Who Has The Drive to Win THE AMAZING RACE CANADA? Season 9 Continues with Another ‘Memorable’ Episode

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede “Who likes that new-car smell?” Those simple words set up a complicated verbal vehicular challenge on THE AMAZING RACE CANADA, during the second episode of Season 9, which aired tonight on CTV, CTV.ca, and the CTV app. After navigating through that task, the nine remaining teams were given a choice between getting into the “fold,” or displaying the right “stuff.” Ultimately, one team was squeezed out. SPOILER ALERT: Details of what happened follow. The teams made their way from Calgary to Smithers, B.C., to begin a series of tasks that included catching different species of artificial fish in a stream, playing a game called “who’s your partner?”, and memorizing features on a new car so that the information could be accurately pitched to a customer. Eddie and Allie got very lost while driving at one point, and also couldn’t find a clue box at another point. Then when they got to the car memory challenge, Eddie really struggled – as did Deven, who is teamed with Amanda. It started to become clear that one of those two teams was probably going to cross the finish line last. For the final challenge of the episode, Devin and Amanda picked “fold” – which meant constructing an egg carton – while Eddie and Allie picked “stuff” – which meant making a dozen sausages. In this instance, eggs were slightly quicker than sausages, and Eddie and Allie were eliminated. Here’s how married couple Eddie Parinas and Allie Seller from Courtenay, B.C., analyzed their ups and downs on THE AMAZING RACE CANADA:   Q: Given the trouble Eddie had with pancakes in Episode 1, and sausages in Episode 2, he ended his time on the Race with a promise that he would never eat pancakes or sausages again. Has Eddie kept that promise? EDDIE: “You know what, I have had sausage, and maybe one or two pancakes, but it’s just a trigger for me right now. So I’m going to stick with French toast for a bit. And then maybe down the road, I’ll come back to pancakes.” ALLIE: “I will say, though, he’s a pancake lover. So yeah, this is not going to last. I knew it was a lie.” EDDIE: “Hey, come on, it’s pancakes! It has been quite an adventure, though. People have been yelling out of car windows, ‘I hate pancakes.’”   Q: They even titled the first episode, I Hate Pancakes. EDDIE: “I know! I was actually shocked. I’m like, wait a second, I Hate Pancakes? Am I reading this right?” ALLIE: “This morning, I was walking the dogs, and this big dump truck drove by, and I thought he was rolling down his window to tell me, ‘be careful, I’m backing in here.’ And he just yells out, ‘I hate pancakes!’ I would say this is all very representative of us, though. When we do something, it’s never intended to be funny, but we always end up doing something funny somehow. We definitely can laugh at ourselves, so maybe that’s it.”   Q: From getting lost driving, to missing the clue box, to having another memory challenge, it just seemed like everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, for your team in Episode 2. ALLIE: “Yeah, it was really frustrating. With missing the clue box, there were two things that happened there. First, just because of where we parked, we couldn’t see the clue box outside the front door of the museum, and we didn’t pass it on the way inside.” EDDIE: “So we thought the clue was inside the museum.” ALLIE: “And at the car dealership, when the clue talked about a new-car smell, we were thinking, oh, is it going to be something mechanical, or something with driving? So we decided Eddie would do it. But it turned out to be another memory challenge, and as soon as we saw that, we didn’t give up, but we definitely said, ‘oh boy!’” EDDIE: “Giving up was not an option.”   Q: It seemed that with a number of the challenges, you both probably wished that the other person had been doing them. EDDIE: “Running the Race doesn’t expose your strengths, it exposes your weaknesses.” ALLIE: “Well, for us it did. You know, we’re really good as a couple. We’re married, we have a business together, and as much as that works for us in our life, I think, to a degree, it worked against us in the Race. Because in life, we don’t cross over into each other’s space. In the business, I handle this, and he handles that. I don’t think about certain things, because I know he has it, and vice versa. Going into the Race, we were so strong in our own areas, but when those things got mixed up, it was like, ‘oh no.’ We would have done better had we been able to stay in our own lanes.”   Q: For your short stay, though, you did create some memorable and touching moments. ALLIE: “Something that I think is most important for me is we’ve gotten a lot of messages, with people saying that we are a lesson in how to treat one another. We didn’t really sense that while it was happening, because that’s just how we are. So when we started getting those messages, we thought, ‘oh, did we do something?’ I thought maybe it was a joke. I was like, ‘did we fight? I don’t know.’ And then I realized, oh, no, people are responding to the fact that we supported one another. There’s so much noise in the world, and negative always stands out over positive, unfortunately. But to know that maybe someone took that away from watching us. I think that’s pretty awesome.”   Season 9 of THE AMAZING RACE CANADA continues with another new episode, Tuesday, July 18 at 9 p.m. ET on CTV, CTV.ca, and the CTV app. billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv