EXCLUSIVE: Val Chmerkovskiy and Normani Kordei Talk Perfect 'DWTS' Score Despite Her Injury
Val Chmerkovskiy and Normani Kordei are clearly the pair to beat this season on Dancing With the Stars.
The duo's incredible Argentine tango earned them a perfect score on Monday night after continuously coming close to it, and ET caught up with the pair to get their glowing reactions.
"I've been waiting on it," Kordei told ET's Cameron Mathison and our special correspondent, DWTS season 21 champ Bindi Irwin.
Chmerkovskiy was also touched by judge Len Goodman's kind words after the dance, after Goodman previously held off on giving them a perfect score.
"It feels awesome, it's nice to finally build a relationship with someone I’ve listened to for the last seven years," Chmerkovskiy noted. "And it's nice for him to validate my work as a teacher and her work as a performer."
The perfect score is even more impressive given Kordei experiencing serious back and hip pain -- though you wouldn't know it from the way she danced.
"It all fell into place," Kordei said. "It happened the way it was supposed to, so I'm grateful."
"I just have to remind myself this is fun, this is something that I’ve always wanted to do, and I only have one shot to do it," she continued about her injuries. "It's been a struggle. I'm a lot better than yesterday even. I had some therapy earlier, and I've been icing it and taking a bunch of medicine, so I'm in the process [of healing]."
Of course, there's no rest for the competitive duo.
"First of all, we want to make it to the finals, we're not there yet," Chmerkovskiy stressed. "Once we do, we just want to do a performance that captures our energy and spirit. I think it should be fun. I think it should be a celebratory performance. And I think hopefully by then, we would have done every other genre where we could afford ourselves to come out and just have a blast."
Watch Kordei and Chmerkovskiy's perfect performance below:
