A tough Sanford woman is celebrating a naked loss in a fourth try at $100,000 on Discovery Channel’s top-rated survivor show.
“I was mere seconds from winning,” Cheeny Plante told viewers during her final on-air interview on the episode.
But by her own standards, Plante did emerge from the show a winner.
For starters, she knew she had made her mother proud back home in Sanford, Maine.
“My mom told me to kick ass and win, and I came so close to winning,” Plante said. “I just know she’s just going to be beaming with joy to know she raised somebody so strong. I did this for her.”
Survival is no afterthought for Cheeny Plante, who has shown grit in her prior life.
She is, after all, an Air Force veteran – specifically, a SERE specialist who trains others in matters of Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape.
Plante was born and raised in southern Maine.
Following high school, she enlisted in the Air Force and served as a SERE specialist for eight years.
After completing her military service, Plante embarked on a journey of self-discovery, backpacking throughout the U.S. and traveling internationally.
Currently, she works full-time as an interior painter and part-time as a Maine Guide and survival instructor.
Plante was not the last one standing at the end of the latest season on “Naked and Afraid: Last One Standing” on The Discovery Channel on July 13, but she carried herself in a winning way and made her hometown proud.
Plante was one of three finalists on the season finale, in which she and two other contestants powered through daunting survivalist challenges in the sweltering Australian Outback – all while naked, of course, with nothing but pixels for privacy.
The final challenge came after four weeks of survivalist competition that aired each Sunday in the unforgiving heat of the Outback.
The season began with 14 contestants.
Plante bested 11 of them and, as she reminded viewers in the finale, emerged as “the last woman standing.”
“I won for all the little women out there – for all the people with the odds stacked against them who still triumph and make it to the top.
“I won today for the underdog.”
A good all-American veteran from a plucky working-class town made Sanford, Maine proud as a peacock (albeit one with no feathers).
