The Deadbolt Interview - An Exclusive 3rd Place Road Block with Margie and Luke of The Amazing Race

An Exclusive 3rd Place Road Block with Margie and Luke of The Amazing Race
by Reg Seeton

The Amazing Race CBS Every season of The Amazing Race starts out with the teams beginning the global reality footrace in the spirit of friendly competition. But when the reality of The Amazing Race sets in after a couple of legs from country to country, some teams find a way to get the edge over the others. Sometimes strategic moves are well received in the spirit of competition while other times well-timed opportunities rub racers the wrong way. In the 14th season of The Amazing Race, the competition didn't really get going until the racers got to Siberia where mother and son team of Margie Adams and her deaf son, Luke, used a Blind U-Turn on the team of Kris and Amanda.

Although everyone was racing nice prior to stacking wood in the Vodka soaked back-streets of Siberia, Margie and Luke unexpectedly cranked up The Amazing Race heat on the others teams to become one of the strongest and smartest teams to look out for the remainder of the race. Although Luke is hearing impaired, both he and his mother double-handedly took the race to a new level of competition, as mother and son dominated the top five positions in almost each and every leg.

But when The Amazing Race went from Thailand to China, Margie and Luke found themselves squaring off at the mat in front of host Phil Keoghan over an altercation with fellow Amazing Race competitors, Kisha and Jen. When the sparks subsided and Kisha and Jen were later eliminated from the race, Margie and Luke continued their pursuit of the million dollar prize by claiming one of the top three spots alongside brother and sister team Tammy and Victor plus former NFL cheerleaders Cara and Jaime to run the final leg of The Amazing Race.

When the teams touched down in Maui within a challenging laid back vibe, Margie and Luke breezed through the Road Block by passing the others while carrying a dead pig on a stick to its final ceremonial resting place. But Maui proved to be an insurmountable Amazing Race wall that stopped Margie and Luke in their tracks when Luke struggled in the final Detour, allowing both Tammy and Victor and Jaime and Cara to catch up and pass them. At the final mat, it was Tammy and Victor who claimed first place and the million dollar prize while Jaime and Cara crossed the finish line in second place, with Margie and Luke in third place not too far behind the others.

The very next morning, bright and early, we caught up with arguably the strongest female competitor The Amazing Race has ever seen and her passionately persistent and determined son to find out how Margie and Luke felt about the final leg in Maui, what they would have done differently, how Luke's deaf condition was an advantage to them, what they think of Kisha and Jen now after the fact, and whether Margie now allows Luke to be her make-up stylist when she goes out.

THE DEADBOLT: How tough was it going through the swings of emotion watching Luke in the final Road Block?

MARGIE ADAMS: You know, it’s really difficult, because on that final leg when we arrived in Maui we were like 20 minutes after Tammy and Victor left, we finally got a cab, and when we got to the point where we caught up with the pig, we got ahead with the wave runners. Then to stand on the sidelines and not be able to help and watch it all kind of disintegrate, that was very hard. And to see how hard Luke was on himself about it, that was even harder. So it was a difficult day.

THE DEADBOLT: Luke, looking back now, what would you have done differently in the surfboard challenge?

LUKE ADAMS: [laughs] Just getting that picture right.

MARGIE: He should’ve eaten the bugs and then he would’ve known.

LUKE: But they didn’t show a full picture on the surfboard. Some of the surfboards had full pictures. But that last surfboard, especially on the food challenge had shrimp and larva and starfish, they had different things. But on that picture they only showed one scorpion. However, that picture was really bad. It was red on the background and then it had this black in it and it looked like swords. So it was really confusing to me.

THE DEADBOLT: How do you feel Luke being deaf turned out to be an advantage for you guys during the race?

MARGIE: I think our communication. You know, people are always like, "Oh, my God. Wasn’t that hard on the show? How did you communicate?" This is just how Luke and I communicate his whole life. I mean, we don’t know anything different. So it didn’t make it harder because we had to use sign language in the aspect of that we were able to communicate with each other.

