“Everyone Should Live Life Boldly” – An Interview with The Amazing Race’s Uchenna & Joyce
by Teeuwynn Woodruff -- 04/10/2007
Uchenna & Joyce were one of the most popular racing teams both on their first race and on All-Stars. What do they have to say about their Philiminating decision to go for the earlier flight, what really caused them to miss the connecting flight, how did they rank themselves as competitors, and what are their thoughts on having children and the future? Read on to find out!
RealityNewsOnline: Hi Guys! Thanks for talking to RealityNewsOnline!
Uchenna & Joyce: Hello!
RNO: How did you feel when you found out you were going to be on All-Stars?
Joyce: Elation!
Uchenna: Yeah, we were overjoyed at the prospect of having another great American adventure.
Joyce: Yeah, you forget about all the pains and stress after it’s been a while. Of course, the next day you start rethinking your decision and go, “wait a minute! I forgot about this pain!” I’m glad we did it. I wouldn’t miss that opportunity.
RNO: Did you do anything to prepare for the race?
Uchenna: Definitely in better shape. We tried to learn a little more Spanish.
Joyce laughs.
Uchenna: A big part of it for me… Joyce coached me on the players that were strong in other races. Of course, we didn’t know who was going to be in it until we got there at the start. But she coached me on many of the majors and I think she was right about 70% of the people who ended up competing against us.
Joyce: But I think that in this kind of a competition it’s really hard to prepare. It’s more mental than anything. You don’t necessarily have to be in good shape, or speak a language, or have traveled around the world. They do things that you’d never imagine.
RNO: Certainly the race has shown that people who are in the best shape do not necessarily win.
Joyce: Absolutely. It doesn’t mean a thing. You could be in your 70s like Gretchen and Meredith and do well. They weren’t fast [but did well].
Uchenna: Or be a total stud like John Vito and go out first. That guy was a horse, man!
Joyce: It doesn’t make a difference. It’s really hard to prepare. You just have to be open-minded and just ready for whatever they put in your way. Just lose all your barriers of control.
RNO: Did anything you learned on your first race cause you to make any changes on All-Stars?
Joyce: You know, considering that we won the first one, we were thinking we had a pretty good strategy and we should stick to it. But, of course, this time we had different players with different mindsets. They were not new to any of this, so the playing field was a lot different.
Uchenna: I really thought that our strategy was working. The teams, if you noticed, really didn’t say a whole lot about us. We were under the radar. The reason for making the move that we did [on our final show], was the fact that there were only five teams left and the focus was going to end up being on us. So we thought that we better try to make an effort to be ahead as much as possible with the Yield coming.
RNO: Was the possibility of the Yield the reason that you decided to take that big risk, instead of sticking with the pack in the airport this past leg?
Joyce: No. We just decided that it was getting to the end of the race and a lot of strong teams and we were constantly coming in at the middle to the end of the pack. We thought it was time to make our move and it was a decision we made to do it. We knew it was going to be tight, but we were trying to be so on top of it that you would never imagine that a printer was going to break and that would be your downfall.
RNO: Is that what happened?
Joyce: We went to get our tickets for our connecting flight [while we were still at an earlier airport] and our printer jammed. And the tickets were inside the printer. The guy called over people to help and he was like, “You’re not going to make your connection so why don’t you go ahead and go. What I’m going to do is personally call, make sure they have your tickets there when you land. All you have to do is pick them up and just keep going. Easy as pie.” We thought we were being so careful. Famous last words. We get there and these other people are like, “we can’t reissue tickets that have been issued.” And the flights were all fully booked.
They didn’t know how to print – reprint – tickets that were already printed. The tickets did get jammed in a machine. It could almost be a story, their word against ours. And the guy might have talked to someone, but we never found the person he talked to.
Uchenna: The Munich airport’s really big.
RNO: That’s painful.
Joyce: Yeah, tell me about it! It was so painful. We tried to go to every airline; we spent hours trying to find a way out of there.
RNO: How long did it take there at the airport?
