Carey Hart is still in disbelief over his exit from Special Forces.
“Truthfully, it was so dumb,” Hart, 49, began during an exclusive interview with Us Weekly ahead of the Wednesday, January 29, episode with a smile on his face.
While fans saw Hart fall during the mud run on Wednesday’s episode, it was hard to tell what exactly happened. He explained to Us that he tripped over a “plastic speed bump thing for all the cables.”
“It’s my own fault that that happened. We were running this brutal workout through the mud holes and into the splash pond and all these things. It was absolutely freezing outside. I got hurt because I wasn’t paying attention,” he said. “In the prior exercises, we had to do two laps around the compound and back into the square. Well, in that certain situation, I think that was the second or third round — [and] I’m not a great runner. The DS said, ‘OK, go out, do one loop around and pull back in.’ I wasn’t paying attention. I went for the full two laps. Well, it was the second lap I actually tripped. … So had I been paying attention, I would’ve advanced and not been in that situation.”
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“II’s dark. At that point I couldn’t even see. I had so much mud in my eyes,” he continued, adding that the ankle that he injured is his “bad ankle” that he’s had issues with for years. “I actually have to have that ankle fused next year — I have no cartilage left in that ankle — and I tripped and I hit the ground and I put my hand out. So I initially felt my wrist more than anything and completed it.”
Hart noted that the left ankle pain is “something that I’m used to,” but when it started to swell, it “kept getting worse and worse.”
“I went and sat and thawed out in the shower and the wrist was one thing. I’m pretty good with tape. I could have got through it, but there was no way I could complete the next couple of days of that show with a blown-up ankle,” he said.
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After the accident, Hart informed his costars that he was leaving and joked that his wife, Pink, was going to laugh when she heard the story.
“I FaceTimed her that night. At the moment I got hurt, it was probably around midnight. So by the time I made it back to the hotel and got my phone out of the safe and all the things, it was probably 3 o’clock in the morning U.K. time,” Hart recalled of telling Pink. “She’d known the period of the time of the show and probably in the back of her mind, she knows anytime my phone’s going to ring before that last day, I’m going to be [hurt]. So her initial [reaction] — she was wide-eyed, kind of white as a ghost, asking, ‘Are you alright?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s just my old body.’”
Hart and Pink, who wed in 2006, share daughter Willow, 13, and son Jameson, 8. Hart told Us that it’s been “really fun” to watch the show with his kids.
“Most of my career, anything that I did, lives on YouTube for them. My last serious freestyle competition was X Games when my daughter was a year old. So I started to step away from that high-risk level of my career 12 years ago. So it’s pretty fun to be able to sit on the couch and watch something in real time, watch it on TV, because my kids get to see what my wife does for a living,” he told Us. “My son’s kind of starry-eyed because he’s at that younger age. My daughter is tough as nails like me, and literally every week before the show starts and then after she’s like, ‘You don’t cry this week, do you?’ And I’m like, ‘Will, I don’t cry.’ The only thing she cared about is if I cried or not.”
Circling back to his exit, Hart explained to Us that his actual “injury was nothing major whatsoever,” but he was upset about how his exit went down.
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“It was a little tender for a few days and then it passed, but I was pretty disappointed in myself that something that dumb took me out,” he said. “But at the same time, as I went into the show as well as every day that I was there, it’s just full immersion. I’m going to take one challenge at a time, one workout at a time and just kind of embrace being here because truthfully there’s 10 things that I could have aggravated on day one or day two that would’ve taken me out of it. So it was a little bit of a double-edged sword. I was happy as far as I made it, but being, like, 48 hours or so from the end [and] not getting to stand on top of that platform with the DS — that hurt my ego a little bit.”
The DS did tell Hart that they were proud of how he conducted himself.
“What those four men, let alone all of the special forces and armed forces do for us, that is a pretty solid pat on the back,” he told Us of the remark. “So I take that very seriously that they gave me that compliment and I was lucky enough to communicate with the guys a little bit and it’s like, look, I put it on the line, I gave it 100 percent and I don’t have any regrets.”
Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test airs on Fox Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
