She deserves this.

On last Sunday's Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains season finale, Sandra Diaz-Twine (pictured here) became the first two-time Survivor winner. She has played the game twice, and she has won the game twice. She is the only player, in twenty seasons, to do so (of course, only nine of the show's nineteen winners have played the game more than once; four of them competed this season: Sandra, Tom from season ten, Parvati from seasons thirteen and sixteen, and JT from season eighteen [the latter three came in fifteenth, second, and tenth, respectively]). In the days following the announcement of Sandra's win, however, a question has arisen: did she deserve it?

Third place finisher Russell Hantz has argued all across the Internet that Sandra did not deserve to win the game. She performed poorly in challenges. She argued too frequently with her cast mates. She didn't make any big, bold moves that drastically altered the course of the season (and thus "entertained" the audience). Essentially, she wasn't physically dominant, she didn't show off for the cameras, and she didn't call attention to her gameplay. According to Russell, Sandra did not deserve to win because she did not play the game the way he did, an approach he has deemed the "best" way*.

The gaping hole in Russell's logic, however, is that Sandra won. Winning a game automatically makes you deserving of that win (unless you cheated; she didn't). How you get there doesn't matter. In crew, a team can dominate a race for the first 1,800 out of 2,000 meters, and still get beaten in the final sprint. The fact that the losing team "won" the first 1,800 meters of the race doesn't make the winning team any less deserving. Both teams agreed before racing to race for 2,000 meters. Whoever wins the races deserves to win the race.

Tom explained this logic at the reunion; Russell refused to listen**. Russell apparently spent the season playing a game called "Who Is the Best Player According to Russell's Subjective Image of the Ideal Survivor Player." Sandra spent the season playing Survivor. In the end, she survived thirty-nine days, and got six out of the nine jury votes, enough to win.

She deserves it.

*Russell has never won. This season, he received zero jury votes. Last season, he received two.

**I would also like to differentiate between Russell's "she doesn't deserve it" comments and those made by host Jeff Probst, and blogger's like EW's Dalton Ross who have stated that they would have voted for runner-up Parvati (who played a fantastic game, and got three votes for the million). Probst and Ross were viewers, not participants in the season.