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♥♥♥ TAR14: Victoria Pfeifer Hunt & Brad Hunt ♥♥♥

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georgiapeach:
They seem to be facing all of this with the same determination and spirit that we saw on the race, they are such incredible people.

I hope they know that we are holding them in our hearts.

Hooky:

--- Quote from: apskip on March 03, 2009, 02:26:54 PM ---I loved Brad and Victoria as a team and I was very sad to see them eliminated (although I would have been sadder if Tammy and Victor had been eliminated).

--- End quote ---

No, it definitely would have been a lot better if Tammy & Victor had been eliminated. Now they will just come right back up to the front again and start winning many of the future legs. Victor has annoyed me since episode one!

I really miss Brad & Victoria, and I'm pretty sure that if they had survived the episode they would have been funner to watch than another team of super-strong siblings.

puddin:
This can be shared :<3, thank you Amazing Racers!

Written by Brad:

Why the F&#@ did we get on that plane!?!?!?
Seems to be the question of the day, so let me clarify for any of those who are interested.

Let me preface this by saying to to all the know-it-alls who are sure if it was THEM, would have certainly known not to get on that plane/get another flight when it was delayed/worked harder to find a different connecting flight/sprouted wings and flew themselves to Bucharest...but every racer will tell you that it's WAY different when you are out there by yourself/don't know who is in front of or behind you/don't know what kind of challeneg is coming up next/don't know which team has which info/don't know if a big bunching is ahead or if every minute counts.

Why didn't we do like Kris & Amanda and just hustle and try to make the 4:45 flight that they ultimately made? They were able to find a little shortcut to the airport that just barely allowed them to get on that flight. We didn't have that information. Munich is a big airport and we were assured by several people by the time we arrived at the ticket counter, there was NO possible way we could make it, so why run all the way to the gate, miss the flight and then not hve neough time to get on our 2nd choice. Yeah, but what IF we had traveled to Munich with Kris & Amanda? - we would have gotten the same short cut and could've gotten on the same plane...what about that? Well, all I can say is IF my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle. Also, see point#1 above.

Vic and I realized that one good guideline to follow would be to never get on a plane by ourselves...too many bad things can happen (mechanical problems, weather, missed connections etc). If there is at least one other team on the plane, then even if there are problems, you have a 50/60 (inside joke) chance of beating the other team in a foot race. But, no offense intended to Steve & Linda, but after they were out, there wasn't a single team we could count on beating if it came to a footrace due to Vic's hip/foot problems which were severely aggravated by the run down the mountain at Ruhpolding. (It hurt her bad enough that she will be having surgery this summer to repair the damage). So much for dragging a weaker team along to beat to the finish - in that respect, we were the weakest team and we knew it.So why did we take such a big risk just to get a 15 minute lead (based on arrival times)?

...a bit of background: On the first leg, on the train to Locarno, Vic & I managed to get explicit directions to the Piazza St Antonio - information that no one else except Jodi & Christie had. We got off the train and tried to sneak away from the pack, but when they saw us walking purposefully away, they knew we knew something and followed us. They then were able to simply yell "St Antonio?" to bystanders who would then point the way. They were able to do this at a full run and beat me and Vic to the checkpoint, even though we were the only ones in the group who knew exactly where to go. Everytime we were with the group, and they saw us in an extended conversation with a local, it was pretty obvious we had information and the choice was either to lie and suffer the consequences of being found out later, or share and give away our competitive advantage. I tend to be pretty good at geting information from folks and getting them to help us, but we had to get away from the group to be able to fully exploit this advantage. Even though the flight we took was only 15 minutes faster, it did serve to seperate us from the pack where we felt more comfortable travelling on our own.

