‘The Amazing Race’s’ Michelle and Sean on their 4-hour Roadblock and getting Phil Keoghan ‘in the ropes’
The fourth leg of “The Amazing Race 36” started off promisingly for Michelle and Sean Clark. The married aerobics instructors breezed through the dance Detour in Medellín, Colombia, but their momentum came to a screeching halt at the Roadblock. Michelle took so long placing the statue locations on a map of Botero Plaza that darkness had fallen by the time they got the clue and arrived at the Pit Stop in last — or “first backwards.”
“I did have a watch, which is funny, but I didn’t look at it. It had to be three or four hours,” Michelle tells Gold Derby (watch above). “It felt like 100 [times]. You can’t count. As I see it on the screen, I’m like, ‘Oh.’ I couldn’t do that in person. It literally felt like 100.”
“I think you went back and forth 100 times and you asked [the judge] 19 times,” Sean adds. “Because literally it was 100 times. I never saw anybody run that much ever. The statues are around the corner. It’s like a New York block. It’s like this long block. You go around the corner. You look at the statue, then you run all the way back and then you look the map. She did that at least 100 times. It had to be.”
SEE ‘The Amazing Race’s’ Anthony and Bailey explain their multiple Detour switcheroos
Like several teams, Michelle and Sean were deceived by the word “artsy” in the vague clue at first, thinking the Roadblock had to do with arts and crafts. “Had I known it was memorization, I would’ve jumped at it,” Sean says. Michelle struggled to figure out how to orient herself on the layout of the map.
“When a dance teacher teaches a dance, they teach you the same way you’re gonna be learning the dance. Our side was almost like, when you figured it out, then you had to figure out that it was almost like a dance teacher who turned around to teach you the dance facing you,” she explains. “If you were on the side, once you figured out where you were orientation-wise, you were in the place where you could just place it like this. So I did that, but I had to realize it was turned around on the other side as well.”
Though they came in last, the couple did pull off an “Amazing Race” first: They got Phil Keoghan to jump rope at the Pit Stop. He was Double Dutching so hard that the rope took out a cameraman. “That’ll make the cut,” the host quipped.
“It was a tough episode, but it was a dope ending,” Sean says. “While it was tough that we lost, we just had a great time. We were screaming at the screen. We saw Phil in the ropes! We were like, ‘Oh, my God! Phil is in the ropes!’ Like I didn’t know. I was like, ‘Phil is in the ropes!’ We were very excited about that because that was our goal too.”
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