English former professional rugby league footballer Sam Burgess has won SAS Australia. After a brutal season that saw 18 celebs take on the SAS course, only one made it through selection.
“I’m feeling a lot of things, really,” Burgess said after it was announced that he made it through the course successfully. “A bit of emotion, joy. It’s a bit unbelievable”.
Burgess said that it was his goal from the beginning “to get to the end and be selected, and it was great to achieve that goal”.
“It’s a once in a lifetime experience,” he said.
As for the lessons he learned along the way, Burgess said that it’s taught him where to put his “time and emotion” in life.
“It starts with my kids and just making sure I’m the best role model for them,” he said, adding that the experience was “just a great lesson in life”.
It’s been a season of physically and psychologically demanding challenges, and none more so than in the final episode, which put the recruits through three extreme tests.
The first challenge saw the recruits get ambushed and taken hostage by masked hostile soldiers. Asked to recall their capture with as many crucial details as possible, the recruits had to prove that they weren’t just physically capable, but also “thinking soldiers”.
Unfortunately, Dan Ewing wasn’t able to remember enough about the capture, and didn’t pass the challenge.
The second challenge saw the recruits paired up and dumped (via helicopter) into a simulated war zone. Intense! The mission was to locate a cache with important intel about the enemy. But wait, because it gets more hectic. When they came under fire, the recruits were forced to hang off the end of a helicopter extraction rope. Honestly? No thanks!!!
Running on empty with nothing in the tank, this challenge took out the show’s final female, Jana Pittman, leaving John Steffensen, Mark Philippoussis and Sam Burgess to compete in the final challenge.
In this challenge, the recruits had to shimmy across a rope that was hanging 300 metres above a ravine.
Once they were in the middle, they had to drop, and hang by their arms for 90 seconds.
While all three finalists made it to the end of the course, former SAS soldiers Ant Middleton, Mark ‘Billy’ Billingham, Jason ‘Foxy’ Fox and Olli Ollerton decided that only Sam Burgess had the brains and brawn that they were looking for.
If you can’t get enough SAS Australia, though, don’t worry! There’s still one more episode for the season. Tomorrow at 7.30pm, all 18 recruits will return to base camp for a reunion special. We can’t wait!