In addition, we had no idea until we go to the gate that other teams that had left before us wouldn't be there. The way the deal works is this: you get one flight in hand, and then try to improve your position. We would have felt stupid as hell if we learned of that Amsterdam connection and then declined it, only to find out 2 or 3 teams had taken it, perhaps enabling them to get an earlier train and perhaps enabling them to open up a big lead on us. Once we show up at the gate and see no other teams there, were we supposed to schlep all the way back to the ticket counter, maybe only to find out that our back-up flight was now sold out and then try to get back on the original flight, only to find out that it had left, and then ultimately get on an even later flight? Where does it stop?!?!

When you see it on screen, it all looks very simple, but when you're in the middle of it, you make the best decision you can and then stick with it unless you have some VERY definite evidence to the contrary. So you take the best info you have, which sometimes is not much, and do the best you can with it. You can woulda/coulda/shoulda all night long, but in the end, every stupid thing I've ever done...seemed like a good idea at the time.

puddin:
The Amazing Race: Brad and Victoria Just Wanted To Be Alone


Brad and Victoria were one of the most likable teams worth rooting for on this season of The Amazing Race.  Unlike the “older couples” of prior seasons, this duo had the physical strength to take on contenders young enough to be their children.   They were loving, supportive and unfailingly upbeat.  Many viewers picked them to make the show’s finale.  Instead, an ill-fated decision to take a different flight from the other teams resulted in disaster.  They were stranded overnight in Amsterdam with no hope of catching up to the other teams.  Brad and Victoria wax philosophical about their experience to fancast.


Why did you decide to take a different plane from everybody else, especially after you knew it was delayed and you had to make a connecting flight?

Brad: Until that point all of the racers had been running together as a pack and sharing information.  We felt like we were a little better at getting information on our own.  But if you do that when you’re part of the pack and people see you talking to tourists, they come up to you and want to find out what you know.  You either have to lie to them and risk being a conniver or share with them.  So we felt we needed to get ahead.  Some people questioned why we took the risk to get on a plane that would only get us a fifteen minute advantage, but it wasn’t necessarily the fifteen minutes.  It was so we could break free of the pack.

Victoria: Also, what we found out in the early stages of the race is that the other players were extremely fast.  Everyone seemed to be a marathon runner.  Brad and I are really fit and strong but we were still slower than everybody else.  We were like, “Wow.  We need to find a way to stay competitive if it’s a foot race to the finish line, we probably aren’t going to be the first ones.”  So if we could gain an hour on a flight or cab ride or any other way we were eager to take those opportunities.  Of course they come with a risk.

Brad: The other thing was that we didn’t know none of the other teams were going to be on that flight. You go up and you find out what’s the first flight that’s going to be there.  We would have felt stupid if we’d intentionally taken a later flight then found out that three or four teams had taken an earlier flight and gotten a 20 minute lead.  We didn’t know until we got to the departure lounge that nobody else was out there.  At that point we didn’t have the time to run back through the Munich airport, get to the ticket counter and then maybe find out that the tickets for the other flight were gone too.

How far behind the other teams were you?

Brad: Really far!

Victoria: We’re not really sure, but we presumed that we were at least 18 hours behind.  We didn’t know there would be the bottleneck at the train station.  That helped us a little bit but it wasn’t enough.  I think we showed up at the pit stop four hours later than Victor and Tammy.  It was a large enough gap that we don’t have any regrets.  It’s not like if we had done one small thing it would have made a difference.

You were covered with fake blood when you got to the pit stop.  None of the other teams were.  What happened during the coffin detour?

Brad: I was smashing those frames.  I had a lot of adrenalin going.  They didn’t show it but it was pretty crazy.  There was blood everywhere.

Despite everything that went wrong, the two of you seemed so positive and supportive of each other, while several other teams had meltdowns over lesser problems.  What is your secret?

Brad: We like each other.  We realized that no matter what happens on the race, whether we get eliminated third or win the million dollars, we’re still going to be together at the end. You have to keep the big picture in mind, which is there’s no reason to completely destroy my teammate for a short term gain.  Someday the race will be over and I have to live with this woman.

