The Christmas Day 2025 edition of Celebrity Gladiators has featured plenty of memorable moments, including a rough fall for Joe Wicks.
This year, Nicola Adams, Sam Thompson, Vogue Williams, and the fitness guru stepped into the arena for the festive special on the BBC.
The Body Coach came off worse for wear during the recording, as one of the pro Gladiators’ Viper (real name Quang Luong) dealt him a dizzying knock to the head, and he was eventually disqualified for starting too early.
During the Duel challenge – which involves two competitors going head to head and duking it out with massive pugil sticks – the fitness guru took a ‘full whack to the head’ from Viper.
The brutal hit left him struggling to get back to his feet, telling Barney afterwards that he was ‘seeing stars’ as he stumbled over his words.
He also explained to The Sun: ‘Viper hit me a second before the whistle, I got a full whack to the head and I couldn’t recover. I got dizzy, everything flipped upside down.
‘He hit me again and I went over. To top it off, I landed on my head. I didn’t want to look bad, but I could have laid there for a couple of minutes!’
Joe, 40, said that he put on a brave face, but admitted that doing so might have been a mistake.
‘My mum and boys were right there so I quickly got up, but I was fuzzy,’ he recalled.
Viper was disqualified from the event for hitting Joe just before the challenge was meant to begin, but showed no remorse or mercy.
It’s not the first time a contestant has been injured during this recent run of Gladiators, with Strictly Come Dancing star and Gladiator Nitro (real name Harry Aikines-Aryeety) badly damaging his knee in 2024.
Nitro was forced to stand aside from the contest during the second season, but recovered sufficiently to reach week seven of Strictly this year.
Gladiators originally aired on ITV between 1992 and 2000, before being cancelled to make way for new primetime shows in the new millennium.
The series was rebooted on Sky One in 2008 with Ian Wright and Caroline Flack as the hosts, but only ran for two more seasons totalling 27 episodes and was cancelled again in 2009.
It was then brought back for a second time in 2024, this time by the BBC, with Bradley Walsh and his son Barney as hosts – it averaged 6.02million viewers across its first few episodes.
A third season of the revived Gladiators has been commissioned, and that’s scheduled to start in January 2026, not long after the Christmas special on Christmas Day.
The first celebrity edition of the long-running, frequently-rebooted physical contest saw Rob Beckett, Joel Dommett, Ellie Taylor, and Louise Minchin take on the Gladiators in a series of challenges.
Stream the Celebrity Gladiators Christmas special on BBC iPlayer.
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