Calgary fitness model competes in Canada’s Ultimate Challenge

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Darko Boskovic has his wife to thank for his participation in the second season of Canada’s Ultimate Challenge.

It seems that recruiters for the show were actually angling for Ana Biavatti, Boskovic’s wife. Both  Boskovic and  Biavatti have a social-media following on Instagram due to their involvement in body-building competitions, but she was the one that recruiters first approached to be a competitor in the country-crossing reality series. When she watched footage of the first season, she declined.

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“My wife does not believe in cardio, she always says ‘I would not even run away from a thief,’” says Boskovic, in an interview from his Calgary home. “We saw some trailers where they are running up a hill and she said ‘absolutely not . . . I know who would be perfect for it.’ And here I am.”

So in September, Boskovic found himself in St. John’s as part of Team Green, being put through the paces of what would become the first episode of the second season. Given that the season hasn’t aired yet — it premieres April 28 on the CBC — Boskovic can’t say too much about how he fared and how far he made into the series. What we can say is that his is part of the four-person Team Green, which is also made up of personal trainer and writer Ninko Pangilinan from Innisfil, Ont., real-estate agent and fitness trainer Sandra Wendland from Toronto and Edmonton’s Sahsily Matowe, a dancer  and fitness trainer.

A total of 20 competitors are involved in the season, which has teams dealing with high-stress situations, both physically and mentally, in beautiful locations across the country. There will be stops in Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC, Ottawa, ON, Hamilton, ON, Canmore, AB, Revelstoke, BC and Vancouver Island. But because it’s an elimination show, Boskovic cannot reveal which locations he competed in other than St. John’s, which involved a zipline challenge.

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Boskovic can speak generally about the experience. It was fun, he says, but perhaps not what he initially expected.

“It was a lot harder than I thought, I definitely underestimated it,” he says. “I guess you could say I’m a little bit cocky and I definitely underestimated the challenges. But, to be fair, those guys upped it. The first season, looking at the competitors and looking at the challengers, (I thought) it’s not that big of a deal. Definitely with the second season, whoever made these challenges was an angry person. Some of them were questionable for sure.”

The CBC’s video introduction of Boskovic certainly introduces him as a competitor who doesn’t lack confidence. A bodybuilder, coach and fitness model, he is shown offering various poses to show off his sculpted physique and talking about his love of dancing and martial arts. “I think this challenge is designed for me,” he says at one point. “It should be called Darko’s Ultimate Challenge. We can work on that later.”

At the time of this interview, Boskovic had not seen any of the episodes and was planning to watch the first on Sunday with his wife. He is excited but admits he is a bit nervous about what will make it to air.

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“It takes a lot for me to be hurt, to be offended,” he says. “I think of the old saying ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.’ You can say whatever you want to me. It’s nothing, as long as things are not getting physical, words are nothing. The reason I’m saying this is because I see the world like this so I can be very careless with the things that I say.  I feel if I can take it, everybody else can, which can sometimes get me in trouble. That was my biggest challenge being on national television, with today’s world and the cancel culture and always somebody being hurt, I was very nervous to say things that could potentially hurt somebody. That’s never my intention, but sometimes I can be stupid boy who talks faster than he can think.”

Boskovic’s irreverent sense of humour certainly doesn’t diminish his dramatic backstory, which began in the former Yugoslavia in war-torn Bosnia. He and his family fled a civil war when Boskovic was only six. After being a refugees in Croatia for six years, the family immigrated to Canada in 1997. They first lived in Ottawa before Boskovic moved to Calgary in 2003.

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“I’ve been in Canada since 1997, a long time,” he says. “I kept the accent because it makes me sexier.”

His early experiences in a war-torn country and as a refugee has had a huge impact on life and worldview, he says.

“It was a horrible thing but some good things came out of it,” he says. “One thing was that I would say I am a lot more grateful than the average person who grew up in Canada. Throughout my life, I never required much materialistically. Everything I got was always a bonus for me, both in materialism and experiences. For somebody who was supposed to stay in a war-torn country with an uncertain future, I got to travel across Canada and compete and play and get access to locations and circumstances that most people don’t have. It makes everything bigger and grander.”

In 2013, he was travelling in Africa when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer which was caught before it could spread. In the video, Boskovic says “I always joke around ‘Look at the way I look . . . imagine if I had two nuts.’”

“That was a strange thing,” he says about the cancer diagnosis. “I consider myself a healthy. Life is an interesting thing. I’m not a religious person, but I always like the quote that says ‘You want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.’”

Boskovic has said he wants to win Canada’s Ultimate Challenge as a tribute to his mother and her bravery in those early years. She died two years ago.

“My life had some difficulty, had some challenges, but my mother’s life had a lot of challenges,” he says. “For me, she’s a superhero. I feel like I’m very little compared to what she accomplished and her attitude towards life, how she conducted herself. She was a remarkable woman.”

Season 2 of Canada’s Ultimate Challenge begins Sunday, April 28 on the CBC

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