Victoria: There’s a piece of insight that never really came up in our conversations about the race.  Part of the reason why we worked so well as a team and ultimately as a couple is that Brad is a recovering alcoholic.  He’s been sober for 26 years.  He has spent his entire adult life reflecting on himself.  He takes time to make changes and grow.  He has taught some of that to me.  I don’t want to take any credit but the two of us are not willing to live a life together that has a lot of pain and discomfort.  We want to go to bed at night happy to be together.  It came together well when we were put into a really stressful environment.

In the first leg, you were the only team whose cheese carrier didn’t break.  What did you do that everybody else didn’t?

Victoria: First of all we didn’t know that they were rigged to fall apart.  I guess ignorance is bliss. We spend a lot of time in the gym.  We lift heavy weights.  We just had spirit.

Brad: Here’s the thing.  The instructions said: use the carriers to carry the cheese down the hill.  We thought it literally meant use the carriers. So for quite a while we thought that all the teams who broke the carriers and rolled their cheese down the hill were going to be penalized.  By the time we figured out that they weren’t we were already almost to the bottom of our second trip down.  The only alternative was to save an additional minute or two by sliding down that hill covered with sheep dip.  One of the consequences of that is that we were sleeping soundly when many other teams spent much of the night washing their pants out.

What moment of your race do you wish had made it onto the television show?

Brad: A lot of our friends have watched the show.  They say, “That was great but they didn’t show you very much.” We didn’t have a lot of drama.  A lot of the stuff we did wasn’t really particularly good television.  It was good racing.  It was a good example of being getting along together.  One of the reasons we were able to get down the cheese hill without falling down is that we held hands. At one point we were going down and Victoria said, “Thank you for holding me up.”  I said, “You’re holding me up as much as I’m holding you up.”  It was an example of two people working together.

How did going on the Race change your lives?

Victoria: We’re still working on that.  I think this week has been more of a learning experience than the Race itself because the Race is an environment that we have experienced in other periods in our lives.  We’re athletic and we compete.

Brad: It’s a funny experience for regular people like us to suddenly have a certain amount of celebrity.  At first it’s kind of fun, people saying they saw you on TV.  Eventually it ended up being kind of an icebreaker for us to develop more and closer relationships with a lot of the people who are around us.  There are people I’d lost track of who saw me on the show and contacted me. People I see in the gym or at work come up and talk to me now because they saw me on TV.

What advice would you give to future competitors on the Race?

Victoria: You need to understand the dynamic between you and your partner.  If you don’t have that figured out before you go on the Race there’s no way you’re going to make it through.  You can’t imagine how desperate it is.  You’re hungry.  You’re tired.  You’re wet. You’re cold.  You have to make a decision like in five seconds and you don’t know what the other teams are doing.

Brad: There’s only one team that can win.  Most people are eliminated.  So chances are, statistically speaking, any given team is going to be eliminated.  When that happens, the only thing you have left is the way your conducted yourself during the Race.  Nobody cares if you’re third or tenth.  What they remember is the way you treated your partner, the way you comported yourself when the chips were down.

Kynt and Vyxsin are fancast’s celebrity Amazing Race bloggers. They have this question for you: Guys!  The image of your “bloody” faces in the middle of the night at Phil’s Mat was without a doubt one of the most unforgettably SPOOKY moments in Amazing Race history.  With this morbid leg now behind you, we have to know ——- what is each of your personal favorite SPOOKY movies?

Brad: The Shining, the original with Jack Nicholson.

Victoria: This is really embarrassing. Planet Of The Apes had me so petrified when I was 8 or 9 years old.  I used to lie in bed and I swear I could hear the apes coming into my bedroom.

http://www.fancast.com/blogs/the-amazing-race/the-amazing-race-brad-and-victoria-just-wanted-to-be-alone/

puddin:
Stuck in Amsterdam with Brad and Victoria of The Amazing Race 14
by Reg Seeton

