Jackson Olson is reflecting on the “tough” backlash he received after making a controversial comment about his Dancing With the Stars competitor Guillermo Rodriguez.
“I mean, it’s been tough,” Olson, 29, exclusively told Us after Super Bowl Night on Tuesday, October 13. “I feel like this is the first time that I’ve really felt the pressure of having a lot of negativity on me. I usually try to only spread positivity, and so that moment [in] that week was tough for me.”
Olson raised eyebrows earlier this month when he joked in a since-deleted Instagram comment that a Loco Beach Coconuts player did a dance routine better than Rodriguez, 55, with less practice. (Olson has since apologized to the Jimmy Kimmel Live! personality, who consistently scored at the bottom of the leaderboard during his DWTS tenure.)
“I preach being positive and lifting people up, and that’s all I try to do,” the Savannah Bananas star told Us of the online drama. “It was very tough, and I knew it was a mistake on my part. You have to own your mistakes. I owned it. We got over it. Me and Guillermo are buds, and we just got through it, and we move on.”
The twosome further buried the hatchet after Rodriguez sent Olson a jar of his legendary salsa.
“He gave me [salsa, which] I have in my trailer right now,” Olson quipped.
Rodriguez was eliminated at the end of Tuesday’s episode, while Olson and pro partner Emma Slater finished in the middle of the leaderboard with a score of 31 out of 40 after their salsa to Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk.”
“I know that my technique isn’t always the best [that] it’s always been on show night because I get so excited,” Olson acknowledged of his past routines. “For a dance like this, I was in it the whole time. I was like, ‘Let’s go,’ and so I was really excited to see that [the judges] saw my performance in the dance, and they saw that I was really trying to do the salsa, and I think that’s why they gave us those scores.”
He added, “The technique wasn’t absolutely 100 percent perfect [in] every single move, but I think the performance moved those numbers up a little bit, and I want to keep performing while keeping that technique.”
Olson also hopes “to keep that energy going” into Dedication Night next week.
“You can never tell if you’re going to be in the bottom two, bottom three, whatever, and if we are again, who cares?” he stated. “We just keep going and keep getting better, and that’s all you can do.”
Dancing With the Stars airs on ABC and Disney+ Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
