The Amazing Race returned to CBS on Sunday for the 21st season as Lumberjack couple Rob Scheer and Sheila Castle became the first team to be eliminated.
When The Amazing Race 21 began, 11 new teams started the competition in Pasadena, California where host Phil Koeghan announced that should a team win the first and last leg of the race, $2 million would be awarded to the winner.
Once off and running in Pasadena, the teams traveled to Shanghai, China where the race kicked into high gear for Season 21. After a Double Roadblock that consisted of a tough table tennis challenge and an eating competition of two bowls of frog fallopian tubes, the teams were off to the first pitstop at The Bund signal tower.
As it turned out, engaged couple Rob and Sheila had a hard time finding The Bund after getting an early jump on the first flight into town ahead of some of the other teams. In the end, Rob and Sheila took too long to find a woman with an old abacus and ended up on the wrong side of a final dash with Chippendales dance team of Jaymes and James, who hit the mat in tenth place to continue.
So, what went wrong for Rob and Sheila in the final leg of The Amazing Race 21? Did they get lost?
“We weren’t lost,” said Rob, a Lumberjack and entrepreneur from Alaska, to The Deadbolt the next day after being eliminated. “When we read the clue, I knew exactly what it was. It was an old Chinese apparatus for counting that goes back centuries. So we stopped immediately to look on the internet for a tourism type indicator on if there was anything special at The Bund with the woman with the abacus.”
Unfortunately for Rob and Sheila, their indicators sent them off in all different directions as they asked locals for help to find the woman with the final clue.
Along the way, both Rob and Sheila played the game with class as they tried to give good karma to the other teams.
“The only thing we could find,” Rob continued, “was at The Bund there were three large banks, the Bank of China. One guy said, the Bank of China is where you want to go because there’s a woman with an abacus there. We then spent forty minutes looking for a woman with an abacus. It took us forty minutes to get to the back of the bank and then to the waterfront to start looking.”
By the time the Lumberjack couple got their bearings and found their next clue, their Amazing Race fate was sealed.
So, despite their exit, how do Rob and Sheila feel now about they way they finished the first leg of The Amazing Race?
“That was tough,” Sheila admitted to The Deadbolt, “because we had been on the first plane. It really and truly came down to a foot race at the end. It was really tough. We were completely committed. We were just so committed to all of the great challenges and competing in this amazing adventure together. But as we walked away from the race, we got to appreciate the country we live in and that we were walking away together with this amazing relationship and great life that we could come home to. But we were very disappointed. It hurt.”
As for Rob, going out on the first leg of The Amazing Race wasn’t in their plan. Looking back, however, Rob admitted there was one thing he’d do differently.
“I was pissed as hell,” Rob jokingly added. “I was mad and I was really angry. I mean, we should have been there at the end on the last leg, and we weren’t. The only thing, as I said to Sheila, we shouldn’t have trusted anybody. Ultimately, when I look back, what would I have done differently? I would not in any way have trusted anybody. I would have kept to our own game.”
What did you think of Rob and Sheila on The Amazing Race?