Hope Solo Talks On Her Elimination On Dancing With The Stars (Video)
Hope chatted to Seattle’s Komo News about her elimination and experience on Dancing With The Stars. “I learned A LOT about reality television,” she says. She also said she definitely doesn’t fit into the “Hollywood world”. She describes the physical toll it took on her body and said, “it was pretty intense.” Looking back and over all, she said “What an experience” and she pulled it off lasting to the semi-finals. At the end, the interviewers talk of how the network pulled the Jimmy Kimmel and GMA appearances after the elimination. Hope had her dress ready and everything. They think it’s because the network thought they were “loose cannons”. More at the link and video below.
Stay tuned. For those interested and if you haven’t heard yet, Hope will be Anderson Cooper’s guest on his new daytime talk show Tuesday, November 22nd.
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Kathy Lee recently said that you can blame her and Regis for reality TV because they started saying personal and blunt things on their show and that got the ball rolling. I think reality TV, when things go south, is like another circle in hell: hubris? You go in overestimating your abilities and importance to the matter.
Somewhere on here (sorry, can’t remember who) it was said that her bent knees were driving the person crazy. I’m thinking she just could not give up the bent knee soccer/baseball infielder/football ready pose. Probably for the best so she doesn’t gum up her game.
Thanks for posting. She tried hard and went pretty far-just not a great dancer. She forgeot to say: “I was paid pretty well for this.” Do amateur athletes (i.e. Olympic team members) get paid? Also, wondering about dancers. Do the dancers on the competitive circuit (like the DWTS Pros when they competed or someone like Anna D. now) earn money at the competitions; do they get money from sponsors; or is the financial gain in attracting dance students?
So true how she got paid well, Sasa! She also got a lot of exposure. I never had heard of Hope Solo until the rumors started last summer as I have never paid attention to soccer. As for your other questions: Heidi and Court might know more on those.
@Bruce – I can speak for professional ballroom dancers – they do make money from competitions, but it’s usually only if they place well or get top teacher/top studio awards, and it’s often cancelled out by the expenses of competing. When you think about how much you have to actually SPEND to compete, the purses at comps seem pretty puny – you pay for transportation, you pay for lodging, you pay for costumes (unless you’re lucky enough to have a costume sponsor, and you typically have to have established yourself well as a champion before designers will be willing to give you $5K dresses gratis!), you pay for dance shoes, you pay for entry fees, you pay for tanning, you pay for coaching lessons, you pay for choreographers, you pay for hair, you pay for makeup, you pay for gym memberships, you pay for health food – the list goes on and on. Granted, you can write a lot of it off for taxes, but it’s a royal pain in the ass (my bf always gets cranky when it’s time to sit down and document his write-offs), and you still have to shell out quite a bit of money for each comp. You may win the professional Latin championship and get $5K – but you probably paid $10K when you add up everything it takes to compete.
As for income – I would say the bulk of it comes from teaching and doing exhibition performances. And the more you’ve established yourself as a champion – the more money you can command, which is where I think the big appeal of competing really lies…plus it will be your main source of income once you’re too old to compete. I know for a fact that Shirley Ballas charges $225 per 45 minute lesson, and that Riccardo Cocchi & Yulia Zagoruychenko (the current world Latin champions) can command $10K for a private exhibition, which is usually 5-7 dances in length.
As for your question about getting paid for sponsorships – it gets a bit murky there. Most often, the sponsors consider whatever good or service they’re providing as payment – “I’ll give you this $5,000 costume/fantastic hair dye job/high-end pair of dance shoes/etc with the understanding that you’ll tell everyone which designer you’re wearing and you’ll gush about how great we are.” It’s very “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours”. However, I think some dancers do have enough clout to command a fee for other extraneous stuff – i.e. appearing in ads for a certain designer, making appearances at a designer’s booth at a competition, etc., so there could be some additional $$$ in that…but I often find that a lot of dancers will do stuff like that gratis because their sponsors do so much for them. When you’re at a competition and accidentally rip your Latin costume and can call your costume sponsor at 2 AM and have him/her come to your hotel room to patch it up – then I think you should be willing to do pretty much anything your costume sponsor asks of you
I posted this under the wrong article. I apologize. Well, in all fairness, the “poor sport” media blitz articles started when people assumed Hope skipped out on the interviews after her elimination. She didn’t have a choice, though, which I don’t think is right. She should have been given the opportunity that everyone else on the show has had to express their feelings, good or bad. That impression continues even though it was ABC’s decision to pull Hope from Good Morning America, Access Hollywood, Kimmel and The View. The only media that carried Hope was NBC, not ABC. There have also been a lot of articles about Carrie Ann’s biased judging appearing in MSNBC which are very articulately written. As reporters, they turned a critical eye to her trying to put a spin on what was happening. Fans were criticizing her judging as biased and she tried to spin it as if fans were criticizing other contestants. That only worked for bloggers but actual reporters on NBC saw right through it and crucified her. So maybe Hope did have a point afterall. We can assume that ABC, Dancing with the Stars producers and the Judges all work together to decide who stays on the show. If they snubbed Hope for even doing the after-show circuit, I am pretty certain there was some sort of an internal producer and judges push to remove her as well. It’s all under the same umbrella.
Courtney, thanks for all the info. Teaching gigs and for-fee performances make sense. For example, I imagine that Edyta and Alec do well that way.