It’s the most famous curse in the Survivor franchise, but this year things happened a little differently.
There are many superstitions in the world of Survivor, but one of the most infamous is that of the car curse, which has hounded Survivor players across the globe.
Though it’s a dream come true for players to win a car during a reward challenge, the sad reality is that no contestant who has ever won a car as a reward has ever gone on to win that same season.
But this week, during Australian Survivor: Blood V Water, a very different individual reward was on offer: a cash prize of $60,000.
Won by King Khanh Ong, there was very little time to celebrate as he was almost immediately booted from the tribe and became the first member of the jury.
“That is probably the most enormous prize,” Australian Survivor expert Shannon Guss said on this week’s Australian Survivor: Talking Tribal before adding, “I don’t know how much cars cost because I’m not a car person… but that’s the most enormous prize I’ve ever seen on the show.”
While cars have featured as prizes on Australian Survivor, Survivor US and Survivor South Africa, every player who has won in their season has never made it to be crowned Sole Survivor in the same season.
“I think that I can kind of extrapolate what we call the ‘car curse’ to this challenge,” Shannon continued.
“Maybe it is a curse, maybe it’s an anomaly,” she wondered but Shannon also added that the curse could be a symptom of resentment in the other players.
“Obviously they are really threatening if they can win a challenge like that, so they've never actually won the game. And I honestly — when Khanh did it I was like, people are going to resent the fact that he just won 12 percent of the prize money for the entire show on one challenge and he even kind of made light of it at the Tribal Council. So I can kind of extrapolate the car curse to Khanh’s ridiculous, amazing salary prize.”
While the car curse may have been one factor, it was also just a very visible and tangible reason for the core alliance to continue to see Khanh as a major threat in the game.
On the list, Khanh had a very public Idol he had managed to hold onto for over 20 days, and he had proven himself a very worthy player both socially as well as physically, emerging as an unexpected challenge beast.
Later in Australian Survivor: Talking Tribal, one king chats to another as George Mladenov interviewed Khnah about his time on the show.
Check out all of that, plus so much more insight into the big moves and mistakes of this week on Australian Survivor: Talking Tribal in the video above.