Amazing Race: All-Stars winner says of ex-girlfriend:
I never want to race with her again
By Jeanmarie Tan
May 15, 2007
IF Eric Sanchez, winner of the recently-concluded The Amazing Race: All-Stars, had a choice, he would have wanted to race with a different partner.
Even though teammate and then-girlfriend Danielle Turner (left, with Sanchez) helped him nab the million-dollar booty, the 28-year-old waiter is convinced he could have reached the finish line with anyone else.
In fact, he felt it was 'exactly' like a 'Flo and Zach' situation.
Flo Pesenti and Zach Behr were the champs of The Amazing Race 3, but Pesenti was roundly criticised for her teary tantrums, whiny attitude and basically letting her long-suffering ex-boyfriend do all the dirty work.
Sanchez told The New Paper over the phone from his South Florida home: 'I take a lot of credit for our win. If I didn't push her so hard, we wouldn't have won.
'She did a good job, don't get me wrong, but I navigated, I drove, I made the decisions. She just had to do the tasks as best she could.
'I definitely could've won the race with any other partner, besides her. I'll never want to do it again with her!'
Unfortunately, poor Turner, a 23-year-old bartender from New York, was unable to defend herself in the usually shared phone interview because she wasn't picking up our calls.
After a one-year long-distance relationship, the couple made the 'mutual decision' to break up during the filming of The Amazing Race: All-Stars last December after 'fighting over too many little things'.
He said: 'The race showed us that the relationship wasn't as strong as we thought.'
The former lovers didn't talk for two weeks after, but keep in touch now.
Meanwhile, Sanchez - who has a new girlfriend - went on to admit that he would've preferred to join the All-Stars edition with his original Race partner Jeremy Ryan because 'he's a great competitor'.
The frat-boy slacker duo came in second to hippies BJ Averell and Tyler Macniven in the ninth season. It was also during then that Sanchez fell for Turner, one-half of a bosomy, blonde female team nicknamed 'the Double-Ds'.
But he said the producers, who found out he and Turner started dating after the season ended, picked her instead because
'they didn't want an alpha male team'. Sanchez said he was surprised to discover on the race 'how high-maintenance she was'.
He said: 'I always knew she was a girly girl who liked to shop, but she complained about everything the whole time.
'She didn't like some challenges and she would ask, 'Why am I doing this? Eric's a guy'. But other girls like Charla and Mirna and the beauty queens never complained once... That got me really mad and I wanted to tell her to shut up.'
On a positive note, Sanchez conceded Turner was 'really strong and did the tasks well'.
'Even though she always wanted to give up and was crying every day, she fought on,' he added.
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