By  Arthur Perkins
 
Summaries of the 11 prior legs and 3 teams open the show. Teams start in Beijing and know that this is the leg for all those 1 million dollars and that they must be at the peak of their game. Only 1 team can win, except that all 3 teams are winners who’ve seen and done marvelous things circling the globe.

The release times from the pit stop are Tammy/Victor 915pm, Margie/Luke 1124pm, and Jaime/Cara 204am. That’s a huge range, rivaling the 6 hour lead of Kris/Jon starting the AR6 finale vs. Adam/Rebecca and more than Nick/Starr’s 5.5 hours over Ken/Tina.

However, all fans of the Amazing Race know that BUNCHING will erase it right from the beginning of this episode. The teams learn they are headed for Kahului airport on Maui, Hawaiian islands. There are no late-night flights so all teams can take the same morning flight to Tokyo and then an evening flight to Honolulu to get to Maui around 630am the same day (due to crossing the International Date Line west to east). There is no hard evidence of which flights each team took. Teams exit the plane at high speed and then try to impart their urgency to their taxi driver.

The first task is at Fleming Beach in Kihei (Maui Beach Access point 118), where they handle the key chores of preparation for a Hawaii luau. They start by rubbing oil and seasonings on the 145 pound dead pig and attaching it to bamboo poles and then carry it 200 yards down the beach to the luau pits, a bed of very hot coals. They set it down on a bed of palm fronds and season it, closing it with more palm fronds. Then they close the pit with sand and let it bake. That earns them the next clue. Margie/Luke started last, but both Jaime/Cara and Tammy/Victor falter. It was Cara and Tammy that lacked arm strength, but Margie was a trooper, able to hold the pole on her shoulders to transport it. She is the Bionic Woman indeed. Margie/Luke take the lead leaving, with Tammy/Victor next and Jaime/Cara last. While Jaime states multiple times that Tammy is a weakling and can be beaten, they can’t manage to do it and Jaime utters “This is how we lose $1 million.” She’s wrong, as there is worse to come. Victor discovered he had put palm fronds over the pig that did not belong, so they are dug out.

Next is pilot a personal watercraft along the coast of Maalaea Bay (Maui Shoreline Access point #36, the one nearest to the cross-island north/south road) to a marked area where 4 clues can be found attached to a total of 100 buoys. Margie/Luke kept their lead and finished before the other 2 teams arrived. There was a 4.0% chance each try of getting the first clue, 3.0% for the second clue and 2.0% each try for the third clue. That means that the first team to find one will have taken an average of 25 tries, but the third team needs 50 tries. Jaime/Cara take 2nd and Tammy/Victor 3rd.

The next clue sends teams to find a Surfboard Farm at Kaohu Farms Peahi slightly inland from the north coast of Maui near the northern end of the Hana Highway, infamous for its 20 miles of continuous curves further south. Margie/Luke maintained a healthy lead, Jaime/Cara’s taxi driver did not know where to go and took them to the wrong surfboard farm. They spot the road sign Hana 35 straight, Haiku right 3. They stop and call in to the driver’s dispatcher and she says “tell people that I am not their personal concierge” and refuses to help. Jaime gets smart and calls the police, who say Kapkahula is at Mile marker 16 on the Hana Highway.  Then the driver needs to refill his gas tank.  When Jaime this time says this is how we lose the race, she is quite right. By the time they get to the ROADBLOCK “Who’s ready to relive it?”, arranging surfboards in order of when the episodes represented occurred from a large pile of surfboards, they were a substantial margin behind. There was a frame with 11 slots, one for each leg of the race. When a surfboard has a representation of any part of that episode then that surfboard needs to be put in the slot for it. There is a judge who instantly says right or wrong. The chosen ones were Luke, Victor and Jaime since physical strength moving the surfboards was an important part of this task.  In the middle of all this, Luke and Victor both strip off their shorts; regrettably, Jaime does not.

The logos for the surfboards by leg were:

1 Locarno St. Church of San Antonio

2 Ruhpolding Gondola

3 Romanian Gymnastics

4 Krasnoyarsk Yenisei River Dam

5 Novosibirsk Lada automobile

6 Jaipur pit stop nose flutes

7 Phuket Esso the tiger at the zoo

8 Bangkok Long-Tailed Boats

9 Guilin Cormorant

10 Beijing Reflexology

11 Beijing Delicacies—scorpions

Luke had attacked this problem-solving exercise in a positive manner. He had filled in a majority of the slots before Victor even arrived in second place. Luke got the first 9 without difficulty, in the order leg 1, 4, 8, 7, 6, 5, 3, 4, 9, then 2. Getting 10 and 11, both Beijing, confounded and frustrated him. Victor steadily progressed and placed 10, 11, 4, 2, 6, 9, 7?, 3?, 1?, 8, 5. Jaime finally got going and she was completing them at a rate quicker than Victor. Finally Luke moves one from slot 11 where it was wrong to slot 11 where he had already tried over a dozen without success. This time it is right, so #11 is all that remains. Victor needs only #5 and Jaime only 2  places. Victor finds it first and Tammy/Victor leave in first place. Now Jaime is coming on strong and she is down to the end. Luke helps her by telling her the final surfboard placing for her, the church at #1. She reciprocates by helping Luke in a way that should never be allowed if it wasn’t already clear that neither team could win after Margie urged Luke to work with Jaime. Jaime showed Luke each of the surfboards in order so he could compare and see what was missing. Jaime/Cara leave in second place, with Margie/Luke minutes behind them.

All teams take their taxis to the King Kamehameha Golf Club maybe 15 miles away. A short sprint takes them to the finish line where all the eliminated teams are waiting to cheer the teams as they finish. Tammy/Victor arrive first and get the 3 continents, 9 countries, 40,000 miles and 22 days speech from Phil. Jaime/Cara arrive second and Margie/Luke third. During the taxi ride, Luke required a lot of assurance from his mother that he had done well even though they did not win Amazing Race 14. He was tantalizingly close to doing so and he would have earned it by doing well throughout the race. However, Tammy/Victor and Jaime/Cara also did well and they experienced less of a frustration factor on the critical ROADBLOCK. I think these are the right 3 teams to be there and I think the best team, judged by the record of victories in prior legs, won.

I think we have witnessed the curse of the international tax driver’s union. That union took Christie/Jodi out in Jaipur and now they have ended Jaime/Cara’s dreams of being the first female/female team to win the Amazing Race U.S. and win the $1,000,000. Their performance was exemplary except on the pig-carry, where they lost less than 5 minutes because of the short distance, and the drive to the ROADBLOCK, where they lost an undetermined amount but probably 15 minutes or more. Jaime ended up finishing only slightly behind Victor if the time sequencing of the episode presentation is approximately accurate. Why did they finish second? There is nobody to point to except the taxi driver. Karma bites back.

(Image courtesy of CBS)

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