Bristol Palin's time on Dancing With the Stars was no cakewalk. The daughter of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin didn’t get a warm welcome from international ballroom dance champ Maksim Chmerkovskiy when she was a contestant on the celebrity dancing competition 14 years ago.
During a new interview on Cheryl Burke's podcast Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans, Bristol was asked “who rolled their eyes” when she and pro partner Mark Ballas made it through an elimination.
“Oh, Maks?” the Teen Mom OG star responded. “He hated me so much.”
“Why did he hate you?” asked Cheryl, who also serves as a pro dancer on the series. “I don’t know, probably just because we kept going through,” Bristol said, adding he was “nice at the beginning but … as we kept going through, I definitely felt the tension from him.”
Maks denied the accusation.
In a statement, a rep for Maks said the 44-year-old pro “doesn’t hate anybody” and called the accusations “a mischaracterization of his feelings.”
“I think he and everyone else in America, 14 years ago, thought that he and Brandy were on their way to winning that year, if not coming into the finals,” the statement continued. “So there was a bit of disappointment when she leapfrogged him into the finals. It’s a competition. He’s very competitive and took it seriously.”
Bristol, a mother of three, competed on season 11 of the long-running ABC competition series in 2010, where she and Mark took third place, despite earning consistently mediocre scores from the judges. Audience votes also factor heavily into who stays and who goes home.
Bristol returned to the all-star version of the show.
Two years later, Bristol and ex-husband Dakota Meyer competed on Dancing With the Stars: All-Stars — before being eliminated during week four.
—Karu F. Daniels, New York Daily News (TNS)
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