Ari and Staella have the dubious honor of being the first team eliminated on The Amazing Race 12. Some say it was karma, I say it was just unlucky. The duo, who are best friends, simply picked a defective donkey who didn’t want to move. They were subsequently passed by about half the teams and were left to stand and beg their donkey to move. But, alas, such is the way of The Amazing Race. Not always are the outcomes just. However, there also rarely as funny as a really lazy donkey. Ari and Staella took the time to speak with us this morning about their time on the race and everlasting grudge upon donkey-kind.
Below you will find the written transcript as well as the full mp3 audio of the interview.
Your Take
Anonymous said: This is Rob & Amber stealing Charla & Mirna’s taxi at the airport PART 2. It was similar to the episode fro…
DoctorDoom said: C’est la vie folks….
Anonymous said: i don’t care HOW it was edited. their treatment of the donkey, even if a minor part of the experience, was …
So, how much do you guys hate donkeys?
Staella: Well, lets just say that if a donkey ever comes across me, I don’t think anyone will ever see it again. Haha.
Was it overblown at all in editing, or was it just completely the donkey’s fault that you guys got stuck?
Staella: It was 150% the donkeys fault. It was out of our control. We tried every single thing we could possibly think of to get that donkey to move, and nothing. We got it to move a couple steps forward, then it would turn around and walk right back.
Ar: It just wanted to go backward the entire time.
Watching it on TV, they edited it to make it seem like you guys were just completely mean to the donkey the whole time. Did you try being nice to it as well?
Staella: Oh we tried like, petting it and blowing it kisses.
Ari: We caressed it. We fed it. The damn thing didn’t want to go.
What made you two want to come on the Amazing Race together and were you guys fans of the show beforehand?
Staella: Yeah. We were both huge fans of the show. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an entire season, just episodes here and there. I think if either of us were going to do a reality show it was going to be this because it’s the most original, nobody’s being voted off. You get to travel…well, we didn’t get to travel around the world per se, but it’s an opportunity to travel. To win a million dollars. There’s just a lot of things that you encounter on the race that probably any normal person wouldn’t get to do that. As much as it sucks for us to be the first ones out, we were two out of the, you know, hundreds of thousands of people who tried out for it and we got picked.
Ari: It’s just an experience of a lifetime and no one can ever take that from us. So even though we went out first, no one can ever take that from us. We got to do something that probably thousands and thousands and thousands of people have been trying to do for so long. We had fun doing it.
Was there anything involving you guys over the first leg that was edited out that you wish was shown?
Ari: Yeah. I wish they would have shown me running out of the airport, standing in the middle of the road screaming out: ‘Where the beep is the taxi.’ The thing is we thought we were being placed in the middle…we thought there were already teams ahead of us. And it said last night when we got the Taxi we were currently in first and we were surprised to even see that.
Staella: And it just goes to show how quickly things can change, you know? From the time we got into the taxi being in first place, and by the time we go to where the ferries were we were in fourth, to toward the end of the leg of the race we were in last place.
Ari: And the funny thing is that was when we got into the taxi and we found out it wasn’t ours and the guy said he wasn’t turning back, we were finally like: ‘Yeah. We got into the wrong taxi.’
How many minutes were you behind the 10th place team at the very end?
Stealla: Apparently, we weren’t far behind at all. And like I said we were still up at the very top of the hill. We hadn’t even been able to get even half way with the donkey.
Ari: It’d had to have been like a 10 minute walk back, and we were still at the very beginning. We still hadn’t gotten our donkey down. I mean, it was hard enough getting it down the hill, and the entire time after that it was just push-pull, push-pull, every two steps. Funny thing is I don’t remember watching last night, I don’t know if they saw us running with the donkey, but at the very end it just took off on us. It just started pulling us because Stealla and I were just so dehydrated and it just took off. And I was like: “Oh, now it wants to run!? Towards the end!?”
-Interview Conducted By Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image Courtesy of CBS)
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
