The Amazing Race
News (Page 3)

When racing around the world, time is a factor. Same goes for when airing a show about a race around the world.

Hence, The Amazing Race's twelfth season will run two episodes shorter and drop the course's non-elimination Pit Stops in an effort to "create more excitement," executive producer Jonathan Littman told reporters at the Television Critics Association summer press tour last Friday, according to the Orlando Sentinel and Reality TV World.

Non-elimination Pit Stops have been part of The Amazing Race since the reality competition series first premiered in Fall 2001. For the show's first two seasons, clues given to teams before each Pit Stop ended with the statement "The last team to arrive will be eliminated" - except in non-elimination legs, which made it easy for teams (and home viewers) to distinguish when they were coming up.

The non-elimination pocess got a little trickier for The Amazing Race's next two editions, as clues preceding the Pit Stop initially featured the same "will be" phrasing until midway through the competition, after which "The last team to arrive may be eliminated" clues were substituted to create some uncertainty as to whether the next location was in fact a non-elimination Pit Stop.

Up until The Amazing Race's fourth season, teams that finished last at non-elimination Pit Stops were not penalized.

The Amazing Race's fifth season was the first to use the phrase "The last team to arrive may be eliminated" for every leg except the first - a format that has since been used up through The Amazing Race: All-Stars, the eleventh edition that aired this past spring.

Starting with The Amazing Race 10, teams arriving last at a non-elimination leg kept their clothes and money, and were instead "marked for elimination," which meant they had to arrive at the next Pit Stop in first. If they failed to do so, they'd incur a 30-minute penalty, allowing other teams to check-in before them and possibly spelling the end to their game.

Meanwhile, Littman is excited about the next edition.

"The countries are very exotic," he said. "We're going to a couple of places that I don't even know where they are on the map. I've had to go look them up... This is a tough group [of teams]. They'll be younger. We still have a good balance."

CBS announced it has ordered another installment of The Amazing Race - but the twelfth season of the four-time Emmy-Award winning reality competition series won't be part of the initial 2007-2008 primetime programming lineup that the network unveiled on Wednesday.

Instead, it's scheduled for a midseason debut.

Fall 2007 will mark the first time since The Amazing Race's sixth season that the reality series will not be part of CBS' initial fall television season schedule.

After The Amazing Race 5 delivered impressive ratings during its Summer 2004 broadcast, CBS decided to delay the premiere of the show's sixth season - which was originally scheduled to be part of the network's initial fall schedule but air in a dismal Saturday night time period - until the ratings failure of one of its new Fall 2004 shows created an opening on CBS' higher-profile weeknight primetime schedule.

The Amazing Race 6 eventually premiered in November 2004 as a Tuesday night replacement. Since then, the show's next five installments have followed the twice-a-year Spring/Fall programming schedule that most popular broadcast reality competition franchises are broadcast on.

Fresh off a victory in The Amazing Race: All Stars, Eric and Danielle sat down with Reality TV World to discuss their victory. While the couple is no longer dating, they still get along well ...

Reality TV World: How does it feel to be the winners of The Amazing Race: All-Stars considering you both never raced as teammates before?
Danielle: It's pretty amazing, huh?
Eric: I'm not sure what it says, if it makes a good case for either way, you know? I didn't really know what to expect. I'm sure the other teams didn't know what to do with us as a team. They had never seen us race before.

Reality TV World: How did it feel when you crossed the finish line?
Danielle: Shock...
Eric: Disbelief...
Danielle: ... being so thankful that it's over. We couldn't believe it. We really were shocked. It's an exciting thing. You don't even know how to react honestly. You want to cry -- but then you're like so excited -- and all these things are going through your head. It's crazy.

Reality TV World: How do you think your old Season 9 partners feel about it?
Danielle: I'm sure [her The Amazing Race 9 partner Dani Torchio] was maybe a little jealous, but she never really told me that. When we talked she was very supportive of [Eric and I]. She was happy for me the whole time, so I'm sure she was a little upset but she never told me that.
Eric: [His The Amazing Race 9 partner Jeremy Ryan] was happy at that point. But I'm sure... I know he's a little upset because we did a really good job on our season and I know he wanted to be there and I just felt like he deserved it. You know, happy but sad.

