Just giving y'all a little article from yesterday's Trib TV mag - it's kind of interesting. And, at the end there's more cousin bashing.http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/printedition/chi-0408150493aug15,1,3000922.story
The 'Race' is on
Teams turn cutthroat in thrilling series
By John Crook
(copyright) Zap2it
Published August 15, 2004
Maybe it was the recent Emmy win that did it, but CBS' "The Amazing Race 5" has shaken off its dubious reputation as a critically acclaimed underachiever to become one of the summer's biggest hits.
The Tuesday-night series, which routinely wins its time period this time around, has electrified viewers over recent weeks with a competition that is far more cutthroat than anything that played out over previous editions of "Amazing Race."
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As "Race 5" enters its final handful of episodes, some of the teams already eliminated are talking about the intense psychological toll the players must endure as they chase one another around the globe.
"I wasn't prepared for the mental and psychological stress of it," says Dennis Frentsos, part of the very first team eliminated. "It was just very intense, and I wish I could go back and prepare for it."
The amiable Frentsos, teamed with girlfriend Erika Shay, found himself vilified by other teams early on when he tried to buy tickets for another team as well as themselves (which is not against the rules).
"Suddenly I was a 'scumbag,' and that made me distraught," he says.
"We let them get under our skin," Shay admits. "Then Brandon and Nicole jumped the line waiting for taxis right near the end, which put us in last place unless we did the same thing to someone else."
"I just wanted to play things fair and ethically, because that's how I went into the race, and I stood by my word," Frentsos says, explaining their decision to accept the last cab and last position on the first night.
If Frentsos and Shay got off on the wrong foot, figuratively, father-daughter teammates Jim and Marsha McCoy did so literally, as Jim tripped over a nail almost right at the starting line and fell, badly injuring his knee.
"I don't think it slowed us down," he says. "The pain wasn't a big factor, but it got infected and had to be treated behind the scenes. I remember wondering what I would do if the infection got worse, because I wasn't willing to lose a leg to this."
As viewer favorites entering night three, the McCoys' saw their luck run out when an airline clerk's error kept them off a crucial flight, a setback from which they could not recover.
The previous week, the "bad girl" of the race, "Big Brother 4" runner-up Alison Irwin, and boyfriend Donny Patrick nearly came to blows when his poor map skills lost them valuable time. That was compounded by his insistence on taking a bus instead of a cab late in that round. They came in last.
"If we had taken a cab instead of that bus to the pit stop, we would have come in third," Irwin says. "I made a mistake and I let Donny think." (The couple later broke up, and Patrick was unavailable for comment.)
All team members interviewed say viewers generally get a very accurate impression of how the race really unfolds, although Marsha McCoy had one bone to pick with the editors.
"All of America thinks I'm a midget-hater because ... I apparently snubbed Mirna and Charla (a little person) when they wanted to work together," she sighs. "What you didn't see was that just 20 minutes before we had been running to catch a ferry and they had been yelling to the captain, 'Go, go, go! Leave 'em!' We didn't trust them, but unfortunately, the audience didn't see why."
2002 IceCat Originals, Inc. All rights reserved.
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