‘The Amazing Race Canada 3’ episode 9 review: Wrestling to a close finish

Nick and Matt -In some ways, we’d say that the emotion we’d use to describe Wednesday night’s new episode of “The Amazing Race Canada” is “relief.” We have a new #1 team, and most importantly the final non-elimination of the season is over. We don’t like saving that one until close to the end, since at least this way there are more teams around.

As for Brent & Sean’s chances now that they have to complete a Speed Bump? Well, we’d say that they are not completely out of it, but they’re not extremely speedy at any of the tasks and, as we saw tonight, they can also get a little sick on the road. This season seems at the moment divided into two different groups: People who can win, and people who are severe longshots.

For the first time, Nick & Matt at least know that they can finish a leg in first place. Granted, it sure helped them in Dehli that one of the Detour options was a wrestling one! We’re not going to ring a conspiracy alarm or anything, though, mostly because these legs are designed forever in advance and as the Olympians taught us last year, having some serious skill in something by no means guarantees that it translates over to the race. They still got a good lead on the strength of finding things quickly in the early going, and doing a good job with the fish-hauling challenge at the very beginning (which is why Brent & Sean got behind to begin with).

We are enjoying the beginnings of this rivalry between the wrestlers and Gino & Jesse, who clearly see each other as their biggest threats and for good reason. The wrestlers have never been severely close to getting eliminated, and the brothers have won the most legs and came close to winning this one.

Probably the big surprise, at least for now, is the performance of Simi & Ope. Weeks ago, these two appeared almost guaranteed to be gone by this point. What happened? They’re still not that great in most of the challenges and are limited physically, but they seem to be very good at navigating around. They made up some time getting to the Pit Stop, given that they left for it after Brent & Sean did at their half of the Detour (grinding spices, otherwise known as riveting television).

Ultimately, the best thing we can say about Wednesday’s episode is that it was competitive. We’ve said it before, but we’ve seen so many legs in India on multiple versions of the show that we’re really not impressed by it anymore, and none of the challenges this time around were that awesome or entertaining. We’re glad to be getting back to Canada for that reason. Grade: B.

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