The Amazing Race – Reading is Fundamental

Every year on The Amazing Race you find one team to hate.  You have to, it's kind of a rule of watching the show.  By the second or third episode there is always one team that stands out as the single most obnoxious, the single most vile, the single most despicable group racing around the world for a prize of a million bucks.  Week in and week out you watch that team somehow, someway, avoid elimination.  It stinks.  In the end, you don't want the team eliminated, you want them painfully eliminated (not physically, but embarrassingly). It's always good when that happens and, for me, it happened last night.

For me, the most obnoxious, insidious, annoying team this season was Kelly and Christy, the divorcees.  Their now gone and I won't miss them.  Frankly, I don't even want them standing at the finish line.  And, the way they went down last night was embarrassing, simply embarrassing.

I've lost count of the number of times this season that teams haven't bothered to read clues, but I know that Kelly and Christy have been guilty of this season on more than one occasion.  I would have thought that after the first couple of times were they didn't bother to read the clues they would have figured out that old line – "reading is fundamental."  Yeah, they didn't.  They fell way behind last night on a task where they failed to read the clue.  I can't imagine that the task was worded poorly as no other team had any trouble with it, just Kelly and Christy. 

If they had bothered to actually read what was required in the Holi task (running past the people throwing colored powder at them, climbing a ladder to a platform and finding the correct envelope) they would not have been eliminated.  Yes, truth be told, they either misread or misinterpreted the clue for a task that required them to read numbers on power lines later, but by that point I already felt as though their ship was sinking fast.

I don't get it.  You go on a reality show.  The reality show gives you, every day, a bunch of different clues and assignments.  One would think, one would assume, that anyone who wants to actually win the competition would read what they were supposed to do relatively carefully instead of just skimming it. 

Not these contestants, not this season.  I guess that I forgive the first team that didn't read a clue, maybe even the second, but certainly not the third (the teams have to talk between legs of the race) and certainly not the same team twice (or three times, or four). 

So, I for one am happy to see Kelly and Christy depart.  Not only did they have some not-so-nice things to say about India and Indian festivals and traditions (as did some other teams), but they made the unforgivable sin of not paying attention to the card in front of them that tells them what to do on more than one occasion (twice tonight) and it finally cost them. 

I'd wish them farewell here, but even if they read this column I kind of doubt they'd have bothered to pay attention this long.