Whether they love her or love to hate her, longtime The Challenge fans were probably disappointed when veteran Tina Barta quit All Stars 2 last week. Tina has been bringing a fiery personality and fearsome elimination skills to the show ever since her debut in The Gauntlet back in 2003, so it was no surprise when, after a long hiatus, she hit the ground running in her long-awaited return. Barta delivered in the confessional booth, pranked Ryan Kehoe with a pair of dissolving swim trunks, and left Darrell Taylor speechless as she refused to budge an inch during their nomination deliberation – all within the first four episodes. But when Jodi Weatherton won the daily and sent her into the Arena, Tina ultimately went out with a whimper as she refused to compete against her friend, Melinda Collins, forcing host TJ Lavin to blow the horn and send her home. Hers was a rollercoaster of a return to the show and now, thanks to an interview conducted after her elimination, Tina is finally able to explain why she became the latest player to quit The Challenge.
Much has been made of “Nice Tina” in her brief yet impactful appearance, and rightfully so: Tina has a notorious history of explosive and iconic moments on The Challenge, the notable one being her expulsion from her last full season: The Duel. Tina exchanged heated words with Beth Stolarczyk after a daily before punching her in the face, resulting in an immediate disqualification and removal from the game. In her return on All Stars 2, Tina temporarily impressed cast members by showing a different, more peaceful side of her. But when she was sent into an elimination by rival competitor Jodi Weatherton, Nice Tina quickly vanished, replaced by an irritated version much more reminiscent of the Tina from seasons past. But Tina’s quit wasn’t just because of her growing ire. She recently opened up about all of the unaired factors that went into her decision to leave the game.
On the show, Tina mentioned her discomfort with how The Challenge brought out an angry version of herself that she thought she’d left in the past, but she now opens up with much more insight into what she calls a “weighted decision” to quit All Stars 2. First of all, her experience wasn’t what she expected at all. “I went in under the assumption that it was going to be just chill…we’d do some backyard games, do some of the old challenges,” she explained in an interview with the Mike Lewis Podcast. “It didn’t go that way.” There’s more: in addition to feeling like the new version was less fun than the show she remembered, Tina also felt like she had few friends and no hope of winning The Challenge. “Melinda and Tyler…the people who were giving me a fun time there were all on the chopping block,” she said, adding that “The writing’s on the wall.”
Players rarely give up when they are in a favorable position within the game, so in a way, Tina’s honesty is admirable. Many players invent creative excuses for quitting The Challenge; here, Tina is saying that the show wasn’t fun, she didn’t think that she had a shot at winning, and of course, she didn’t like who she was becoming. Only the last of those explanations made the show, but her decision was in fact based on all of those factors, plus one more: the fact that Melinda was one of the people that she actually liked on the show. It’s safe to say that Tina would not have quit had she the opportunity to go toe-to-toe with Jodi in a physical elimination.
While it can be argued that she shouldn’t have come back on the show in the first place, Tina couldn’t have known how the experience would affect her. “I just want to see if I’ve still got it,” she asked herself rhetorically in the premiere episode. Unfortunately for both Tina and viewers, the answer seems to be “no.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean that her decision to leave The Challenge was a bad one.
The Challenge: All-Stars 2 streams Thursdays on Paramount+.