Good leg; local color and atmosphere, fair tasks, no interpersonal snipage, and no taxi luck figuring into the outcome.
I think the blondes have finally found their comfort zone, guns! All the teams that did the skeet shooting made it look relatively easy (although I saw some of them firing when the pigeon was practically standing still at the top of its arc). I have long wondered if the Amazing Producers tweak the difficulty of the challenges very much. It seems like the judging for singing and dancing tasks gets a little more relaxed the longer a team is at it. Same thing with the soccer goalies tonight. Maybe with the skeet shooting too; I’ve certainly heard that it’s harder than the teams made it look tonight.
If Brendon & Rachel had gotten knocked out on the boot Detour, would that have been the worst RTFC error in Race history?
I don’t know quite how Leo & Jamal got so lost. Nice work for Brendon to lose them on the motorway. If you choose to follow a team, that’s the chance you take.
I agree about the way the tasks seem to get easier depending on how long a team is attempting them. After a certain amount of time, the blondes seemed to have no problem with the soccer task, and it looked like the goalies let Dave score, too.
I liked the Welsh challenge. Finally something non-physical! That’s a difficult language to have to memorize a poem in, so I admire them all.
The blondes seemed to cruise through everything this time, to my surprise, and I’m surprised that Brendan and Rachel were able to finish in the top three after having to do the boot task twice.
When Brendan was reciting the poem I thought the Welsh lady was just about ready to jump his bones. He did a great job on that and losing the Afghanimals on the highway.
I have to hand it to Brendon in quelling Rachael’s outburst upon discovering she’d picked the wrong size boots. He yelled “shut up” and she shut up. She’s matured, thank god.
I loved the Welsh challenge too! Shades of Austria last season, though…the more Jamal stumbled with it, the more I kept thinking, “Oh, crap, they’re not going to make it…just MEMORIZE THE DAMN THING AND STOP ACTING!”
I don’t know if I’d say the challenges are easier coming closer to the finale. Everybody struggled with the Welsh to a degree. The blondes initially had issues with kicking the soccer ball. And then there’s Brachaels with the boots…
I was surprised that the Afghanimals didn’t go into the gas station to get directions (even before Brendan and Rachel got there) rather than just asking people at the pumps. Following another team when you have no idea where you’re going is not a smart move.
Do these teams not have enough money to buy a map? I think that’s the first thing I would do if I had to drive around in a strange country.
Speaking of money, I haven’t noticed them saying “You have x dollars for this leg of the race”. Have they been saying that?
I’m not sure the judges got easier - in the soccer challenge, for example, when most teams first started, they seemed to be trying to kick right at the goalie. There was a learning curve to try to kick into the corners of the goal.
It was good of them to remind us that Dave had ruptured his Achilles’. I almost forgot.
A lot of shocking developments last night: How relatively easy skeet-shooting seemed; and how competent the blondes were. I never would have thought that hitting a moving target would be quicker than throwing a boot.
Somewhere during an edit in the soccer challenge, the blondes figured out how to get the ball in the air.
Good Lord, but Welsh is a bizarre language! How do you pronounce “yw”? Your guess is as good as mine. Throw away the paper and just learn it by ear.
Just when I was starting to like the Afghanimals…now I have to root for the blondes in the fnale.
I think what was difficult was that the course was a bit long and that they had to refill the boots with water and run back to the flag each time. And yes. Yes it’s real-well, sort of.
The funny thing is that upon arriving she actually read the clue out loud saying they needed a pair of size 9 or size 11 boots. A few cuts later she was saying that they needed size 10 or 11. There weren’t that many pairs of boots to search, so I doubt a lot of time passed between the two scenes.
How do you screw up a challenge where all you need to do is pick out the correct boot, fill it with water and toss the stupid thing? I’d been cutting Rachel some slack but on this task she reverted to her whiny crying ways.
Thank god Garanimals are gone. Every episode they did at least one embarrassing thing that made you cringe.
Hate the blondes even more now as I hate when women whine “why are you being so mean to me” when they are not getting their way.
The keeper completely allowed some of those penalty kicks to go by him. One seemingly rolled in at two mph and he made no attempt to dive at it. This was a similar task as one in a previous season where the teams had to stop a penalty kick which as most people know is much much harder than scoring one.
Laggard - I don’t really think the blondes were whining (unlike Dave’s "Don’t hit me! I’m an old man!). I think it was their attempt to charm the young goal keeper. It (probably) didn’t work, but the blondes have never been shy of using their assets or trying to manipulate men.
It’s a Celtic language, and they’re all pretty tough if you’re trying to learn them as an adult. Irish is just as bad, if not worse.
“Yw” is pronounced “yoo,” more or less. “W” is “oo”, “f” is “v”, “ff” is “f”, “ll” is the kind of hissing thing they were doing…more or less a “th” and “l” mixed together. There’s a serious imbalance between vowels and consonants in Welsh…words that are all vowels and words that you have to beg for a vowel to pronounce it both.
Stupid Brendon. I hate it when that guy, who I despise, is likable. And he was very likable during that poem challenge. At least I got to laugh joyously at the boot throwing snafu as Rachel dissolved into a puddle of tears.
I’m thinking the Afghanimals directly caused their own demise. If they had U-Turned Brendon and Rachel instead of the Cowboys, like they had agreed to do, either Jet or Cord would still be trying to finish the Welsh poem challenge and the final three would be the accidental alliance.
I can say from my experience that shooting skeet with a 12-gauge shotgun is actually not that difficult, especially when compared to using a rifle. On my HDTV I could easily see the large cluster of pellets being hurled from the muzzles of their shotguns. It’s this cluster/scatter effect that makes precision a much less important factor in hitting the pigeon when using a shotgun.
If those goalkeepers were trying, the blondes would still be out there. I am sure they were instructed after X amount of attempts, if the shots are online, let them pass.
I am pretty sure I could have blocked the blondes shots. I can’t believe one of them said that she had never kicked a soccer ball before. What do they do in Phys Ed classes?