Joyce: We were almost 10 hours behind everybody. It took us maybe five hours to just go through the airport to just try to beg and plead and find a different path, but by the time we did find another flight we weren’t going to get in until… just many hours later. It was horrible. Every hour that ticked by your spirits are dying. It was a holiday period and a lot of flight options weren’t available. They had a lot of standbys.
RNO: So, when you got to the first clue box in Kuala Lumpur and it said to just go to the Pit Stop, did you know it was over at that point?
Uchenna: That actually –
Joyce: That didn’t happen. We did all of those tasks. We were pretty surprised that they didn’t show us trying. We ate the cookies.
Uchenna: It took about an hour.
Joyce: An hour of eating hundreds of boxes of cookies. You just can’t imagine how long that feels. And then I did the newspapers in the neighborhood, even though it was dark.
RNO: That must have been tough!
Joyce: It was.
Uchenna: It was. The fact that they were allowing us to do all of the tasks gave us just enough hope to keep pushing on. In hindsight, looking at how long it took us to do the tasks, if we had been with the pack, you wouldn’t be talking to us today.
Joyce: We would have still been in it. You know, really in hindsight, we didn’t have to take that risk. But if you don’t take risks at some point in time, you just always get the status quo positioning. We just thought it was time to do it.
RNO: You thought that if your flight worked out you would be the first team in, but it turned out that Charla & Mirna got in even earlier. How did Charla & Mirna find a better flight than anyone else – again?
Joyce: Yeah. Who knew that? They are able to garner a little assistance. They always say, “Help this little girl!” I don’t know. We were impressed when we saw it because we didn’t know it until we saw it on TV ourselves. That would have been shocking.
Uchenna: They were not our favorite team, but you can’t really throw rocks. They beat us.
RNO: They are good with the airports.
Joyce: They are good there. They’re good at making things work for them – which is what you need.
RNO: How do you feel you worked together as a team in this race compared to the first race?
Uchenna: I think there were periods where we worked really well as a team. I think, getting closer to our “demise,” the wheels started to fall off. Our down time wasn’t spent as productively as it could have been.
Joyce: I think that generally the race, the first one, just forced us to be – well, we just knew that our enemies were not each other. We worked really well under that pressure. At home it’s easier to just get off at each other, but in this race we know still that the others are the enemy. And if you have issues among yourselves, that’s time wasted. There were times when we got distracted and fell into our old habits at home. That could have been a cause of our demise as well. We weren’t always as focused as we should have been.
RNO: It looks like you didn’t get to go to Elimination Station – where did the producers put you up?
Joyce: Yeah, we did not.
Uchenna: [They put us up in] local hotels.
Joyce: We stayed with the production. We stayed sequestered with them, wherever they went. We went where the other teams went. We were just sequestered.RNO: What was your favorite task on the race?
Joyce: Um… I would say… You know what turned out to be really fun? The whitewater rafting. It was a blast. It was one of the scarier things we had to do. Most of the tasks were more mental, but the whitewater rafting this time around was a higher degree – a level four or five – and being as we were novices, that was frightening. I mean you could fall out, you could be under all those waves.
Uchenna: There were six foot waves out there.
Joyce: We were bouncing down, seeing the bottom and being way up at the top thinking we were going to crash at any second. It was really exciting. But you had a favorite, right Uchenna?
Uchenna: Task-wise, doing the Maasai throwing Roadblock. That was incredible.
Joyce: Yeah, we loved that.
Uchenna: Being with the Maasai and, of course doing the task. I wish I could have taken one of those hammer things [rungu] with me.
Joyce: Being with the Maasai, seeing how they dress… It just looked like something out of National Geographic. I know I’ve seen them on that, but having them there, live, doing all of the things you’ve seen on TV. It was awesome.
RNO: How about your least favorite?
Joyce: Yeah, the coal.
RNO: And that, of course, led to your being marked for elimination.
Joyce: That didn’t help either. That was horrible! It was dirty and we got cut.
Uchenna: We got a newfound respect for what David of Dave & Mary does [coal mining].