But we have kind of our own shorthand sign language that we use and we were able to communicate pretty quickly, make decisions pretty quickly, and we also are very expressive, like when we sign, and so a lot of gesturing, a lot of facial contortions, I guess you could say. But it just helped us. And there were a lot of tasks where the other teams were talking, talking, talking and Luke and I didn’t have to talk at all. We just were able to do things without the communication. It’s kind of like a non-verbal thing that we have. I think it really helped us.

LUKE: I think it really helped us a lot, my mom and I, with the challenges. We were actually in the top four from the start to the end.

THE DEADBOLT: Do you think in some way you actually gave the million dollar prize to the public in terms of inspiration for what’s possible?

MARGIE: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely! We are so thrilled at some of the responses we received from the deaf community. We’ve had total strangers come up to us on the street and say, "Hey, I just learned the sign language alphabet." And people are making an effort to communicate with Luke with sign language and just the awareness. It has just been phenomenal and we’ve gotten such great support from both the hearing and the deaf community.

Like last night, we were at this party and group of four women came up to me and said, "We’re hear to talk to you because we all have handicap children and we’re teaching them sign language and you’ve just inspired us and given us hope. We didn’t feel like we would be able to have a normal relationship with our child, but we’re really invested in learning sign language and teaching our children so we can communicate with them." And they said that they really didn’t realize how important it was until they saw us on TV. And that’s just four people who flew from California just to meet us and say that and it was just incredible.

Yeah, the million dollars would’ve been nice, but it’s nothing compared to the response from the public. I mean, if we had to pick the million dollars or the response we’ve gotten from the public, we would take the response from the public any day.

THE DEADBOLT: When you used the blind U-Turn, how difficult was it to stay focused and not get rattled by the other teams?

LUKE: It wasn’t hard for me because I knew it was part of the game. I wanted to improve the challenge for my mom and I so it didn’t bother me at all. I know it bothered my mom a little bit.

MARGIE: No, it bothered me a lot, because I really liked Amanda and Kris. I mean, I love them now, but I just thought that they were really great racers and they were really great people. They were so nice and courteous to everyone, but we had made a promise with Tammy and Victor and Cara and Jaime that whoever got to the U-Turn first would use it to give the other two teams more time because it was a difficult challenge that day. And nobody knew where the other teams were because they were so far ahead of us.

So we had made a pact to use the U-Turn and, initially, we had agreed on using it on Mike and Mel. But when Luke and I got there, we just couldn’t use it on Mike and Mel. We just had really bonded with them, so we ended up U-Turning Amanda and Kris. And I think it turned out to be a really good move because they were such a strong team. Also, it was really hard for me to actually do it because they worked so hard on the show, and I know if it had been used on me I would’ve been devastated. It was hard.

THE DEADBOLT: How do you look at the incident with Jen and Kisha?

MARGIE: Kisha and I have talked, and I talked to Jen, and we all understand that it was a really stressful time. And the show doesn’t show that we slept outside on top of a mountain in the cold and rain the night before and we had been going non-stop for 36 hours. And leading up to that ...

LUKE: There wasn’t a lot of food as well.

MARGIE: Not a lot of food. We had a couple of Ramen, I think, and it was just really, really stressful. Actually, Luke and I were really getting on each other’s nerves, too, and we’ve acknowledged that both teams were wrong. We took it way further than it should and we’ve made peace. Luke and I both respect Jen and Kisha so much as people, as athletes, as competitors, and we have no ill-will and no hard feelings. You know, we have a little bit of regret about that situation, because we had had so much fun up until that point on the race, and then it was just a sad situation for me that it happened. But it’s over and we’re friends.

THE DEADBOLT: So, do you let Luke help you with your makeup now whenever you go out?

MARGIE: [laughs] Only when I want to look like Alice Cooper.

THE DEADBOLT: Now that the race is over, can we expect to see you on an all-star version of the Amazing Race? Will you guys be there if they ask you?

LUKE: Yes. Emphatically ... YES!

-- Reg Seeton