Amazing Race 14 - week 10

I am busy, busy, busy so without further ado:

Phil's Blog

Never knew the "virtual pit stops" stirred up so many emotions for people. Last night, I was in Ft. Wayne, Ind. having dinner and this woman approached me and started berating me for not eliminating a team during last night's episode.

There's no better look on team members' faces than when they arrive at the mat and I get to say: "You're the first Team to arrive... (cue the celebration) but you're not done racing this leg and here is your next clue." Cue: "Are you kidding me?! We're exhausted. This sucks." Teams were definitely not too eager to keep racing after that leg. It was pretty brutal for all four teams.

I just want to say for the record that I think Kisha is a great big sister. I believe she really showed some of her true colors during last night's episode. Her sister Jennifer could not have had a tougher, more frustrating leg. We were all pretty concerned that Jennifer wouldn't even complete the detour. She was absolutely paralyzed by the water. I was really impressed with the way Kisha held it together for her sister and didn't resort to yelling...or as Mel and Mike would say, going all "agro" on her. And for the record, not like I really need to say it, but how fast is Michael Phelps?

I know a thing or two about having to overcome being paralyzed in the water. I'm sure some of you have heard me talk about it before, but I had a near-death experience when I was 19 years old, while diving in an underwater ship wreck. I became separated from my team, couldn't find my way out, and was quickly running out of oxygen. Talk about panic. I was eventually rescued, but it was definitely touch and go there for a while and by far the most fear I've ever experienced. I suspect Jen was feeling a little bit of that last night during the detour.

I was actually a little surprised that the teams were not better swimmers. With the exception of Margie and Luke, who flew through the detour, the teams weren't as good in the pool as I thought they would have been. The high-dive detour was nearly impossible. Very difficult to sync up with another person like that springing off a diving board.

Margie-Luke vs. Kisha-Jen continues to fester. They aren't putting aside their differences, which could definitely come into play as they head into the final two legs. As we've seen in all the seasons, it's essential to try and ignore personal feelings when you get to this point in the race. If you don't, you'll definitely lose focus and make mistakes.

Still, out here on my Ride Across America...and just want to acknowledge all the Amazing Race fans who have come out to support us. We've had such amazing support in every town along this trip. Thousands and thousands of fans showing up asking to be eliminated. Wonder why no one ever seems to want to be the first team to arrive -- they only ask to be eliminated.

We were in Chicago over the weekend and had over 600 potential racers auditioning for the chance to race around the globe next season. Great to see that.

With two all female teams heading into the final two legs, do you think we could finally - after 14 seasons - have an all girl team win the Race?

Guess we'll have to wait and see. Blog you next week. Back to pedaling.

Recap

We've seen challenges go bad for people on The Amazing Race before: the ''needle in a haystack'' challenge from a few seasons back comes to mind, when a woman from a sister/sister team was fruitlessly searching through a hayfield for a clue for so long that Phil finally had to come to them to enact the elimination rites. And yet—for all I can remember, anyway—I've never seen one go wrong in a way that was as painful to watch as Jen's aquaphobic breakdown. A terrible swimmer, she was so crushed by this task that I felt like Michael Phelps himself owed her an apology just for inspiring the Detour.

When the episode started, it looked like it was going to be more of the same from last week: endless references to last week's mat meltdown between Margie/Luke and Kisha/Jen. (And nothing was said about the fact that the pit stop rest period must have been longer than the usual 12 hours, considering that the teams arrived in sunlight, and left in sunlight.) We got many, many shots of Luke (through Margie) saying things like, ''I'm gonna make it to the final three…and kick their ass.'' At one point he said, ''If I have to go to the final three with them, game on!'' First things first: Hearing the squibillionth Amazing Race contestant say ''Game on!'' gives me as bad a taste in my mouth as if I had eaten a pound of Kynt and Vyxsin's body glitter. But more importantly, my mind reeled at Luke's comment: Was he implying that the game isn't on now? So what was his bodychecking Jen to try to keep her from opening a clue, an exhibition match? I'd hate to see what he does when the game is on, but I fear it involves a lead pipe and a kneecap.

