Amazing Race 16 Winners (now with Spoiler!)
Last night was the finale of the 16th go-round of The Amazing Race. I only caught onto the series about five installments ago, which is about how it always goes with me and anything, but in my experience I’ve learned one unalterable truth about the Race: It’s a young pair that always wins. The only older people you’ll see anywhere near the finish line are the ones cheering on other people, well rested from having been eliminated so quickly. All six remaining contestants from this finale were 30 and under, so the rule of thumb worked, but was of no further use.
Two other main points jumped out at me from yesterday’s show:
1. Normally in the season finale, all three teams meet at the airport and have to catch the same flight to their last destination, the keep up the drama for as long as possible. One team, Dan and Jordan, showed up at the closed airport well after another team, Jet and Cord, the cowboys. But Jordan sneaked his backpack in line in front of them. When the ticket counter opened, Jordan and Dan cut in line, to the cowboys’ surprise. But it didn’t escalate – a few words were exchanged, but no punches. If I’d been cut in line, I’d have thrown the backpack clear across the airport, with or without Jordan attached. But the cowboys took the high road and let it go. Good on them. I think.
2. Also typical for the season finale is a memory challenge, where one or both team members have to recall details about the race. The details might be which countries they’d visited along the way, or the order in which other teams had been eliminated – which was the challenge last night. We soon saw that Jordan, an avid fan of the show, figured there would be such a puzzle and kept a list of eliminated teams. It seemed to take about three minutes and then they were on their way to the final pit stop. Which was terrible, because there was no challenge there at all.
Even with the helpful list, typically this memory puzzle is a two-step problem: You wouldn’t just organize names, you’d have to put in order objects, say, that they’d handled in each of the different countries. The first challenge I saw like this involved ordering flags from the course. That’s seems a worthy problem, forcing a runner to be clever in the moment instead of just keeping track of things en route. I admit it was savvy of Jordan, having seen the previous races, so really my issue is less with him than with the race itself.
Though I’m always strangely satisfied when a race ends, mostly because it’s one less thing I have to watch, I enjoy the show very much. I’m glad that in recent years, they’ve shown much less airport drama, which was always tedious, and have focused instead on footage of the countries themselves. The show has a winning formula, given all its Emmys, given also that I keep watching. But in cases like last night, it’s obvious they should change some things up a little bit more than they do. Take a note from fellow CBS shows Big Brother and Survivor and switch it up just enough year to year, keeping with the formula but evening the playing field and not just rewarding those who have watched for always watching.
For example:
I want to see these teams scale a fucking mountain. Climbing up a wall that’s 50 or 100 feet high is fine, and looks like a lot of fun. But if a million dollars is at stake, I want it to be about more than fun, and just slightly more demanding that something I or anyone else could do:
Teams must now fly 5,000 miles to Lhasa Gonggar Airport in Tibet. From the airport, they’ll take a taxi to the North Base Camp of Mount Everest. They’ll choose one of these sherpas to guide them to the summit, where they’ll find their next clue.
And then eventually:
The Second Step of Mount Everest’s North Col route. This scenic location, with 10,000 feet of exposure at its feet, is the pit stop for this leg of the race. Teams that plummet to their death on their way here, may be eliminated.
Maybe next year.
Anyway, here are the last couple of minutes of yesterday’s finale:
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