Curtis Pritchard has opened up about being attacked during Christmas and being forced to miss the beginning of Dancing with the Stars.
The dancer and his brother AJ who is also a professional dancer on Strictly Come Dancing were attacked on St Stephen’s Day while in a nightclub.
“I remember gaining consciousness and I couldn’t walk,” he recalled.
Curtis suffered from an injury on his knee which resulted in surgery and has forced the 22-year-old to pull out of Dancing with the Stars series 3 for the first month.
“I don’t want to go into too much of the detail – it’s unwanted memories – it’s just a shame that people can do things like that. It’s young kids that have this mindset that they don’t necessarily think about the consequences of their actions, I’m only coming back now and I should have been dancing with Holly Carpenter for a month.”
Holly was paired with Trent Whiddon until Curtis recovered but the duo was sadly voted out of the show last weekend.
Curtis recalls his brother saving him during the incident and admitted that he was concerned about his legs due to his line of work.
“I remember one or two punches … and then AJ picked me up off the floor… My brother had me under his arm. People were saying ‘your face, your face’, but I said ‘my face is fine but I can’t walk.”
“A knee is quite a major area when it comes to my expertise.”
“It happened with the click of a finger – that fast. I remember AJ picking me up and trying to get out of that situation and help me hobble off and get to safety.”
“Luckily, touch wood nothing had happened [to my face and head] except for a lot of swelling. I had got a lot of knocks… and my face had blown up, I couldn’t see out of my eye.”
Curtis was forced to have surgery on his knee but still counts his blessings.
“For the whole experience of it, it could have been a lot worse, I could not be dancing/ could not be walking.
“It’s a disturbing thing to know that this does happen everywhere and it has to stop… In some situations, the case is, some people don’t come out of it.”
The dancer also admitted that he hasn’t been focusing on those who attacked him and they don’t deserve it.
“I haven’t given [the attackers] a thought, they mean nothing to me, they’re not going to affect me in any single way, they’re not going to affect the family because then they’ve won.”
Summing up how it’s changed his mindset, Curtis said told the Independent: “I’ve learned from everything – from the incident, from the whole situation of what happened there, Holly getting knocked out – life works in a very peculiar way, but you can create a positive in any situation.”
The professional dancer returns to Dancing With the Stars this weekend.