Aidan: I wanted to give Dayl my place in final
HE’S the only finalist to avoid the dance-off in the series – and this weekend Aidan O’Mahony will hope to win the Dancing With The Stars glitterball for pal Dayl Cronin, who was booted out on Sunday.
New father Aidan, 36, will face Aoibhín Garrihy and Denise McCormack in the final of the contest which has been a runaway success for RTÉ.
The remaining contestants will perform three times in their bid for the title – with each celebrity dancing a fresh routine for the grand finale, as well as their and the judges’ favourite dances from the past 11 weeks.
Recently retired Kerry footballer Aidan will perform his salsa from week one, his American Smooth from week five, and a freestyle number to Bonnie Tyler’s I Need A Hero. He considers his place in the final ‘bonus territory’, and insisted he’d have happily given his spot to pop star Dayl, who got the boot on Sunday.
‘I’d have given anything to swap places with him and given him my place in the final, but it’s a dance competition and the public have a say, I suppose,’ he told the Irish Daily Mail. ‘It’s unfortunate for him and I hated seeing him crying. We’ve spent the last four months living together for the show and it was very emotional.’ With no dancing background, the GAA All-Star has gone into every live broadcast of Dancing With The Stars with the ‘realistic’ approach that he could be sent home – and is grateful to the public for keeping him in until the end. ‘I always think I’ll be in the dance-off and I was preparing myself for it on Sunday,’ he said. ‘I’m a country lad in Dublin, doing something I’ve never done, and maybe the public sees that.
‘This week I’ve three dances, so it’ll be a tough week, and I just want to go out there and give it everything I have.’
Sunday’s show was watched by an average of 545,000 people – with a peak of 640,000 for the last 15 minutes, when the dance-off took place between Dayl and his partner Ksenia Zsikhotska, and Denise McCormack and her partner Ryan McShane. With one vote apiece from judges Julian Benson and Brian Redmond, Loraine Barry’s vote was the decider and she chose to axe Tipperary man Dayl.
‘It was a heartbreaking thing,’ the singer, 19, told Ryan Tubridy on RTÉ Radio 1. ‘I felt like a girlfriend had just broken up with me. I felt like I’d lost everything.’
‘I hated seeing him crying’