Joyce: We had to do it with our bare hands. At least they get protective gear. We didn’t have any. It was horrible. Painting nails? Who would have known that would be as simple as it turned out to be. I thought it would be harder because I thought that most people wouldn’t be able to give up extra money to get their nails painted.
RNO: Then it turned out you only had to get about two people to pay.
Joyce: You only had to do a couple people and it took them a couple of minutes! Whereas the coal took us a couple of hours. If only we heard Phil explaining it to us. We just don’t get that benefit.
RNO: So, was that the hardest thing you had to do on the race or was it something else?
Joyce: I think also the whitewater rafting was one of the hardest things to. We did attempt rock climbing [at that Detour], although they didn’t show anyone doing that. We only got a foot off of the ground. Uchenna tried it and said it was impossible.
Uchenna: Absolutely!
Joyce: But nobody could do it, so maybe it was. Rob & Amber tried, I think Eric & Danielle tried, and nobody finished that. So, I would say that was hard. Also, back to the coal, that was crazy.
RNO: Do any locations you visited on the race stand out to you as either really wonderful or really horrible?
Joyce: Really wonderful was Punta Arenas for me – in Patagonia in the mountains. It was absolutely beautiful. The mountains were white-peaked and the lakes were just glassy. But the whole area was very pristine with beautiful homes. It just looked like heaven. It was really gorgeous.
Uchenna: My favorite place was the dhow ride from Tanzania to Zanzibar.
Joyce: That was not a fun ride for me. Ten hours!
Uchenna: There’s a history that goes with that trip. It actually struck a chord with me, looking at the whole slave trade and that was the gateway. It was really important to me. Running through the city of Zanzibar… I mean it seems like we’ve sailed the seven seas now, having done this trip twice.
Joyce: We should be pirates!
Uchenna: It’s priceless being on this great American adventure. Now the show’s been franchised to some other countries, but it is one of those all-American adventures that we wish that all Americans who wanted to could have that opportunity.
RNO: Were there any teams you either expected to be in the race or really wanted to be on the race, but weren’t?
Joyce: We definitely expected Rob & Amber to be there, but we also expected Colin & Christie to be there. I was really surprised they weren’t there. We were surprised the Clowns, Jon & Al, weren’t there. We thought they’d be there.
Uchenna: We also thought there was a chance Lynn & Alex from our race would be there. I believe, as far as older couples go, that Meredith & Gretchen would have been a high vote. But I’m not sure… I think he had some surgery, heart surgery or something.
Joyce: It would have been cool if they were there.
Uchenna: For the most part, we really expected to see more winners there.
RNO: You were the only pair of winners on the race.
Joyce: That was surprising!
Uchenna: It painted a target on our backs, right away.
RNO: You were also facing your old nemeses, Rob & Amber, from the first race.
Joyce: We expected that they would be there because they are definitely great competitors and they bring a whole different game playing to the whole arena. But it is fun to compete against them even though they haven’t won yet. I’m sure they would have loved to have won this one – just like us.
RNO: I believe Rob picked you guys to win after his team left the race.
Joyce: Ah! That was surprising, though.
Uchenna: The mistake we made really changed the climate of the whole race. To be honest with you, we expected a foot race again. We expected it to come down to us, Rob & Amber, and someone else for the final three – possibly the Guidos.
RNO: There is a lot of luck in the race.
Joyce: There is a lot. A lot of luck. It just wasn’t our time, which is fine. We accept the inevitable and what was to be because we don’t feel that there are any mistakes. Even though things happened the way that it did, even though the printer never jams at the airport!
Uchenna: A million tickets a day and the one time we’re there it does.
Joyce: That was a sign to me. I just accepted my fate. Even though it’s hard. I have to think there’s a bigger lesson to be learned, a bigger picture.
RNO: Speaking of bigger pictures, has running The Amazing Race changed your relationship in any way?