At the airport, where everyone dashed to fly to Beijing, Jen and Kisha ended up in line right behind Margie and Luke. Awk-ward! (But just to clarify: THE GAME WAS NOT ON.) There were two attendants behind the counter, but the spare one would not acknowledge Jen and Kisha's presence. And then came a moment that puts me in a weird spot: Talking about how they were just receiving a ''dumb'' look from the attendant, Kisha said, ''They should be able to say, 'Me no speak English' or something, but they just give you this look. Like zombies.'' I know, I took the mini stunt brothers to task for the same kind of ''Don't Asians talk funny when they're trying to speak our language in their country?'' mockery when they were pulling the rickshaw around in Thailand. And yet after the sisters' pool meltdown, I can no longer bring myself to hold a grudge. Had mini Mark burst into tears about his deep fear of rickshaws, instead of just hiding all the pumps, perhaps I would have forgiven him, too.

The teams all ended up on the same flight, and a tense moment went down when all four teams gathered at the gate. The tension between the archenemy teams was palpable, and it looked like Luke was having no part of the communal conversation, sitting with his arms crossed, squinting off into the distance with a sulky expression. He looked bitter…although, to be fair, he could have been looking away and ignoring the conversation because he's deaf and couldn't hear the conversation. You be the judge: Bitter, deaf, or both? Considering that when they arrived in Beijing and dashed for cabs, he bodychecked Kisha with his backpack, I think we can safely go with ''both.''

The first clue led everybody to a Roadblock at a foot massage parlor. Tammy was nervous about this, as she said she gets creeped out by other people's feet. (This led to a funny comment by Victor: ''I just imagine toes going, 'Tammy, we're waiting for you!''' I'm starting to warm to this team.) Little did she know that she'd be the recipient, not the donor: One teammate had to undergo a wildly painful foot massage for ten minutes. They dug knuckles so deep into people's soles that I thought they were going to come out the other side. I think if you ask for a Happy Ending at this place, they saw off your foot and then toss you a towel and say, ''Here, clean yourself up.''

At first I was down on the idea of this massage as a challenge: Nobody was going to bail on it, so it was a given that it would only take everybody ten minutes. And yet, it ended up being so entertaining to watch (as sadistic as that sounds) that I forgave it. Cara was brought to tears, and Kisha bit down on her jacket, making it look like someone was performing frontier medicine on her. I have seen my wife give birth twice, and I totally recognized the look on the nonparticipating partners' faces: It says, ''I can't believe how helpless I feel for the pain you're going through and how grateful I am for what you're doing for the two of us…and yet I wonder how hard you'd hit me if I were to blurt out that this whole thing is grossing me out a little bit.'' Jaime had no such censor. Rather than showing any empathy at all, she just kept warning Cara not to bail, until the writhing Cara finally yelled, ''Shut up, Jaime!'' Although, perhaps Jaime just didn't understand what Cara was trying to say with all her grunts and moans. And we all know how mad Jaime gets when she doesn't understand what someone's trying to say.

Cara finished first, then Kisha, leaving Tammy and Luke holding hands to share their pain. The show constantly cut from a player yelling in pain to a smiling masseuse (one of whom had fangs). A motif for this season's show is definitely, ''Locals enjoying the players' suffering and failures.'' From the laughing cheeseworkers in Switzerland to the maniacally laughing Gypsies and Siberians, the producers have gone out of their way to hire background characters whose sole purpose is to mock the players. Next season perhaps the show will up the ante: When players are sleeping at the pit stop, locals will knock on their hotel room doors and bolt, leaving behind a flaming bag of dog poop on the doorstep.

From here, teams searched for cabbies who knew how to get to an Olympic swimming pool. (While fruitlessly searching for a savvy cabbie, Kisha asked the same driver twice, leading her to say, ''They all look alike!'': Look, Kisha, I'm trying to stay on your side, but you are making it very difficult.) Victor and Tammy and the cheerleaders fought over a cab, leading Jaime to later comment, ''Seems without fail every time there's something slippery going on with Victor and Tammy.'' And yet this comment seemed entirely manufactured. The middle part, ''there's something slippery'' sounded odd, like it was yanked from an entirely different sentence said on a different day and jammed in another quote. What's troubling is that it's hard to imagine producers having to manipulate anything Jaime said to make her seem nasty. Nasty quotes just roll out of her like the alphabet rolls out of a five-year-old. But when Tammy then said, ''I don’t want to get in a fight with Jaime. She scares me,'' that sounded natural. And logical.

Then came the Detour: Sync or Swim. ''Sync'' was a synchronized jump off a three-meter board, and teams had to hit the water at the exact time. ''Swim'' was a relay, where the teammates had to trade off doing 100-meter legs until they finished 400 meters. This was linked to Michael Phelps, in that the partners' cumulative time was compared to his individual time—although, obviously, they weren't expected to beat it. His time was simply held up to underscore just how slow everybody was. And to make matters worse, they even dressed everybody up in a laser swimsuit exactly like him to underscore just how much they paled in comparison. It was like dressing a normal person up like Superman and shoving him out the window, saying, ''Go fly and fight crime.''

