ABC/Eric McCandless
Dancing With the Stars: Athletes is a 4-week special edition of the DWTS series and the show is on week 2. This season, the live episodes operate differently than past seasons. On the premiere episode, which normally is safe for all contestants, two couples were sent home. Contestants Johnny Damon and Jamie Anderson were both eliminated.
Season 26 has real-time live voting, in order to decide which contestants will be eliminated. So, the votes are especially important. Unfortunately, west coasters may not be able to participate in the real-time voting, though east coasters and those on central time are able. Visit dwtslivevote.com during the show to cast your votes. There is also an overnight vote, which you can find here when the voting windows are open.
The couples who truly excelled on the premiere episode included Adam Rippon with Jenna Johnson, Josh Norman with Sharna Burgess, and Mirai Nagasu with Alan Bersten. In addition, the other remaining contestants are Arike Ogunbowale, Chris Mazdzer, Jennie Finch, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Tonya Harding.
Votes rea combined with the judges’ scores during each episode of the show this season and the couples with the lowest combination of scores and votes are sent home. Voting this way is a live online-only method that goes down during the live broadcast of the show. The remaining couples then move on to the next episode. Live voting ends shortly after the last couple performs on the show.
Online voting on ABC.com and Facebook, along with toll free phone voting, will open during the May 7 and 14 shows at the top of those shows on the East Coast at 8 p.m. ET. Toll free voting will close at 5 a.m. ET and online voting will close at 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday May 8 and Tuesday May 15, 2018, as reported by ABC.
Voters must be 18 years old or older to participate and they must be located in the U.S. or Puerto Rico in order to vote on ABC.com. For those voting by using Facebook, fans must have a Facebook account and need to be located in the U.S. or Canada. Data rates may also apply.
The amount of votes that you can submit per each voting method will change throughout the season, but ABC has reported that votes will not go below 5 votes per voting method. ABC has explained that, “For example, in week one, there are 10 couples and you have 10 votes to allocate among all the competing couples. If you want to vote for a given couple, you can submit up to 10 votes for them on ABC.com, up to 10 votes for them on Facebook and up to 10 votes for them via toll-free phone voting, for a total of up to 30 votes for that couple across all voting methods that week.” So, the number of votes allowed depends on how many contestants are in the competition.
To vote via ABC.com, one must create a OneID account and to vote on Facebook, one must have or needs to create a Facebook account. Also, to vote on Facebook, you must have your pop-up blockers turned off and you need to authorize the Dancing with the Stars voting app.
Last week on Dancing With the Stars, contestant Tonya Harding was in jeopardy and was almost sent home by viewers. On the show, she talked about how years ago, she felt that skating was “taken away” from her when she became involved in the infamous attack on former fellow figure skater Nancy Kerrigan. Apparently, America wasn’t that sympathetic to Harding’s story … and some of her fellow DWTS contestants have had their own opinions on her as well.
Figure skater Adam Rippon told the New York Post that, “It was nice to see that she had a moment. But it’s also important to remember that skating wasn’t taken away from her — that she was banned because she was part of a bad thing. I don’t think that we should forget that.” Rippon then added, “I’ve interacted with Tonya very limitedly. I’m not avoiding her but I’m not not avoiding her.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar also shared comments about Harding, according to People he joked that, “I’m not competing against Tonya in a way where she needs to break my legs … Tonya tries to get along with everybody.”
Dancing With the Stars airs on the ABC network on Monday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT and 7 p.m. CT. Tune in for the live broadcast.