Joyce: You know, I wouldn’t say it’s changed our relationship other than when we are on the race, usually we are… we really work well together under pressure when we have a common enemy. After the race, we go back to normal. We go back to my world or his world. We’re back to our little control area. One of the lessons we should take from the race is that we never have any control. That’s hard to swallow. We really don’t have any control. We learned from the race that just being open to positive possibilities and letting go of control that all kinds of things can happen that are really miraculous. When we are trying to control things, boy, we just get what we can’t control as an outcome as well. Anyway, it changes our relationship because when we’re on [the race] we do well together. But it doesn’t change our relationship because when we’re back to reality and then it [doesn’t]. I think we need to be racing all the time!
RNO: There are areas in life where people don’t always have control over. After you won your season, you used some of your money to try IVF. Do you have any plans to have children now?
Joyce: Yeah, you know just before we were going to go on the race this time we were getting ready to do in vitro, to give it another shot. We decided to put it on hold until after the race was over. Now that we’re back, we’re definitely back at it. Whether it works out that way, or adoption, that’s what we’re going to do. We want to keep everyone posted and keep in touch because that’s usually the first question everyone asks, “Do you have a baby yet?”
RNO: I’m sure people are wishing all the best for you guys as far as that goes.
Joyce: Yeah, we want to be able to share with everyone. We do have a website where we want everyone to go and leave their e-mails for us. What we’re going to do is just send it out to everyone when we’re starting to work on the baby thing and the relationship thing.
Uchenna: The web site is
www.uchennaandjoyce.com. Basically, we’ve been convinced to videotape the process of in vitro –
Joyce: Well, much of it. Not all of it!
Uchenna: …and we’re also videotaping the process of working on our relationship. The race gave us a look… it was a crystal ball into what our relationship can be. But it’s really up to us to do the work to get there. We’ve been convinced to tape that process as well. That will be pretty much the meat of the site once it’s launched. But right now we have a page there for everyone to leave their e-mail addresses right now.
RNO: I’m sure there will be a lot of people interested in that and in your journey with IVF. A lot of people go through that these days and want to learn more about it.
Joyce: After being spokespersons for Resolve, we learned that 7.2 million Americans suffer with [infertility]. They say it’s the last closeted sexual disease. A lot of people are still afraid to talk about it. You think it just happens naturally, and you don’t think that it will ever be a problem.
RNO: And it’s such an emotional issue for people.
Joyce: And it is an emotional issue.
Uchenna: Yes.
Joyce: You feel like there’s something wrong with you if you can’t do this.
Uchenna: It’s been difficult filming this process.
RNO: It must be very emotional for you, talking about your relationship and children.
Uchenna: It’s really personal.
Joyce: It’s personal.
Uchenna: We’re hoping that it touches people who not only have the curiosity, but there’s a lot of people who relate to us on those specific issues. It’s sort of an avenue to see someone else going through it. It helps take the pressure off. Once we told everyone that we want to have a baby, everyone asks. We just added a ton of pressure to a situation that already has a bunch of pressure.
Joyce: “Are you guys getting to it? Down to business?”
RNO: I think it’s brave to express that to other people. Also, the way you appeared on the race, you showed a lot of bravery, a lot of character, and a lot of joy, which I thought was great to see.
Joyce: Thank you.
Uchenna: Thank you very much. We plan on living our lives that way. I think a lot of people need that example… a role model or whatever. A lot of people come up to us and say we appreciate you showing that side instead of just the meaner side [of some racers].
RNO: And hopefully some day you’ll be showing the race to your children.
Joyce: Yeah. That’s the plan. We’re still going to learn the right way as we go along, but we’re hoping to share with others.
RNO: Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about yourselves or your experience on the race?
Joyce: Just that everyone has the same opportunities on everything that’s possible in life. If they want to go on The Amazing Race or do their own amazing race in their own lives, we totally encourage it because everyone should live life boldly – not from the fear that you could fail. It could turn out like it did for us on the first race, you could win in life – not just the race. So, we would like to totally encourage people to be bold.
RNO: Thank you so much for talking to me today.
Joyce: Thank you.
Uchenna: No worries. Any time.