The Amazing Race Recap

Having a Baby’s Gotta Be Easier Than This

By David Mumpower

April 28, 2009

Women always look exactly like this when I rub them.

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While all of the jostling for seat positioning on the plane is ongoing, the cheerleaders arrive at the airport. Jaime immediately walks up to Luke and gives him a big hug. Say what you will about the demon spawn, she and her teammate have been very nice to Luke and his mother. Of course, this could all be an act to convince the world that she is not Keyser Soze after the face lift and sex change from the Verbal Kint look.

The teams all get on the same flight and leave the airport at roughly the same time. The four contestants in the bitch-off share another moment of alarmingly intense hatred (that's five!) as one team passes the other. In the end, the last place contestants at the start of the episode, the cheerleaders, are the first to arrive for their happy ending, err, curative massage. Five minutes after she arrives, Cara (Jaime wusses out and doesn't do this one) is in tears. As her sympathetic teammate shouts, "If you say uncle, I'll hurt you!" (does no one around her having any holy water to douse her with?), Cara grabs a towel to drown down her screams of agony. Kisha & Jen arrive a few moments later and experience some discomfort as well, but Cara has clearly lost the lottery here. Her masseuse is sheer evil, reveling in every scream and smiling menacingly into the camera. Eli Roth, the director of Hostel, will probably base his next horror villain on her.

After more than a few tears, Cara completes her "therapeutic massage" and the cheerleaders race to the next challenge. It's a swimming and diving challenge at Guangcai Natatorium, a preparatory swimming facility. Obviously, the ten minute massage challenge offers no way for teams to pass one another, meaning that the order is the same once everyone gets back to their cabs. Finding the appropriate swimming pool, however, proves quite difficult for everyone who doesn't speak Mandarin. Victor & Tammy arrive first followed by Kisha & Jen while the team that finished their massage first wander around a while before becoming the third team to arrive at the natatorium. Luke & Margie are well behind everyone else at the start, but fate smiles upon them.




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The problems at the pool begin when Victor & Tammy choose the diving challenge. All the swimming challenge would have required was two laps in the pool by each contestant, something that would require no more than 20 minutes to complete and probably less than half of that for strong swimmers. As the clue states, Michael Phelps is able to do the entire thing in a little over four minutes. With the contestants allowed to use life jackets and to pull themselves along on the support ropes in the water, any adult should easily be able to finish this challenge. Victor & Tammy unfortunately talk themselves out of this. The diving task is much, much harder in my estimation. It is a synchronized diving challenge where the teammates must enter the water at the same time and receiving a judged score of 5 out of 10 to move on. Anyone who has watched synchronized diving has full appreciation for just how much coordination is required for such a challenge. As we quickly learn, Tammy may be beautiful, but she is NOT coordinated.


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