person neither she nor Jay and Michele expected: Horacio Gutiérrez.

Unlike Nurys, Horacio came into Battle for a New Champion as a fan favorite after his incredible rookie run on Ride or Dies. After losing out on the final due to his partner Olivia Kaiser's unfortunate injury, fan hopes were with the gentle-hearted daily challenge beast to take the championship mantle. What we weren't expecting was for Horacio to find an even sweeter prize of true love.

Nurys and Horacio hit it off early on in the season and continued a slow-burn romance through Control and most of Conquest. There hasn't been a Challenge couple to generate this many butterflies since the days of CT and Diem Brown. Horacio's tortoise-like approach to love put the emphasis on these two talking and connecting before finally kissing on camera. As flirting and talking paved the way to the pair admitting they were falling in love, Jay and Michele became increasingly paranoid that Horacio was too big of a risk to their plans to win. They turned the power of their alliance on eliminating Horacio and his puzzle-minded BFF Kyland Young, trapping Nurys in the middle of a lopsided war.

Jay and Michele made attempt after attempt to get Horacio and Kyland out of the game, and each attempt increased fan distaste for the duo and increased audience allegiance to Horacio and Kyland. There's nothing The Challenge fan base loves more than a competent underdog, just ask Cara Maria Sorbello (before she ruined her own legacy, but that's a story for another day). Kyland defeated two former Challenge champions, Brad Fiorenza and Darrell Taylor, in elimination during the Chaos phase of the game. Horacio went down in the sand twice but was sent back to the house without having to play. The latter may not have faced elimination, but he was consistently performing in daily challenges and already had fan allegiance on his side.

Horacio and Kyland "earned their stripes," as the familiar Challenge adage goes, over and over while Jay and Michele sat on the elimination deck watching their scared game fail to unfold as they wished. Horacio and Kyland were too competent at the game and Nurys' attachment to them finally started to open her eyes to Jay and Michele's manipulation. But by the time Nurys decided to take a stand, it was too late.

The third and final part of the game, Conquest, finally gave Jay and Michele the guarantee of sending Kyland or Horacio home. Their ploy turned Nurys and Horacio's adorable love story into a Shakespearean tragedy and themselves (and Olivia) into supreme villains. Conquest turned elimination voting into a grade school kickball team draft with the winner of the daily challenge picking someone to remain safe with them, and that person picking another person picking another safe competitor, down the line until only three competitors were left to go into a private elimination away from the house's eyes.

In the first elimination of Conquest, Jay convinced the house that Nurys needed to prove her allegiance to the larger alliance and orchestrated a sequence that forced Nurys to choose between Horacio, Kyland, Olivia, and Zara Zoffany for the final safe spot. With Horacio's encouragement, Nurys saved Olivia, sending her boyfriend and closest male friend into elimination against her newest ally. The boys returned, only for Nurys to truly be stabbed in the back.

The next elimination nomination revealed footage of a back-door deal that convinced Olivia to save Moriah Jade instead of Nurys, forcing Nurys to go into elimination against Horacio and Kyland. It was a dream scenario for Jay and Michele, but a nightmare for Nurys.

That nightmare is the very thing that puts Nurys in elite company on The Challenge. The competitors were informed at the elimination that only one player would make it back to the house. Nurys managed to put aside the emotional aspect of the elimination and "dialed in" to complete the puzzle obstacle course faster than her new love and their truest friend in the game.

It was not only the compelling narrative twist that this season desperately needed, but it was a powerful statement for all female Challenge competitors. Without the help of anyone else, Nurys single-handedly defeated two of the strongest and most-well rounded players in the game. She did Jay and Michele's dirty work for them, and she will go down as a worthy Challenge competitor for the effort, but they will be automatic targets for the next several seasons of the show, if they return for another shot at the title.

Which brings us to the final, a bittersweet cherry put on this haphazard sundae of a season. Michele was eliminated by coming in last during the final daily challenge of the season, finally proving she lacked the essential trait of a Challenge champion to win when it counts the most. Shortly afterwards, karma decided to show up just in time to see Jay was defeated in the first mini-elimination of the final. Maybe if he had gone down in the sand during the regular season he would have been more prepared to perform under pressure.

In the end, it was Emanuel Neagu who claimed victory in the new season. He benefited greatly from the partner pairings in the Chaos chapter of the final, which gave him an easier time than Nurys on the second day of the exhausting gauntlet. Emanuel didn't steal the season, but he didn't really do anything to deserve it either. He spent the season cheating on his girlfriend (Dear Producers, we did not spend enough time on his guilt after she wrote him a motivational letter going into the final) and riding the middle of the alliance war. He did it successfully, but it makes his victory feel hollow. Crowning Emanuel the new champion only served to highlight the major issues with this season.

If Battle for a New Champion was an attempt to refresh the series and introduce vital new blood to the franchise, the season failed to make that new blood compelling. The magic fabric of this show is watching the relationships and rivalries between returning competitors grow and shape the seasons they participate in. A season absent of ratings-garnering vets meant that a new strategy needed to come into play, but watching players who had never seen a final dominate a scared game was infuriating to watch. It made villains out of your controlling players and made it near-impossible for the worthy fan favorites to come out on top.

The show got lucky with Nurys' narrative, and her previous elimination experience at least allowed her a second place victory. The sweet part of the bittersweet final is that even though Nurys isn't walking away with the prize pot, she is the person leaving this season with the greatest chance of an enduring legacy on this show. Hasn't that been the actual prize of The Challenge in recent years? It's less about the singular payday, and more about turning your stint on the show into a reality competition career. She embodied the series trials of a champion and "earned her stripes," and emphasized "to be the best you have to defeat the best," which will put fans in her corner for years to come.

Battle for a New Champion was not the fresh start The Challenge needed, but it was a reminder of what makes this show work. At the end of the day, fans want to watch a compelling story. They want to see David beat Goliath. They want the underdog to figure it out. They want a Challenge champion who wins by actually playing the game. Emanuel may have the title, but Nurys is the real winner. We hope the franchise recognizes that and treats her as such, for the sake of its own future.

The Challenge: Battle for a New Champion is now streaming on MTV.com in its entirety. You can join the discussion about the show on our forums.

Megan Vick is a pop-culture reporter whose byline has appeared on TVGuide.com, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Reuters and more. You can find her on the internet talking about K-pop or screaming about teen romances.