Losing Like Nobody Has Lost Before: The Ulong Tribe from ‘Survivor: Palau’

Pa-gong vt., to pick off an opposing tribe one by one after the merge on Survivor – n, one of the first two tribes on Survivor, where alliances were not made and the Tagi tribe picked them off one by one after the merge.

U-long vt., to completely and disastrously lose every tribal immunity challenge in Survivor and thus have your tribe decimated – n a tribe on the tenth Survivor series that could not work as a team and therefore lost every immunity challenge until only one person remained.

The Reality TV Hall of Shame previously recognized the Pagong tribe from Survivor: Borneo with a Hall of Shame Moment. Now, another tribe has emerged on Survivor that will have its name similarly go down in history and be converted into a verb, as shown above – but this deserves more than simply a Hall of Shame Moment; this is a full induction.

The Ulong tribe on Survivor: Palau has done something that never happened before, never should have happened this time, and quite possibly will never happen again: They lost every immunity challenge. Time after time Ulong visited Tribal Council, while the Koror tribe only visited once – forced by a twist in the game that caused both teams to vote off a person no matter who won the challenge.

Ulong began their slide to shame by voting off the strongest person on their tribe, Jolanda. Maybe it seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but once she left there was no guiding force, no concept of team, and no clue of what to do. When I asked Bobby Jon if he thinks things would have turned out differently if Ulong had kept Jolanda, he noted that she “was an asset” and “she was in the Olympics for crying out loud.”

It was only downhill from there. Other members of Ulong had their thoughts on what went so wrong. In particular, Angie and Jeff seemed to hit it on the head. Angie noted, “We just didn’t work well together and no one wanted to listen to anyone else.” Jeff similarly said, “If you don’t feel like everyone is playing for each other, you never come together [for] a win. … You have to be able to count on someone before you can expect anything from them.”

Indeed, this may also explain why it seems there was very little scheming and plotting on Ulong, despite the repeated trips to Tribal Council. Nobody felt part of a team. Even those alliances that did exist were quickly and easily broken (such as voting out Angie when Ibrehem was given immunity). Ulong wasn’t a tribe – it was a collection of individuals. And as individuals, they were picked off one by one.

Ulong did win a few reward challenges – but those challenges generally were simple and required only one skill. For example, the Pringles reward required only that they could shoot a gun. There was no thought, no strategy, just aiming and firing. The immunity challenges, though, required multiple skills and the ability to work together. Let’s take a look at them:

• The very first challenge was to decide what items to untie and then run with them to a canoe and row that canoe. First, the tribe couldn’t decide what items to bring; then they couldn’t figure out how to row.
• The second challenge required swimming to a floating platform and then diving down 10 feet to a rope strung through a barrel and attached to a footlocker that was 50 feet away. While under water, they needed to pull the rope so as to move the footlocker closer. Once they got the locker to them, they opened it and released eight mess kits. They brought those back to shore and decoded the word based on the dots and dashes on the mess kits. Ulong never get into a rhythm as far as going underwater and dragging the trunk – they didn’t work as a team.
• The third challenge was the one in which each person wore a belt clipped to a common tribal rope; they needed to move together as a tribe, each carrying a backpack weighing 20 pounds. They needed to run through shallow water in an oval track, starting from opposite sides, with the goal being to catch the other tribe. When somebody quit, they had to hand off their weighted backpack to somebody else on the team. Once again, Koror worked as a team, distributing the weight and planning when to make their runs at Ulong. Indeed, when they were discussing the challenge at Tribal Council, Bobby Jon said Tom beat them but Ibrehem noted that Tom and his team beat them, not Tom alone.