Cory Wharton was sent home from The Challenge: Final Reckoning after slamming Tony Raines to the ground on the Oct. 23 episode, and it all stemmed from Tony throwing Cory’s to-go dish of pasta out the window. During the episode, Tony explained that “someone” sat on the pasta on the van ride home, and he thought Cory wouldn’t want it anymore, which is why he thought it was okay to throw it away. Now, the culprit of who actually sat on the pasta has finally been revealed — Ashley Mitchell!
“It was actually Ashley that sat on the pasta and crushed the to-go box it was all in,” Tony revealed on the Challenge Mania podcast. “It looked a mess. I can remember that. I remember [Cory] almost handing it over to me and Hunter [Barfield], but he was just showing it to us like…look, Ashley sat on my pasta. So I was like, oh, f*** that pasta…and threw it out. Not thinking about it or about how he was looking forward to eating those leftovers.”
Luckily, Tony was physically okay after being thrown onto the concrete, but he said he’s still taking the situation very seriously, and knows he could have been much more severely injured. “I don’t want to downplay it in any way, shape or form,” he explained. “I can see someone trying to make humor out of this, but to me, this is very, very serious. It’s something I get emotional about — thinking of me not being able to come back to my [daughters] the same way I left them. I want people to understand the severity of this and learn that the way he handled the situation was not okay.”
Tony also added that he doesn’t think he egged Cory on in any way that warranted the reaction he received. “There’s not one percent of me that thinks my action deserved the reaction from Cory,” he said. “There’s nothing that could change my mind. That’s a simplistic way of thinking, not an intellectual way of thinking. You use your words, you don’t use physical violence to get your point across when it’s over something as simple as pasta. You just don’t do that. There’s so many other different ways he could’ve handled it. As far as me provoking him, I’m not going to give him teh benefit of the doubt. He needs to understand that he was wrong, that the situation was absolutely handled the wrong way. It
After the incident went down, Tony and Cory were both sent away from the Challenge house to cool down separately for the night. During that time, Tony admitted he was scared they would both be sent home, providing the perfect situation for his partner in the game, Johnny Bananas, to be paired up with Cory’s partner, Devin Walker (Bananas and Devin were originally meant to be partners, but Devin backed out at the last minute when his father passed away. He returned to the game halfway through with Cory, and they won their way into the game).
“This was their perfect storm,” Tony explained. “Part of me was thinking…it’s the TV world, this is what they’re going to make happen. I was worried about what I was going to come home and have to tell my family.” Luckily, he got to stick around, and he and Bananas remain in the running for $1 million. The next episode of The Challenge: Final Reckoning airs Oct. 30 at 9:00 p.m. on MTV.