Throughout all seasons of The Amazing Race the road to a million dollar victory has often depended on anything from challenges and roadblocks to getting a slow cab and being delayed by various flights to other destinations. This week's episode of The Amazing Race saw the competition come down to timing as the teams raced from Austria to German to Romania, with the final leg and pitstop located in the famous vampire locale of Transylvania. When teams departed from Austria, married Columbus, Ohio couple Brad and Victoria Hunt moved away from the pack to try to find a better flight to Romania. But when Brad and Victoria touched down in Amsterdam for a connecting plane to their final destination, fog rolled into the airport that left all flights from the airport grounded until the morning.
Although Brad and Victoria made up close to 14 hours at one point in the race, time simply got away from them after they completed the gymnastics challenge and a spooky coffin test before hitting the final mat with host Phil Keoghan and Brad covered head-to-toe in fake blood. The morning after Brad and Victoria's elimination from The Amazing Race, we tracked down the married couple to find out what went wrong, how one minute can make a world of difference, and how The Amazing race affected their relationship.

THE DEADBOLT: When you were in Amsterdam, how much did you scramble after you found out you were going to be stuck there?

BRAD HUNT: Actually, we didn’t scramble at all. The desk we were at had access to all of the flights from the airport and she said that all of the flights that night were cancelled because of fog. There was nothing.

VICTORIA HUNT: There were no options. There were literally no options.

THE DEADBOLT: Did you guys know at that point that you might be out?

BRAD: [laughs] Well, we knew it wasn’t good. But there was fog so there was no reason to think that other people wouldn’t have had fog that was just as bad or worse than ours. It’s not where we wanted to be. But by no means did we give up or get discouraged at that point.

THE DEADBOLT: How far were you guys really behind the others? It looked like you were fairly close later on.

BRAD: At some point we were nearly as much as 18 hours behind and I think we caught up to within four to six hours. The next day we raced like fiends. It was insane.

VICTORIA: It was a wild day, yeah. We did really well with all of the challenges and we had fun doing it and we never gave up hope. It was something we weren’t willing to even consider even though there’s probably a little piece of our brains that kind of acknowledged, "You know what? Our game is probably over." But until we were at that pitstop, it’s not over till it’s over. So we raced as though we still in it. We had every hope that somebody else had screwed up, got another bad flight, or maybe it was non-elimination leg. And the moment we saw Phil at that pitstop, and even as we were standing there, there was still one more second of hope - "He might say it. He might say it."

BRAD: Actually, when we showed up, he said, "Brad and Victoria, you’re the last team to arrive." And I was like, "Yeah, and, and ...?" And nothing, "You’re eliminated!"

THE DEADBOLT: Brad, at the end of the vampire challenge you were covered in fake blood? Were you rolling around? What was going on?

BRAD: Well, no, there were those frames that you had to smash on the stake. I was actually kind of surprised last night when I saw the other people smashing them. It was pretty wimpy frame smashing. I mean I had so much adrenaline going, so much stress going at that time, that I took those frames and I was smashing them and blood was everywhere. It was all part of my plan to end the show covered in blood so that if anyone thought of asking me stupid questions about a plane ride, they’d have second thoughts about that [laughs].

THE DEADBOLT: Victoria, you looked pretty comfortable in the gym during the gymnastics challenge. Did you have any experience in that before the show?

VICTORIA: Well, thank you for recognizing that. I was kind of bummed that they didn’t show me doing more of the gymnastics because that was, I think, one of the moments in which we may have actually made up some good time, from what we could tell, watching last night. The other girls were struggling with some of the exercises. I got in there, they show me the routine, and I whipped it. I didn’t even have to really repeat the routine. Maybe one time I had to do one over but it just came to me, like riding a bike. I’ve done a little bit of gymnastics when I was a little girl and I guess you just kind of pull it from your past. You know, it’s like riding a bike.

THE DEADBOLT: What do you think the secret is to getting ahead of the other teams?

