Las Vegas Weekly

May 19, 2009 · 8:26 PM

And the winner of Dancing With the Stars Season 8 is …

By Robin Leach

The final three couples on Season 8 of Dancing With the Stars.

Photo: ABC TV

It’s taken 11 weeks, and now in a two-hour, nerve-tingling showdown, it’s the finals of ABC’s top-rated Dancing With the Stars Season 8. It’s the last showdown between Olympic gymnast and gold medalist Shawn Johnson, rejected The Bachelor star Melissa Rycroft and Sex and the City heartthrob Gilles Marini, and when it comes time to dance for the final time, all score a perfect 30! So that doesn’t provide a forecast of how the contest will end!

Don’t read any further if you plan on watching the tape-delayed West Coast broadcast of ABC’s Dancing With the Stars and want nothing spoiled beforehand! But come back after the show to compare notes!

The heavy betting, plus previous winner picks, all indicate that Gilles should take home the mirrored disco ball trophy. But you just know that ABC producers will push back the verdict to the final moments to wring out every possible gut-wrenching and teary-eyed emotion.

We wind up with a new champion, but it takes two hours of drawn-out suspense television to get there, so you’ll have to keep reading through the action of the night to get there, too!

After pop singer Lady Gaga sang her appropriately titled hit “Just Dance” to kick off the show, the ousted duos return. It’s become tradition! They come back in the order of their axing, so new Peepshow headliner Holly Madison with partner Dmitry Chaplin is the first of the Las Vegas contingent to dance after Belinda Carlisle and Denise Richards.

Our Vegas nightclub king and Jackass stuntman Steve-O returns with Lacey Schwimmer before Anna Damidova is voted in as the new professional, joining the DWTS family for this fall’s Season 9. Our Le Reve choreographer Maksim Chmerkovskiy gives her a dance floor whirl around for an advance peek at her skills!

Our hometown country music princess Julianne Hough takes country singer beau Chuck Wicks, in his red silk and satin pajamas, for their samba. Brother Derek Hough dances the “Jailhouse Rock” jive with Lil’ Kim, and our Chelsie Hightower performs the lindyhop with cowboy king Ty Murray. Also returning for the finals night were celebrity contestants Steve Wozniak, Lawrence Taylor and David Alan Grier.

Roast master comic Jeffrey Ross savages the three finalists who have yet to dance tonight! He describes them as “the underage, the unwed and the unpronounceable,” pointing out the irony if Melissa places second again, as she wound up on The Bachelor.

The three finalists by now must be on edge, and they still have to perform one more dance apiece to get the last of the judges’ scoring, which is added to the viewer votes and last night’s judges’ numbers!

Finally, they are called, and Shawn and Mark go first with the cha cha and nail an impressive perfect 30. They go to the top of the leader board with 88 out of 90 from the two nights of dancing. The pressure piles on for Melissa and Gilles, who will be last to dance.

Melissa and Tony fire right back with their samba and grab another perfect 30, taking their two-night total to 86. If Gilles doesn’t trip up, we’re getting the 1, 2 and 3 picture early, but anything can happen in the final minutes, plus the TV viewers have preferred Shawn and Melissa over Gilles this season.

Gilles and Cheryl take the challenge with his Argentine tango reprise, and it’s a triumph with another perfect 30 score. So the finals came down to three tied scores of 30 for each duo, and the total for Gilles is 88, tying him overall with Shawn.

Now we go through the excruciating nail-biting final minutes with Lady Gaga singing her No. 1 hit “Poker Face” as we await the accountants adding in the viewer votes. And it’s a taut, tense tie between Gilles and Shawn at 88 out of 90 apiece.

As we predicted, Melissa and Tony wind up in third place. Then there’s another wait for the announcement of the winner as the network has to earn some money to pay the bills with a final commercial break.

Surprise, surprise! Our prediction was hopelessly incorrect! We got the final two celebrity couples right, but in the end, the vote went to Shawn as the winner and Gilles as the runner-up. Our Olympic gold medal winner grabs another trophy to add to her collection!

Vegas DeLuxe will be back tomorrow with all the photos of the winning night for Shawn and Mark. And remember that runner-up Cheryl will be here in Las Vegas on Friday night now not celebrating her win but instead her birthday! My prediction is that Gilles won’t be on her arm to help out this time around!

The weeks and weeks of blood, sweat and tears have come to an end, and pint-sized Shawn, who shined at the Beijing Olympics last summer, has proved that she’s a ballroom dancing champion, too!

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

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