Dancing With the Stars alum Antonio Sabàto Jr. explains why he thinks the show is 'rigged'

Antonio Sabàto Jr. has a message for Dancing With the Stars: The jig is up!

After competing on season 19 of the ABC reality series back in 2014, the actor recently joined his old dance partner Cheryl Burke on her Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans podcast to reminisce, and he had some provocative thoughts about how the show picks its winners.

"To be honest, I I think that that the show is partly rigged in a sense," Sabàto told Burke. "Yeah. It is rigged."

Explaining his thinking, Sabàto said that contestants who come from a dance background have an unfair advantage. "It's rigged in this way," he continued. "First of all, if you're not a dancer or you don't have dancing skills from a young age, you're not going to win. I think that somebody who's never danced — because the the whole premise of the show would be celebrities who's never danced — but the majority of winners are dancers."

Entertainment Weekly has reached out to ABC for comment on Sabàto's remarks.

Burke gently pushed back against Sabàto's claim, noting that former NFL star Emmitt Smith, who she won season 3 with, had never danced prior to his time on Dancing With the Stars.

"Yeah, but he had moves," Sabàto protested. "He had soul. He was dancing at church, you know what I mean? He had that thing going."

He also pointed to current DWTS cohost Alfonso Ribeiro, who won season 19, the same year Sabàto competed. "He was tap-dancing with Michael Jackson," Sabàto complained. "It's like me racing my whole life of professional cars, and you just raced in a track, I'm going to beat you every time."

Sabàto, whose offscreen pursuits have included an unsuccessful run for Congress in 2018, also took issue with DWTS judges' need to support a contestant's narrative throughout the season. "The judges, they know who they want, so you've got to keep that persona," he said. "Like, you've got to keep the momentum of what's going on in your private life. But I was surprised, sometimes you see people who have a huge following. But you've got to have personality. There's just a lot of things that they want, that the show wants. Because it is entertainment and they need to keep the stories going, but you do have to learn the numbers. And when it starts happening where you have to learn two numbers a week, you you've got to know what you're doing, man."

Burke also pointed out that Sabàto had the added challenge of working another job while competing. He was hosting the remodeling show Fix It & Finish It at the time, and admitted that he probably would have done better in the competition if his energy had been solely focused on DWTS.

"If I didn't have another job and we were just, like, in Hollywood and me driving five minutes, and we had all the time in the world and also the time in the world to relax in moments where you're not traveling," he reflected, "instead of taking red-eyes every single week, I think I would've probably lasted at least another week or two. If we would have been free of all the other craziness, I would have had a chance of winning it."

Sabàto and Burke ultimately finished in eighth place.

Dancing With the Stars airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC and Disney+. Listen to Sabàto on Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans above.