BRAD: It comes down to different things. Sometimes you need to be very competent at doing a challenge. Chris ran like a mad man and if he hadn’t made a wrong turn he would’ve picked up a ton of time running down the mountain at Ruhpolding [Germany]. Other times it had to do with being a little bit clever. Neither one of us after Steve and Linda were eliminated - I think we were the least fast team on there so we couldn’t count om speed. You know, a foot race? We didn’t want to get into that. We were fairly competent in challenges. But I think what we were best at is that we are fairly good at talking to people, getting information, and finding our way on our own. The rest of the teams wanted to stick together and work as a group and share information. I never really understood people on the show, and they’re always talking about doing that. I don’t understand why you would do that. But they felt comfortable operating as a herd and we chose a different way.

THE DEADBOLT: Do you think that’s part of the reason you got eliminated?

BRAD: Well, absolutely. Last night I was looking at some postings and some people were like, "That was stupid. They were only going to make up 15-minutes by taking that flight. And to take the risk of missing a connection to only make up fifteen minutes, that was stupid." What they don’t understand is that it wasn’t only the 15-minutes, it was the fact that we wanted to get away from the rest of the group, because every single time we would find out a little piece of information they would see us talking to some people and know that we knew something and start following us or come up and ask us what we knew. And we either had to share it or be accused of conniving or lie or something. So that was a good part of the effort to get on the plane, to get away from the group.

But we also knew that you try to get on the flight that arrives earlier if you can, and we didn’t know until we got to the departure gate that no other teams were going to be on that flight. Now we’d feel pretty stupid if we didn’t choose that flight and found out that three teams got there 15-minutes earlier than us and the consequence got on the earlier train and the consequence arrived two hours earlier. So it’s easy to watch the show on TV and second-guess everything because you have the benefit of hindsight. At the time you have a strategy and some things you want to do and you have to go with your intuition and the information you have.

THE DEADBOLT: So is it that quick for things to turn around? You get a bad cab and you're done?

VICTORIA: Well, look at what happened to Tammy and Victor. We didn’t even realize until we watched the show last night how much they screwed up as well, and they were the team to beat. That’s what we were thinking all along. And then we come to find out they not only screwed up a little, but they were in 8th place. The game can change on a dime. The game can change on a minute. We missed the connecting flight in Amsterdam, literally, by one minute and that one minute cost us the entire rest of the race. So it’s phenomenal how quickly it can change.

BRAD: And I don’t think I’ll be spoiling to say that you’re going to see the rest of the season the lead will flip-flop many times.

THE DEADBOLT: Did you get to spend any time in Transylvania after the show?

BRAD: We were there for a little while waiting on the elimination station. But unfortunately when you’re eliminated you’re in lockdown [laughs].

VICTORIA: Yeah, they put you in lockdown. They don’t want anyone to see you out in the public and so that was unfortunate.

BRAD: We got to spend a few minutes at Brasov and go out to eat a couple of times and see the town a little bit. But we didn’t get to poke around the way we would have liked to.

THE DEADBOLT: What did the experience do for your relationship?

VICTORIA: Well, we knew going into the race that there were obviously going to be moments that were going to test us as a couple, and we talked about it. You know, "How are we going to resolve this kind of issue and that kind of issue?’ We know what our strengths and weaknesses are in terms of our personalities. So pretty much the race played out the way that we predicted it would and we went in as a strong couple, we played as a strong couple, and we came home as a strong couple. But that doesn’t mean to say that since we came home that we haven’t had any issues. You know, there are a lot of emotions that kind of hover around and you have to deal with it. They come up.

This whole past week, knowing that this third episode was going to be on, our final episode, and we’re going to [be eliminated], all of our family and friends are going to be disappointed and we having to relive that moment again. We tested ourselves again and we found ourselves a little snippy and whatever. When push comes to shove, Brad and I really know how to look at ourselves as a couple and talk through the issues and finally come to a resolution on how can we change to make this better? We’re really not willing to walk away, ever.

BRAD: [laughs] We’re kind of hoping that the next step for us is going to be a relationship show and we’ll knock Dr. Phil out of the [way].

-- Reg Seeton

http://www.thedeadbolt.com/news/105527/ar14bradvictoria_interview.php

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