Reality TV World: How about the other teams? Did they voice any complaints that a team that had never raced together before got to compete in All-Stars?
Eric: Not to our faces.
Danielle: Yeah, not to our faces. I'm sure they had their opinions.
Eric: I'm sure some of the teams... I don't think we had any kind of an advantage or anything at all, by any means. I think actually it was probably a disadvantage because the other teams already knew how to work together and Danielle and I had no clue. Obviously there's a lot of friction there so... It just turned out we got a little luckier than some of the other people.

Reality TV World: Eric were you surprised at how Danielle's gossiping paid off for your team during the final challenge?
Eric: You know what? Actually, it was kind of fitting just how it all came down to it. I felt like throughout the first part of the race, I was doing a lot of the work and she was, you know, holding her own but I was making most of the decisions.
Danielle: He's lying. It's all me! It's all me!
Eric: I did all the driving and all the map work. She was just kind of following behind me and as it came down to it, if she wouldn't have talked so much, then we wouldn't have won. So she gets as much credit as anybody for how we did.

Reality TV World: How long were you at All-Stars finish line before second-place finishers Dustin Seltzer and Kandice Pelletier arrived?
Danielle: About 10 minutes.
Eric: Ten minutes or so. It felt like longer. I don't know. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes. Maybe it wasn't that long, but...
Danielle: About that long...
Eric: ... it felt like a long time.

Reality TV World: Going into the twelfth leg and having been the only All-Stars team to be Yielded, how did you like your chances of winning the entire race? Did you feel like underdogs?
Eric: Well in the last leg we felt... Once we were there, we felt like we could actually win. Up until then, as we were getting pulled off of airplanes, missing flights, getting pulled off of standby, Yielded...
Danielle: Yeah, I mean we were definitely underdogs. It was ridiculous. There were times when we thought we weren't going to win, and you know we'd get back into the game. Up until the last second, we didn't know.
Eric: I thought it was like every time we made some ground up and caught back up, something else would happen and we'd get hosed.
Danielle: Hosed...

Reality TV World: Danielle, why so much trouble with the GPS during the twelfth leg's Roadblock?
Danielle: Did it look like I had some trouble with it?

Reality TV World: Yeah it did.
Danielle (laughing): Oh you mean [when] I had a nervous breakdown? Oh... okay. You know what it was, we knew that was like the last leg before the Top 3 and my biggest fear this whole race was having all the pressure on me... like, [to] do a lot of Roadblocks. So I guess it was like doing it, I'm not really good with directions as it is, and then having all the pressure of knowing if I messed up it was all on me. I think it was both those things going through my head that made me freak out. Directions definitely aren't my thing and apparently even when an arrow's pointing in the direction I still can't follow it. I need to waste money on a Tom-Tom or a GPS system for my car (laughing).

Continue Reading...

Three teams remained. So did a $1 million prize for earing the title as the ultimate All-Stars during a season of All-Stars on The Amazing Race.

Which team took home the prize?

Was it Charloa and Mirna, despite their physical limitations? Dustin and Kandice, despite the fact that no all-female pairing has ever won? Or Eric and Danielle, despite their tendency to not always work as a team?

Check out our season finale episode guide now and find out.

Here's the prediction by People magazine of who will come out on top tomorrow night after the season finale of The Amazing Race: All Stars ...

Our first pick to win would have been Rob and Amber. Love that couple no matter who they're double crossing. But among the teams who made it to the final three, we have to go with Charla and Myrna.

Myrna's a bully to her partner/cousin, two-faced to the other competitors, and what's with that bizarre accent she uses to talk to anyone who's not American? ("My friend! Take me to the aer-o-port! Rapido!") But Charla? Love her. She's only four feet tall, but may as well be Shaquille O'Neal for her strength in performing detours and roadblocks.

Sure, it's an amusing sight to see such a small person climb up 11 stories of bamboo scaffolding, drag a mannequin through the streets of Warsaw, and - best of all - lead a horse while wearing a suit of armor. But it's also hugely impressive. If she brings her A-game, which she always does, Eric and Danielle and those cocky Beauty Queens don't stand a chance in the finale. The girl deserves to win the million bucks.

Too bad she has to split it.

They were just the last ones to arrive on The Amazing Race. And, consequently, Danny and Oswalk heard Phil Keoghan tell them, "You've been eliminated."

But the lovable losers still found time to talk with Reality TV News Online. Here's a portion of that interview:

RealityTVNewsOnline: Did you do anything to prepare for The Amazing Race: All-Stars?
Danny: Oswald joined the gym (laughs).
Oswald: We did absolutely nothing to prepare for All-Stars. Got a hair cut, manicure...

RNO: Did you learn anything on your first race that made you change your strategy or do anything else differently for All-Stars?
Oswald: We figured that people after us had picked up on the tricks of going to the concierge and the travel agents â€" things like that. We tried to do things from our hotel room, instead of doing it so public. A lot of the research that we did, we did in hotels and not in the visible areas.

RNO: Did that help you?
Oswald: In some cases it did. We were able to secure and find out about the flight going from Kuala Lumpur to Hong Kong. We investigated and found out about the airport by calling there. When we got to the airport, we managed to get to the offices before anyone else did.

RNO: You guys put on a consistently strong showing throughout the race. What happened the last few legs?
Oswald: We truly believe that this race is 25% ingenuity, 25% physical, and 50% luck. We got very unlucky with our taxi driver in Macau.
Danny: Yep.

RNO: And that's what put you behind?
Oswald: That is absolutely what put us behind.

RNO: Do you regret making the deal with Dustin & Kandice and Yielding Eric & Danielle?
Danny: Absolutely not!
Oswald: That was actually something that we needed to do. We needed to do it to survive. We didn't do it with any malice. That was something provided to us by the race. And it was there to be used.

RNO: Do you really feel that Yielding someone gives you bad karma?
Danny: No.
Oswald: Not after we saw who made the top three.

RNO: On the race, did you have a chance to talk to Eric & Danielle about why you Yielded them?
Oswald: Not on the race. After we finished the race and we settled ourselves into our regular lives, Eric did reach out to us and apologize ahead of time for the things he said about us when we Yielded him.

RNO: How did you feel when you saw what he said?
Oswald: I haven't seen that episode yet because I was traveling last Sunday on business and I wasn't back home until yesterday. But from what Danny tells me, it wasn't very flattering.

RNO: No. He was a little harsh. I've heard that he's apologized to other teams too, in advance.
Oswald: Sure, whatever! He apologized, but --
Danny: You can't apologize the rest of your life for being the way that you are. You have to own what you do and be responsible for it.

RNO: How close did you guys come to missing the plane to Guam?
Oswald: Very close. If we had not made that flight â€" Danny and I talked about it â€" we basically would stay in Tokyo and check into a fabulous hotel and enjoy Tokyo.

RNO: So, it was within minutes?
Oswald: Yeah.

Continue Reading...

In the penultimate week of this season's Amazing Race, we were left with three teams heading into next Sunday's season finale.

Before a pairing could be eliminated, however, squads had to navigate their way around the jungles of Guam to carry out local military missions.

With Oswald and Danny likely to say goodbye - due to their 30-minute penalty unless they win this stage - the pressure was really on. Did they overcome it? Who will we see next week on the show? And who do you wish to be crowned champion?

Check out our episode guide for this week's Amazing Race now.

For Hayden Kristianson, married life is about to become a reality.

The Chewelah native, who appeared with boyfriend Aaron Crumbaugh on The Amazing Race, will got married to him in Spokane, Washington on Saturday with a few former cast mates on hand.

"It was kind of love at first sight," she says. "We hit it off immediately, and we've been inseparable ever since."

Thanks to her friend Kelly Goldsmith, who appeared on Survivor: Africa and was doing casting for The Amazing Race, the couple landed a gig as a team on the sixth season of the CBS reality TV show, which aired in 2004-05.

It was a bit of a stretch for Kristianson, who wasn't a fan of reality TV and "not the biggest daredevil in the world â€" I'm not very good with heights, and I don't like to fly."

But now, she says, "I'm really glad we did it."

After they were eliminated in the season finale in Xi'an, China, Crumbaugh surprised her on-air by popping the question â€" which, she notes, ranked number-five on In Touch magazine's list of most romantic proposals.

Fellow competitor Kristy Jensen wass a bridesmaid in the's ceremony, while the second-place finishers, Kris Perkins and Jon Buehler, were among the guests.

But will we ever see these two on TV again?

Crumbaugh says he'd be interested in a cooking show, "and I would definitely do Survivor. But that's about it."

Sunday night marked the third-t0-last episode of this year's The Amazing Race All-Stars competition. For some, the elimination of Rob and Amber left the remaining few weeks a complete bore; for others, it was cause for celebration.

No matter which camp you fall into, you can at least admire the looks of Dustin and Kandice. Errr, we mean, feel the excitement as the race draws to a close.

With that in mind, check out our Episode Guide now.