The beauty of Physical: Asia, a televised sporting event-cum-reality show that originated in Korea before spinning off to this international franchise, is that it cannot be gamed. Most sports today, after all, are all about the numbers. You can see it in the way people watch sports now, eyes on their second screens, checking lines and prop bets while the actual game unfolds somewhere in their peripheral vision. Everything’s got an angle. Gamblers and number-crunchers run the show. But Physical: Asia keeps bringing back the old ways.

This season’s premise was simple: 48 athletes from eight nations compete in challenges they cannot prepare for, testing strength and endurance in combinations that change every episode. There’s no meta to learn and no film to study, no way to game the system through analytics departments or roster optimization. South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Mongolia, Indonesia, Turkey, Australia, and the Philippines each sent six-person squads to fight for national pride and one billion units of Korea’s currency, the won, worth some $680,000. The challenges ranged from king-of-the-mountain brawls on shifting sand dunes to hauling cargo from a sinking ship to dragging iron balls while tethered at the waist. In each event, these elite sportsmen either had it or they didn’t.