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They’re neck and neck...right behind our tail
On tonight’s final leg of The Amazing Race 12, TK and Rachel trailed Ronald and Christina at every Route Marker, right up to the point where all the teams came together at the Final Road Block. That task was a little convoluted and difficult to understand, even for a veteran race watcher who has paid attention for eleven weeks. So it’s hard to fault Christina for taking a few minutes longer than Rachel, who stayed true to her team’s reputation for remaining calm under pressure. She thought it through carefully and solved the puzzle first, setting up the last three stops on this leg, none of which required anything but reading the clue and going on to the next one. There was no footrace through Anchorage this time out, just a series of cab rides and a mad dash to the mat.

I give a lot of credit to Christina for doing what should have been impossible. No, not finishing the race, or even finishing the race with a stronger relationship with her father, but finishing the race while turning around her father’s attitude toward her and, it almost seems, toward life in general. That’s not something she could have hoped for when she started the race by telling people she just wanted to make him proud of her and not let him down. She carried that team to second place.

Meanwhile, Nicolas and Donald played off each other’s strengths as well as any team I’ve ever watched. They also played a little too casually at times, not reading clues correctly and getting flustered by traffic and instructions and language and just about anything else they might have to deal with. But when it came to just about any task requiring a modicum of skill, Donald was right there, and when it came to climbing the face of a glacier, the old man showed what he was made of. I’d say third place was about right for them.

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