Trust Your Training: Season 12 of THE AMAZING RACE CANADA Concludes With a Stampede to the Final Mat

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede In a tense atmosphere of ring-tossing, white cowboy hats, T-shirt guns, drumline routines, and history museums, the 12th season of THE AMAZING RACE CANADA came to a dramatic conclusion Tuesday night on CTV (the entire season is now available for streaming on Crave). The frantic finale took place against the backdrop of the world-famous Calgary Stampede, as the three surviving teams – twin sisters Tina and Liz from Hamilton, Ont., married couple Eamon and Bec from Toronto, and brothers Michele and Matteo from Toronto – attempted to turn their dreams into reality. At stake was a quarter of a million dollars, OneKeyCash™ from Expedia to plan a trip around the world, and the coveted title of THE AMAZING RACE CANADA champions. So what happened? SPOILER ALERT: details from the finale follow. Front-runners Tina and Liz had been preparing for this moment their entire lives, and they entered the finale in first place. But there are no straightforward paths on THE AMAZING RACE CANADA, and at the end of the first challenge – the reverse zip and oversized ring toss – they had plummeted from top to bottom. But they didn’t give up. By the fourth challenge of the finale – titled Showband, in which one racer had to learn a complex drumline routine – they had essentially caught up to the two other teams. And by the end of Showband, Tina and Liz were back in first place, where they had spent most of the season. Their triumph was confirmed after a tricky memory challenge that related to all the legs of the journey, which is something of a tradition on THE AMAZING RACE CANADA. Tina and Liz then searched the sprawling 500-acre Spruce Meadows equestrian and show-jumping grounds, and found host Jon Montgomery and the previously eliminated teams waiting to greet them at the final mat. Here’s what Tina Liao, a corporate lawyer, and Dr. Liz Liao, a family physician and obstetrician, had to say about their largely dominant performance in Season 12 of THE AMAZING RACE CANADA: Q: Is it nice to be able to talk about this openly, rather than keeping it a secret? TINA: “Yeah, but it’s a bittersweet feeling, because while it’ll be amazing to finally tell everyone that we won the race, we’ll miss having the show air every week. We love watching it with our loved ones, and getting to experience seeing ourselves and our castmates every week. I’m really going to miss it.” Q: Has anything surprised you when watching the show week to week? LIZ: “I don’t think there has been anything too drastic in terms of us remembering things differently, although there are certainly some things that we said here and there that we don’t remember saying, because there was so much happening at the time. It’s also cool for us to see the parts of the race that we haven’t seen, like what happens to other teams, or what the other side of the Detour was like that we didn’t get to do. So there’s still a lot of stuff that we’re seeing for the first time as viewers, too.” Q: This was perhaps the most clinical victory in the history of THE AMAZING RACE CANADA. You established yourself as the biggest threat early, and then you were just kind of in your own world. The other teams respected you, but they didn’t resent you. TINA: “Thank you, we really appreciate that. It’s interesting what you say about us being in our own world, because we really did try to focus only on ourselves, and not worry about what other people were doing. I think a really good illustration of that was in the third leg on the train ride, when we were so in our own world that we didn’t even notice where all the other teams went. They all just started disappearing, but we were in our own zone a little too much at that point. But look, we went into the race knowing that we had the abilities to win, and as long as we performed well, we had a really good chance of making the finale. But there’s always a luck component involved, or something could not go our way, so while we were really hoping we would win, by no means were we expecting it. There were really strong racers this season. But we never looked at it as a competition against other racers, we only wanted to perform the best we could, so that we could be proud of ourselves.” Q: To be fair, it’s easier to be “in your own world” if you’re at the front every week. LIZ: “For sure, yeah. Going into the race, we didn’t want to win every single leg, because we knew that would make us a bit too comfortable. We wanted to be in situations where we would feel pressure, because you act totally differently when you’re in that situation than when you’re in first place with a 30-minute lead or something like that. There were a couple of times when we were in last place. And we were in last place for a lot of the finale. But we were able to withstand those stressful situations and still try to focus on ourselves. A lot of that comes from our jobs, and our sports background.” Q: You really excelled at memorization and recall, such as in the last challenge at Heritage Park, or remembering the Icelandic words. LIZ: “Yeah, I think with our professions, we’re used to training and studying. You’re always going to come across a new situation that you’ve never encountered before, but you have to trust your training, and trust what you know to get yourself through that new situation. So that was one of our mottos. We kept telling