by Victor Jih
Winner of The Amazing Race Season 14

The Amazing Race continued this week in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.  It also marked the return to the more traditional Amazing Race format of ROUTE INFO (grabbing a clue from the mouth of a water dragon puppet), a DETOUR (hauling a ceramic animal or descrambling a Vietnamese word), and a ROADBLOCK (disassembling two used VCRs).  Herb and Nate (Team Globetrotter) finished first, barely ahead of Meghan and Cheyne (Team San Diego), while Marcy and Ron sauntered to a third leg elimination.  Like last week, here are some random thoughts from someone who was just there.
 
1.  THE AMBIGUOUS CLUE
At the beginning of this week’s installment of the race, we see our first non-traditional clue.  Typically, teams receive a yellow clue envelope with a slip of paper that spells out what teams are supposed to do next.  Sometimes, though, the racers encounter a clue that contains no words, but requires you to figure out what to do next.  In some of the original races, teams would get a miniature replica of a monument or a picture of a person to track down.  This week, the racers received a “bullet” and had to know to untwist the bullet to retrieve a “stamp” inside the bullet which depicted the next destination.  Most of the racers seemed to figure this out pretty quickly, but Lance and Keri got delayed while they tried to figure out what to do with the bullet.  The show wasn’t clear, but it almost looked like Lance handed the bullet to one of the employees at the puppet theater, who then untwisted the bullet for him and gave him the stamp, but Lance and Keri still were not clear what to do with the stamp.  They did not get derailed for too long, though, and quickly proceeded to the next destination.
 
I like these types of clues, but I can tell you they are very nerve-racking for racers.  In Season 14, racers received a similar type of clue—a picture of a random gorilla in Phuket.  The problem with this type of a clue is that we were completely dependent on locals knowing the right answer.  We all guessed that the gorilla might be in the zoo (the right answer), but obviously no team wanted to gamble based on a guess.  We spent hours walking around the airport asking people if they knew, and got increasingly nervous when local after local did not know.  We finally confirmed with three different people that the gorilla was at Patong Beach (which was totally wrong and half an hour in the wrong direction).  Overconfident with our secret information, we asked the flight attendants to throw other teams off our trail by telling them it was the zoo (ironically, the right answer).  As we raced out of the airport, my sister told our taxi driver not to tell other taxis where we were going.  He said “ok” and then proceeded to tell the other teams we were going to Patong Beach.  My sister was not happy with him, but thanks to his disobedience, the other taxis proceeded to follow us to the wrong location.  If they hadn’t, we would have been an hour out of the way and alone.  In short, it’s not always a bad thing when taxi drivers do not do what you ask them to do.  The stamp this week did not prove to be too confusing and every team identified the location eventually.  These types of clues, however, can be very challenging because they are designed to be ambiguous.  Hopefully, we’ll see more of these.
 
2.  WHEN YOUR BRAIN STOPS WORKING
I sympathized with Lance and Keri for most of the episode because this was their bad “race leg.”  Every team has one—where everything goes wrong.  Lance and Keri got confused at the start with what city they were in (they thought they were in Ho Chi Minh City when they were two hours away), got confused over what to do with the bullet and the stamp, and even when racing to the pit stop, could not find the mat and Phil.  It is easy for us to sit on our couches, in the comfort of our living rooms, after a nice Sunday dinner, and with the benefit of omniscience (viewers get the benefit of a detailed explanation from Phil and the advantage of seeing what every other team decides) to scream at the television and say “Come on!  It’s simple!  How can you be so wrong?!”  On the race, however, teams are exhausted, hungry, and anxious and the race is designed to test decision-making under extreme stress.  Every racer will experience a time when the brain stops functioning and common sense disappears.  Tammy and I went into the race recognizing that fact, but thought we could avoid disaster since we did not think both of our brains would stop working at the same time.  (If you saw Romania, though, even that does not prevent a horrible mistake since in a situation of extreme stress the not-thinking person—me—doesn’t always realize they aren’t thinking or trust the thinking person.)
 
The real question is not how to avoid turning dumb.  That’s impossible.  It happens.  It’s part of being a fallible human being, which is what guarantees the race will be interesting to watch.  The real question is how to handle that eventuality.  What we learned after Romania (where I turned dumb and could not rationally accept anything my sister was saying), was that we needed to do things with at least one other team.  Having four brains instead of one decreases the chance of a colossal mistake.  It also makes it easier to listen to reason, since you can hear it from people without the baggage of your relationship.  It still enables a victory because you can always complete a task faster or sprint ahead for the mat at the end, and it provides insurance in case both teams make a horrible mistake.  It is easier said than done, though.  We started Romania saying we would perform the vampire detour with the flight attendants.  When we got to the location, we were ahead and the flight attendants were not there yet.  We forged ahead.  We should have just waited a few minutes! 
 
