Here's your complete list of athletes who will soon be Dancing With The (sports) Stars
ABC’s “Stars! They’re just as bad at dancing as us!” competition series Dancing With The Stars returns at the end of this month, but with a twist: This latest edition is going to be all athletes, making for a potentially more impressive group of dancers than one that includes, say, Geraldo Rivera.
That’s not the only change to this most recent attempt to parade semi-famous people around a stage while experienced dancers try to make them look good, as reported by EW. Thanks to the inclusion of the American Idol reboot on ABC’s spring lineup, DWTS is getting a substantially trimmed order, meaning fewer contestants and fewer weeks in which to make a positive impression with a half-hearted cha-cha, or whatever. As opposed to a normal 10-11 week run, the 26th season of the show will be just four weeks, a brief stint that will nonetheless allow America to once again receive its fill of amateur pasodobles and worryingly off-balance tangos.
The complete list of athletes—along with the dancers they’ve been paired with—is below. We’re going to go ahead and give the advantage to the three competitive figure skaters for obvious reasons, but something tells us current Olympic silver medalist Mirai Nagasu might have a slight advantage over Tonya Harding.
Adam Rippon—Olympian figure skater (paired with Jenna Johnson)
Arike Ogunbowale—college basketball player (with Gleb Savchenko)
Chris Mazdzer—Olympian Luger (with Witney Carson)
Jamie Anderson—Olympia snowboarder (with Artem Chigvintsev)
Jennie Finch Daigle—former softball pitcher (with Keo Motsepe)
Johnny Damon—former MLB outfielder (with Emma Slater)
Josh Norman—NFL cornerback (with Sharna Burgess)
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—former NBA superstar (with Lindsay Arnold)
Mirai Nagasu—Olympian figure skater (with Alan Bersten)
Tonya Harding—former competitive skater (with Sasha Farber)