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Emma Slater put in extra effort to avoid any unnecessary lifts in her Dancing With the Stars waltz with celebrity partner Jackson Olson amid the show’s controversial low scores.
“Guys, I get it!!! [In] this dance you have to keep your foot on the floor to stop [judge Carrie Ann Inaba] from docking a point,” Slater, 37, wrote via TikTok comment on Saturday, October 10, responding to fan criticism about her sickled foot from Mariah Carey Night. “This is what I was doing, trying for me [sic] life!”
She continued, “But, because I was being dragged backwards, that was what it looked like without me bending my leg! But I did it to stop him [from] being docked a point.”
Slater and Olson, 29, performed an elegant waltz to Carey’s “Without You” during the Tuesday, October 6, live show. At one point, fans thought it looked like Slater’s foot was sickled — a technical error in which the ankle is rolled inward, impeding what should be the leg’s straight line.
While Slater didn’t address whether her foot was in fact sickled, she stressed that she was merely focused on avoiding an unplanned lift that could hurt the pair’s overall score. (Dancers are forbidden from lifting their partners in a classic ballroom routine like the waltz, with Inaba, 58, notoriously lowering scores if she notices a lift in her sightline.)
With no lift in view, Slater and the Savannah Bananas player earned a total 21 out of 30 from Inaba and fellow judges Derek Hough and Bruno Tonioli.
DWTS season 35, currently gearing up for its fifth week, has seen the judges handing out significantly lower scores than usual to account for future growth.
Slater, the season 24 mirrorball winner, has often found the judges’ critiques can be “disheartening” to a certain degree.
“It is rough when you work so hard,” she exclusively told Us last month. “That’s the hard part about Dancing With the Stars — you work all week on a dance routine, you build yourself up, you get that confidence, you feel really good about it. And then ultimately, you are being judged and it’s at the whim of the judges.”
Slater continued at the time, “If they don’t like it, or if they have harsh criticism to say, you got to just take it. So it could be a little disheartening, not gonna lie. Even for me as a pro — I’ve been here for so many years — but you just show them how to handle it, how to take it and bring improvement to the table, and don’t lose that fire, don’t lose that light, keep on going.”
Slater and Olson narrowly avoided elimination on Tuesday, making it through to next week’s Super Bowl Night over Ciara Miller and Brandon Armstrong.
Dancing With the Stars airs on ABC and Disney+ Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
