‘The Challenge’: The Unlucky Streak Continues for One Almost-Champion

[Warning: The following post contains spoilers for The Challenge Season 41 Episode 15, “The Best Birthday Present.”]

The cast of vets for this season of The Challenge has been a mixture of true champs, relative newcomers who’ve been around long enough to technically qualify as vets, and those long-timers who’ve always made it this close to winning a season and never quite succeeded. Aneesa Ferreira fits firmly in the latter category (alongside Leroy Garrett and Nany Gonzalez), and after this week’s episode, she’ll stay there, too.

Wednesday’s (November 5) segment saw Aneesa and partner Jake Cornish struggle in the daily challenge, “Dirty Drifter,” after she dutifully ripped a series of chains off of a van that was then tugged behind a mack truck, but Jake didn’t follow the rules of the driving portion of the challenge. Womp, womp. Luckily for both, they didn’t come in last — instead, that honor went to Theo Campbell and Adrienne Naylor after the former refused to heed T.J.’s warning to stop trying to help his partner with her part in pulling chains and got disqualified as a result. But when Olivia Kaiser and Will Gagnon emerged victorious, it was a bittersweet result because it meant Aneesa and Jake would almost certainly be the house vote to face elimination, since now both of their ally pairs would not be part of the jury vote.

Though Aneesa was close friends with members of the vet alliance — chiefly, Nany — she hadn’t been working with them all season, so they weren’t about to throw a vote at one of their own allies out of nowhere just to save her. (Would it have been smart for them to target a bigger threat in the finals, though? Probably.)

Aneesa seemed deeply upset by Nany’s denial of her request — “I don’t know if our friendship is worth fixing,” she even said — but she also knew she’d shown more loyalty to Olivia than anyone else this season. After the house vote went as planned, with a nearly unanimous vote for Aneesa and Jake to hit the proving grounds, no one was upset except for, oddly, Aviv Melmed, who was suddenly beside herself (and drew some raised eyebrows from her allies like Michaela Bradshaw and Sydney Segal, who deemed her a “shapeshifter” as a result of her waterworks display).

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In the arena, “Loose Ends,” Aneesa and Jake faced Theo and Adrienne in a race to unwind giant spools of heavy electrical cables and plug them all in. Both Aneesa and Adrienne had just been yanking heavy chains earlier in the daily challenge, so this was an especially tall task for both of them, but they persevered. Despite some communication issues between Theo and Adrienne, though, they emerged victorious from the arena for the fourth time.

Jake, who was actually celebrating his birthday the same day, did bring Aneesa to tears with his pre-arena praise of her — “It’s more a case of grit and determination, and she’s a workhorse. She’s strong. She’s a tank. She’s solid. She really can dig deep,” he said of his partner — but receiving kind pump phrases wasn’t what she came for. Aneesa hoped to break the streak of getting so far in the season only to get sent home before the finale, but this was not her season… again.

There’s always next time, though. Last time we spoke to Aneesa about Season 40, she told TV Insider that losing so close to the end was motivation to come back, and she’s been training like a machine this year, so count on the Elimineesa to come back again for sure. Will 19th time be a charm?

The Challenge, Wednesdays, 8/7c, MTV