3.  THE DETOUR CHOICE
Teams faced their first detour this week—a physical task moving ceramic animals or a more mental task involving descrambling a Vietnamese word.  Every team chose the physical task except for Marcy and Ron.  It seems like this detour choice sealed Marcy and Ron’s fate, since it dropped them to last place where they stayed for the rest of the leg.  It is always easy in hindsight to say “oh, this was the obvious detour choice” but racers are given so little information about the choices that it’s not always as obvious as choosing the Chinese-speaking task because you speak Chinese.  In preparing for the race, I spent a lot of time looking at the detour choices from prior seasons to come up with a decision-making rubric that we could follow when making snap judgments.  Like most teams, we shied away from tasks that required blind luck or random guessing and tasks that depended on other people or animals.  I think that’s why almost every team chose the physical task—not knowing Vietnamese would require either guessing or the verbal abilities of a Vietnamese stranger.  I’m always curious, though, what “rubric” or “rules” other teams followed in choosing detour tasks.  Any care to share?
 
4.  THINKING OUT OF THE BOX
It is amazing how, under stress, we make assumptions about what we can/cannot do or what we are allowed to do.  One of the skills tested on the race is the ability to think creatively out of the box.  In our season, we assumed we were “required” to use the cheese-carrying devices in the traditional way.  It took Steve to think out of the box, disassemble the devices, and turn them into cheese sleds.  At the vampire coffins, the clue only said to unlock the first lock with the key provided.  Teams assumed we had to unlock every lock, so both Cara/Jaime and Tammy/I were derailed when our coffins had missing keys.  Cara/Jaime, in unaired footage, creatively solved that problem by ripping open the coffin with their bare hands.  Tammy/I spent at least 30 minutes looking for the key in the leaves on the hill.  This week, I think Marcy and Ron got stuck at the detour because they assumed they had to unscramble the letters on their own, by looking at their surroundings and figuring out familiar Vietnamese word combinations.  What they needed to do (according to Phil) was simply get someone to do it for them.  That’s what they did eventually, but it was interesting to see how long they tried to figure it out on their own.  I don’t know what really happened, but I imagine their brains were telling them that’s what they were supposed to do.  If they were really thinking out of the box, I think they would have taken the approach taken by the racers in Season 13—simply write down every possibility and read them all to the clue holder.  Here, there were six letters, two of which were vowels.  It wouldn’t be “descrambling” to a word-game purist, but you could write down every combination you could think of, and read all of them to the clue holder until you read the right one.  Marcy strikes me as a purist.  She wanted to actually learn Vietnamese so she could figure out the scrambled word.  The “thinking out of the box” award this week needs to go to Lance.  At the roadblock, every racer assumed you had to disassemble the VCR by carefully removing each screw since a power screwdriver was provided.  Lance literally tore through the challenge by tearing apart the machine with his bare hands.  The task was accomplished unconventionally and no one cared.  By not assuming the task had to be completed “properly” or in a particular way, Lance was able to make up a lot of time and saved his team from elimination.
 
5.  CLASSIC MISTAKES
I think one of the reasons the race is so appealing is how it reaffirms how similar all of us are.  Regardless of our background (basketball players, cheerleaders, flight attendants, race, etc.), we still make the same dumb mistakes that all human beings do.  Season after season, teams fall prey to the same mistakes.  Cognitive psychologists should have a field day with the Amazing Race!  There were at least four classic Amazing Race mistakes this leg.  RULE #1—Don’t run aimlessly when you don’t know where you are going.  For some reason, every racer likes to run full-speed ahead even if it’s in the wrong direction.  In our season, that proved to be disastrous in China when three teams raced out of the detour in search of a “u-turn location” that was right there.  But by running farther and farther away, they made it more and more impossible to find it.  RULE #2—There’s no logical reason to move from one random street to the next in search of a cab.  The likelihood of a cab coming to where you are is probably just as good as the next random location you move to.  RULE #3—Don’t just look in front of you; things might be behind/next to you.  Racers (us included) always get tunnel vision and can only see things that are right in front of us.  RULE #4—Don’t impulsively grab the item that is right in front of you.  Justin and Zev grabbed the most difficult ceramic animal to carry—the giraffe.  Generally once you pick one item, it’s too late and you cannot change items.  The race exploits our natural tendency to grab-and-go.  Just as Justin and Zev grabbed the giraffe and then regretted it, I know both Margie/Luke and us grabbed rickshaws in Phuket that had flat tires just because they were the ones in front of us.  We never even realized it! 
 
