Richard Hatch
The brash, naked, fish-catching schemer who invented the voting bloc and won the game that started it all.
Sole Survivor
- Won Survivor 1: Borneo (2000) after 39 days.
Known for
Richard walked onto Tagi in Borneo announcing he had already won, which went over about as well as you'd guess. Then he made himself indispensable. He was the only one who could reliably fish, and on Day 10 he pulled Kelly Wiglesworth, Susan Hawk and Rudy Boesch into a voting pact long before Pagong caught on. That bloc, with Rudy as his unlikely friend, picked off Pagong one by one. At the final three he figured either Kelly or Rudy would take him to the end, so he simply stepped off the final immunity. He read it right, and he beat Kelly 4-3.
All-Stars went sideways fast. He got Mogo Mogo fire with smuggled matches, competed in the nude, and was bitten by a shark his tribe then ate. As the first winner he was a marked man, and his late push to organize the women against the men did not save him. In his last immunity challenge he accidentally made contact with Susan Hawk while naked for too long, which made her extremely uncomfortable, and she quit the next day.
Background: Survivor Wiki
Season by season
Photos and logos: CBS
Seasons played, finishing positions, day counts, jury status, ages and hometowns come from the contestant table in each season's Wikipedia article, cross-checked against the series overview before publication.
Sources (4)
- “Survivor: Borneo,” Wikipedia, accessed September 28, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor:_Borneo.
- “Survivor: All-Stars,” Wikipedia, accessed September 28, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor:_All-Stars.
- “List of Survivor (American TV series) episodes,” Wikipedia, accessed September 25, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Survivor_(American_TV_series)_episodes.
- “Richard Hatch,” Survivor Wiki, accessed September 28, 2026, https://survivor.fandom.com/wiki/Richard_Hatch.