A contestant on the Israeli TV show "Survivor" was challenged with eating bugs. this posed for him a dilemma, considering he eats only kosher and is religious at some level.

He chose to eat the bugs, as the alternative was to be the cause of his whole team losing and being eliminated.

The sad part of it is that he knew in advance, and chose not to request to be exempt from this challenge, and simply hoped he would not be the one called upon to execute it. it never works like that, and your worst fears generally come to be. if he participated, and he would eb the one with the biggest problem doing this challenge, he should have known he would definitely be the one picked.
He could have exempted himself, but someone else already had claiming stomach pains. he felt bad letting the team down, so he let her go out with the stomach pain. The team should have respected his desire to keep kosher, and made her participate (unless her excuse is really that she also keeps kosher but made up another excuse so they would not know) and let him off.

But they didn't. She got off, he got chosen.

He ate the bugs. His rationale is that in the process of eating the bugs, he made a tremendous kiddush hashem. he showed his teammates that he "took one for the team" and was concerned about other peoples success and welfare.

Basically the claim is a crock. It is definitely not a kiddush hashem that he took one for the team by doing a sin.

He should just say he could not withstand the pressure of everyone relying on him and succumbed, and regrets it. he knows he did something wrong. he was ashamed when his kid asked him why he did it.

Making up excuses doesn't help. We each have our own tests. Sometimes we pass, sometimes we fail. Hopefully we all pass more often than fail....but each person with his or her own tests and successes..We should learn from our failures, and not just make excuses...