ourselves, trust your training. So of course, I had never learned Icelandic before, but I know that I’ve memorized so many prescription drug names, so many words with Latin roots for my medical training, that I was like, ‘okay, I know I can do this. Trust my training, and apply it to this new situation.’” Q: What was the moment in the finale that turned things around? TINA: “I don’t even attribute it to a single moment. But we never gave up on ourselves. I’ll be honest with you, when we left the first challenge in last place by a considerable margin, I didn’t think that we would win. I genuinely thought I had single-handedly forfeited our AMAZING RACE CANADA title. But we just said, ‘we’re going to keep doing our best, and racing as fast as we can, because that’s all we can do.’” LIZ: “Yeah, we told each other, ‘you know, it might be impossible for us to catch up, no matter how good we are, but hey, this is our last day on the race. This is a dream of ours, so regardless, we’re just going to enjoy every moment, and work as hard as we can.’ It wasn’t until we got to the drumline routine challenge that we saw everybody else there, and we were like, ‘oh my gosh, we’re really still in this, so let’s do it, let’s go!’” Q: Was anything in the race more difficult than you thought it was going to be? LIZ: “Definitely not the physical aspect. To be honest, we thought the race was a bit less physical than we were expecting. We did a lot of cardiovascular training, and we didn’t really need that as much. And I would say not the challenges themselves. Mentally it was pretty much where we expected it to be. But I would say, if anything, the part that we just didn’t know how hard it was going to be was the social aspect of the game. And THE AMAZING RACE CANADA is not really a quote-unquote social game, like BIG BROTHER or THE TRAITORS or anything like that. But they still have these gameplays, like the U-turn, like the Passport, that involve a lot of social strategy, and that part was a bit more challenging for us than I guess we knew. Of course, we were in a competition, but we respect every other team so much. They were all so incredible, and we’re so in awe of all their stories.” TINA: “That’s another reason why it was really fun for us to watch the show air, because we’re hearing all these teams say things about us that we didn’t know they were saying, right? And Filipe and Clara, those cowboys, we love them so much. Filipe was saying the nicest things about us, while also saying that we’re a threat. He’s like, you know, ‘they’re figure skaters, they’re this, they’re that, they smell nice.’ And we’re like, ‘that’s such a good compliment!’ So we love that. I just think there’s something about the way we carried ourselves, people could tell we were serious, we really wanted this, and it was our dream. So when people identified us as a threat early on, it wasn’t really a surprise to us. We took it as flattery, as a compliment that they thought we were a strong team. It was a good position for us to be in.” Q: You won five legs, and won so many trips. Are you going to have time to take them all? What’s the one trip that you’re determined to take first? TINA: “Oh man, it’s going to be hard to fit them in, but we’re going to try our best. We’re so lucky to have won all these trips. But we do have a friend getting married in Portugal next March, so our first trip will probably be to Barcelona, and we can combine that with the wedding somehow. We won the trip to Barcelona in the sixth leg.” Q: What are you going to do with the money? LIZ: “It’s still kind of surreal. It hasn’t really hit us yet. But during the race we talked a lot about how much our parents and our family mean to us. Our parents sacrificed so much moving here to Canada for us, and basically raised us and taught us everything that we know. Everything that people saw on the race, and the things they’re complimenting us about, our resilience, our skill, our relationship with each other, literally all of that comes from our parents. So we really hope to do something nice for them, whether it be to take them back to China for a trip or something like that. We’ll discuss it over with them. But honestly, we would have done this without any prizes. Like, if there were no prizes, we would have still wanted to do it.” Q: Um, you might not want to mention that until the money hits your bank accounts. Anyway, what advice would you give friends who are considering applying for THE AMAZING RACE CANADA? TINA: “Just be as prepared as possible. If our friends wanted to go on the race, we would share our gigantic spreadsheet with them, share our training plans and everything. We put in so much work to prepare for this. We did so much research. We did a ton of physical preparation. We were the strongest we’ve ever been, because, you know, you’re up against guys who look like Sacha and Sébastien! We needed to build some muscles, too. We did a ton of cardio work, as Liz said. We actually watched YouTube videos on how to sail, so it was crazy that we got to do a sailing challenge. Liz learned how to drive a manual car. Our parents always taught us, there’s no such thing as too much preparation.” Q: You do realize that in the same manner that you studied past seasons of THE AMAZING RACE CANADA, your victory this season can now be a key element in someone else’s studying! LIZ: “We’re going to be on somebody else’s spreadsheet.” TINA: “That is really cool.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv