An Amazing Ripoff On The Amazing Race

The Emmy award winning reality series, The Amazing Race, has seen it’s ups and downs during it’s many seasons but on the November 15th, 2009 episode it hit a big snag in the eyes of many viewers. Join us in our forum to discuss! But let’s set the stage. During a roadblock, which is a task only one team member can perform, the teams were instructed to go to this mysterious building in Estonia. They were sent with a keyring full of keys and instructed that only one key would open the door, but they had to use their key to open it and the keyhole was in a stone wall.

At one point during this task, Sam and Dan, brothers, used another teams key once it was known which key worked, to enter the building, obviously saving them an immeasurable amount of time. Then the Globetrotters team followed another team in, once that team had found which key worked, effectively skipping the assigned task of not even having to go through their keys. This also saved them an immeasurable amount of time.

Meanwhile, the father and son team of Gary and Matt, who placed last in the previous leg and had to do a Speed Bump, while not quite caught up due to that Speed Bump weren’t apparently that far behind unless the CBS editing made it look that way.

Gary and Matt followed the building/candleabra task as instructed, although it took some time due to Matt not knowing what a candleabra was. But they did use their keys. They ended up last again and were eliminated in tonight’s episode. The controversy? Noone knows how far behind the other teams they were. The team finish order this episode was Meghan & Cheyne, Sam & Dan, Globetrotters, Miss America & her husband, Gary and Matt. Normally when an instruction isn’t followed the team incurs a time penalty at the pit stop, where they have to wait that amount of time before being officially checked in. If other teams arrive before that time is up, they’re checked in ahead of the penalized teams.

By what the viewers saw tonight, both Samd & Dan and the Globetrotters should’ve incurred time penalties since they didn’t follow the instructions as written in the clue. Whether or not that would’ve saved Gary and Matt remains to be seen but considering in past seasons teams have incurred penalties for bizarre rule violations that seem to appear out of thin air, you’d think that with something this blatant, it would again be enforced.

And even if the penalty wouldn’t have saved Gary and Matt, it seems like the Amazing Race still had an amazing ripoff and that saddens this article writer because it’s such a great show.