6.  INTER-TEAM ALLIANCES
I really liked the moment when Dan stopped racing and helped Maria/Tiffany with their broken cart.  Dan’s genuinely nice guy character really shined through.  Sam was on board and didn’t yell at Dan.  And both Maria and Tiffany showed what great sports they were when they told Sam and Dan to just keep going.  Though neither team was thinking strategy at the time, I see the beginnings of a real alliance between these two teams.  In fact, it seems like these are the only two teams who are forging a bond.  As you can tell from my random thought #2, I’m a strong believer in the value of inter-team cooperation and I’m curious to see how this “alliance” helps going forward.  It does seem like these two teams are enjoying each other’s company more than others.  In our experience, sometimes that’s a function of which teams you happen to spend most of your time racing with.  In their case, it might also be a function of Maria and Tiffany’s malfunctioning gaydar.
 
7.  TEAM ZEBRA
Wow—Did Brian and Ericka really catapult from last place to fourth place?  The team seemed to be all business this week and worked together tremendously well.  If they are anything like my sister and I, I imagine they had a heart-to-heart at the pit stop.  Whatever they did, there was an immediate turnaround.  They didn’t bicker; they were mutually supportive; and they were having fun.  As soon as Brian attacked the dragon puppet with no hesitation, I knew they had their game faces on.  Being in last place, it would have been easy for Brian/Ericka to race with a lot of stress and anxiety.  I know for Tammy and I, it was always easier to race from the front than in the back of the pack—especially since you don’t know how far ahead other teams are getting.  But Brian/Ericka were not fazed at all.  Congratulations.
 
8.  UNEXPLAINED BEHAVIOR
Anyone know why Mika/Canaan chose to dance for the dragon puppets?  I have no clue.  Maybe it is because they are country music stars?
 
9.  A MATTER OF PACE
As kids, we learn that “slow and steady” wins the race.  But I think that’s only something parents/teachers say because they are worried their kids are “slow.”  I was trying to figure out why Marcy and Ron were eliminated this leg, and I could not pinpoint a particular “big mistake” or “fatal error.”  You can say it was the detour choice, but I don’t think that detour option was so disproportionately difficult that choosing it necessarily meant elimination.  Instead, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that Marcy/Ron were just racing at a slower—more deliberate/methodical pace.  On a leg when every other team was “rush/rush/rush”; the winner was decided by a foot race; and the second to last place team was decided by a foot race, Marcy/Ron just seemed to go extremely slow.  I felt like I was watching Anita and Arthur from Season 13.  They didn’t do anything badly; just slowly.  I know we can all think of instances and examples where the rush-rush-rush team makes a bad mistake and loses.  But I think those are the exceptions; in a race “fast is still good” and “slow loses.”  In the elimination station footage, Marcy & Ron explain to Jessica & Garrett that they felt “The race was really beginning.”  I think that was their fatal mistake—the race had already begun long before in the concrete LA River, when Eric & Lisa were eliminated.  On the basis of pace, the teams to watch have to be the Globetrotters (who are fast!) and Meghan/Cheyne.  Based on three legs, both teams (Globetrotters: 5th +3rd + 1st  and Meghan/Cheyne: 1st +6th +2nd) have the lowest combined placements (a cumulative placement total of 9).  If you believe past performance predicts future performance, then I’d worry about Mika & Canaan, who have the highest cumulative placement total of 25 (10th + 8th + 7th), being eliminated in Cambodia.  As any student of the race will tell you though, this methodology has zero validity.  I hope Mika & Canaan are not eliminated because I want to see if they continue to dance at random moments on the race.
 
10.  PASSPORT PREVIEW
In the scenes from the “next episode,” we are told a team loses their passports again!  I know it’s next week, but I have to say “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?  THREE SEASONS IN A ROW!”  Dallas loses passports in Season 13.  Jen/Kisha lose passports in Season 14 (but recover).  And now another team loses their passports in Season 15.  It must be global warming.  I have no clue which team is about to face the wrath of millions of Americans who will sanctimoniously judge them for making such a bad mistake.  But before we all join in that collective fit of mobocracy, I thought I’d share a little known fact.  I almost lost our passports in Siberia.  We were going from one airline counter to the next, and I didn’t even realize that I had left our passports on the other of the side of the airport until one of the airline employees ran after us to tell us we had left all of our money, clues, and travel documents.  So it can happen to the best of us.
 
Next week we’re in Cambodia.  Until then…
 

The Amazing Race airs Sunday nights at 8pm ET on CBS.

(Image courtesy of CBS)

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