We immediately knew that Tammy/Victor and Kisha/Jen were going to be the weak teams. Turns out Tammy only learned how to swim a few weeks before starting the Race, and Jen is terrified of the water. Tammy and Victor, knowing their weakness, tried for the synchronized jump, and failed at it over and over and over. Who knew gravity was such a jerk? Seeing their difficulties, Kisha and Jen went for ''Swim.'' Kisha went first, and could barely make it through her leg; most of the time she just dragged herself along the floating guideline. Sign this girl for the 2012 Olympics—she'll dominate at the 100-meter flail! Watching her, Jen knew she wouldn’t fare much better, so they dashed back to the diving boards. But Jen was such a bad swimmer that on the few times they tried the jump, it didn't look like sje was going to be able to make it back to the side of the pool. I'm not sure how she was breathing, considering how she never lifted her face out of the water. The only difference between her and William Holden in the beginning of Sunset Blvd. was that her arms were kind of moving.

Meanwhile, the cheerleaders were doing okay, and not even the lung-constricting wetsuits could stop Jaime from hollering at Cara when she stopped to rest. And seasoned swimmers Margie and Luke, tore through the relay. ''After swimming that distance, I had a lot of respect for Michael Phelps,'' said Luke afterwards. Really, that was what tipped you over to begrudging respect, Luke? Before you matched him meter for meter, you had thought that perhaps he had won eight gold medals by just flopping around in a bathtub?

Both teams finished and took off, leaving Tammy and Victor to realize that their dreams of jumping off a board at the same exact time would never be realized. They then decided to take on ''Swim'' instead: I guess they didn't worry about shaming their family, considering their family never thought it important for them to learn how to swim in the first place.

At the same time, the water officially triumphed over Jen. She completely broke down, crouching by the side of the pool and saying she wanted to go home. Kisha calmly (if stiffly) urged her not to go out this way, and at least ''finish strong.'' I gotta say, I was touched, especially when Kisha finally got her sister to do the Swim, and wore a goofy life jacket to show solidarity with her sister. It was the dog-paddle version of ''I am Spartacus!'' Said a slightly teary Kisha, ''I think she feels like she let me down, but she didn't.'' Sigh: Kisha truly is the wind beneath Jen's waterwings.



While all this was going on, Margie gloated in her cab, ''Jen and Kisha, bye-bye. They're tough on land, but in the water, they're nothing.'' While it's fair to be competitive, this comment inadvertently came off as a little mean-spirited, considering what the rest of us had just seen. I'm sure Margie would agree that it's not nice to mock something that someone has grown up deeply insecure about, right? What, I'm just asking!

Victor suffered a blinding leg cramp trying to get into his cab, but it wasn't successful as a red herring: We knew Jen and Kisha were too far behind to catch up, even if Victor's leg fell off at the hip. The finishing order was a foregone conclusion, but we never saw three of the teams hit the pit stop because of a surprise ending: The leg was not over, and would continue into next week's penultimate episode. Normally, nonelimination legs frustrate me and leave me feeling unsatisfied. But last night's was the exception. A throughline to the episode had been Jaime complaining that they'd never won a leg. I'm never sure why players get worked up about this: Do they really want to win a trip after spending a month flying all over the planet? And yet she wanted it, bad, to the point that she was crying with anticipation in the cab to the pit stop.

And then they arrived. Phil gave them the good news—they were team number one. Jaime crumpled against Cara: Jaime had done it! She had proved herself to everybody who ever underestimated her. She was not to be messed with! Nobody would ever dare to speak in a crazy foreign language around her again, and…wait, what's that, Phil? You say this leg of the race is not over? We're still racing? Huh. That is a problem. Pardon me for a moment as I consider the correct scathing epithet to throw at you and your stupid, stupid eyebrow! Yes, all her triumph was melted away with one tip o' the hosting hat. And it was delightful. I knew I couldn’t stay mad at you, nonelimination round. (Make sure to check out Phil's blog on EW.com: He's a polite guy, but hopefully he'll cop to a small amount of smug satisfaction in stomping on Jaime's first-place dreams.)

So now we only have two more episodes: Next week a team will be eliminated, and three will be left battling it out for the million bucks. And then and only then will game be on! Who are you hoping to go next week, and who do you want to win the whole thing? Did Jen's bawling make you like her more? Or does it serve her right for entering an adventure competition while not knowing how to swim? So many questions, so little time…