Dancing With The Stars contestant exposes major cover-up: 'Don't report it'

When you take away the sequinned outfits, sparkling mirrorball trophy and upbeat pop music, Dancing With The Stars is arguably one of the most brutal reality shows on Australian TV. Not only do the celebrity contestants have to learn an entirely new skill set, but they also have to train eight hours a day, six days a week for seven weeks before they even hit the dance floor.

Over the years there have been plenty of participants who have had to pull out of the competition due to injury, including Shannon Noll who suffered a severe spinal injury in 2012, Kyly Clarke who tore her right hamstring in 2014, and Matt Preston who sustained an ankle injury last year. Meanwhile, current contestant Julie Goodwin had to sit out of her first performance last week after suffering a calf injury.

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Julie’s co-star Nikki Osborne tells Yahoo Lifestyle that contestants will often endure various injuries during rehearsals, however, they’ll try their best to cover it up so they don’t have to sit out of a performance.

“There was one time I got a mild concussion, and I'm looking at my dance partner Aric [Yegudkin] and I’m like, ‘What do we do?’,” she recalls. “He was like, ‘We should call an ambulance’, and I'm like, ‘Should we though?’. He was like, ‘No, I’ll just take you to the doctor’.

“The injuries I got in this show were crazy, but you just don't report it to the producers otherwise they'll pull you out of the show. I called them and let them know afterwards. And even Julie, she hid the severity of her injury as well. It came out later at the wrap party.”

Nikki's 'insane' flip goes wrong

While Nikki and her partner Aric were praised for their ambitious and high-risk lift during their performance in Sunday night’s episode, she reveals that she obtained “a lot of bruises” when they failed the stunt at the tech rehearsals and she fell on the floor.

“That flip was insane,” she remarks. “When he was first teaching me how to do it, I'm kind of standing upright and then he grabs my legs from underneath and he's like, ‘Now just throw yourself backwards at the ground’. And that goes against every instinct ever. It feels like the death spin, basically.

“In our tech run, we didn't land it. I head-butted his a** and then he tripped over my leg and we both hit the deck. I’m surprised they didn’t use that footage, to be honest. I got a lot of bruises from that because it was Aric’s elbow on my hip bone. So doing it hundreds of times a day, it just wore down the tissue basically. So I had two black hips.”

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Nikki adds that they planned on swapping out the move at the last minute but decided to go ahead with it to try and impress the judges.

“When we came to do it on the night we were just like, ‘Oh s**t’, and we were gonna replace it. But then we went, ‘Nah, go hard or go home’. So we were really happy to learn that,” she details.

“But there are more injuries to come for me. I’ve got more images to share on Facebook, let’s just say that.”

Dancing With The Stars continues Sunday 7pm on Channel 7 and 7Plus

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