Duluth woman wipes out on ABC game show ‘Wipeout’

Published 11:18 am Tuesday, January 10, 2012

DULUTH — An episode of a primetime game show featured a Duluth Township native taking a digger into the mud after clearing Snow Shovel Trouble and tagging Smallsy after bouncing through the Big Balls obstacle.

Huh?

Kristen Carter, a 2002 graduate of Two Harbors High School who lives in Los Angeles, was on Thursday night’s episode of ABC’s “Winter Wipeout,” which sends its adult contestants through a wacky, larger-than-life obstacle course filled with spins, slides and trap doors. A wipeout means dropping into muddy water or a shocking splash into a snow-covered lake.

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Carter wasn’t the big winner, but she successfully leaped across three large red balls, knocking a smaller-sized ball into the water – as well as herself – and earned a $500 prize for her efforts.

“I’m really pleased with my performance,” Carter said. “Because of how much pain I was in the following week, I was kind of happy I didn’t make it further. Five hundred dollars for being flipped around is OK. I was pleased with the amount of airtime I got and how I looked. I didn’t look too stupid.”

Carter auditioned for the program about two years ago, but didn’t end up filming the episode until October. She was in a batch of 23 other contestants and said she finished in the back half of the pack. She said getting beaned by foam pads and knocked around by padded obstacles didn’t hurt at the time.

“Immediately when I finished I just had a pounding headache,” Carter said. “The next day I was a scrap of a human being. My legs were so sore. I had water and mud in my ears. I was wandering around like a water-logged zombie.”

Carter is the second player shown completing part of the course during the episode. She charged in wearing a pair of hot pink calf-length tights with orange shorts, a black tank top, a vest and two braids. Her defining feature was a moose head knit cap with ear flaps and shoulder-length strings that earned her the nickname “Moose” with the show’s announcers John Henson and John Anderson.

She tripped up on a trick surface that flipped and sent her diving backward 10 feet down into the mud, where she lost her hat.

“The water was about 50 degrees,” Carter said. “When I fell into it, it was kind of refreshing. I thought, ‘This isn’t any colder than Lake Superior. Easy peasy, temperature-wise. Lake Superior prepared me for the frigid water of ‘Wipeout.’ ”

Henson and Anderson, who deadpan puns and riff on the nicknames, provided comical play-by-play and said of Carter’s first fall: “No moose crossing here.”

Carter said she trained for the show by working through an obstacle course her friend set up at a gymnastics studio.

“It was really fun,” she said, “but it didn’t help for ‘Wipeout.'”

Carter’s mom, Patty Heino, said the show was hilarious and described her daughter as adventurous.

“She’s done so many things already,” Heino said. “She’s traveled to China, traveled to what were the Eastern Bloc countries, she’s gone to Paris to spend New Year’s Eve, she’s been in a hot air balloon, parachuted out of an airplane …”

Carter moved to Los Angeles a few years ago to pursue a career in acting, but decided she was more suited toward visual arts. She is studying art and illustration, specifically for video games. She recently had an exhibition featuring her work with animals wearing top hats at The Hive, a gallery in Silver Lake.

As for the game show experience:

“That was my time in the limelight,” Carter said. “It was a weird limelight to have.”