Heavy/ABC Cristian de la Fuente was encouraged to quit DWTS.
Season 6 “Dancing With the Stars” competitor Cristián de la Fuente talked about his experience on the show during an interview on the “Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans” podcast.
On the June 10 episode, de la Fuente spoke with podcast host Cheryl Burke about a gnarly injury that he suffered fairly early on in the competition. He completely tore a tendon in his arm, leaving it very challenging to dance — but he stuck with the competition anyway.
“Remember when they wanted me to quit?” de la Fuente asked Burke, whom he had been partnered with on the show. “Conrad, the producer. ‘Oh, Cristián, sorry. You have to leave,'” he recalled Conrad Green saying to him. His response? “No, I’m not leaving.”
De la Fuente and Burke finished the show in third place, though he admits he didn’t think he’d make it past two or three weeks.
“It was so crazy,” de la Fuente said. He admits, however, that he felt that people would vote for the underdog and believes that his injury may have helped him get far in the competition.
Cristián de la Fuente Needed Surgery on His Tendon
According to Good Morning America, de la Fuente ruptured his distal bicep tendon. Despite not being able to utilize his arm for certain movements, de la Fuente was determined to keep dancing as long as he could.
“If people voted for us and they would like us to be on the show, I would like to continue and not give up,” he told The Associated Press in 2008. Whenever he was asked about the injury, the actor would say, “I’m fine.”
But the truth of the matter is that he needed surgery, which he underwent after the finale. The “delicate” surgery involved a hole that was drilled through to his bone, per ABC News.
“It’s sad that my only surgical scar is related to dancing. I can’t tell my grandchildren it’s from when I went to war or because I fought in a bar,” he joked at the time.
Some People Thought Cristián de la Fuente Faked His Arm Injury
On Burke’s podcast, she asked de la Fuente if he faked his injury — since that’s what some people thought.
“No. Come on. You can’t fake it,” he said. Burke then shared her thoughts on why people thought de la Fuente was faking it.
“You know what? You know why people think it? Because I just saw the footage when we walked to Tom [Bergeron], and you just said, ‘I just pulled a muscle really bad,'” Burke recalled. De le Fuente admits that he didn’t know that it was a more serious injury because he’d never experienced it before.
“It’s not that you pop a tendon every week at all,” de la Fuente explained.
“But then when I tried to move the arm, and the arm was like this. And then the bicep went all the way up here, it’s like something was wrong. I remember that we went straight from there to emergency, and then it was bad news,” he said. “It was the tendon… gone.”
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DWTS Alum Says Production Wanted Him to Quit the Show