by Reg Seeton
This week on The Amazing Race the new crop of
teams jetted off to France to wage Amazing Race
war on the old battlefields of France in the best
Amazing Race tasks in the show's sixteen season
history. As the Amazing Race teams hit the road
this past week, Joe and Heidi Wang were on the
minds of some of the teams, namely police detectives
Louie and Michael, after Joe vocalized his confidence
after hurting his knee. When the teams encountered
this week's Detour, they all found themselves
in the muddy World War I trenches of a former
battlefield in France while bi-planes buzzed overhead,
dropping fake bombs near The Amazing Race competitors
as they crawled their way through barbed wire.
After making it through the heat of Amazing Race battle, Joe and Heidi were forced to do a second tour of Amazing Race duty when Louie and Michael gave them a U-Turn, which forced Joe and Heidi into the trenches to decipher a message in Morse Code. Although Joe and Heidi did their best with the Morse Code, the married couple were eliminated from the race when host Phil Keoghan met them in the trench to hand them their Amazing Race walking papers.
The next day we caught up with Joe and Heidi to learn more about their time on The Amazing Race, how they endured the battlefield, and what Joe and Heidi thought of being handed a U-Turn.
THE DEADBOLT: So, would you guys rather do the interview in Morse Code?
JOE
WANG: [laughs] No, we care not to, as you
can imagine. And we haven't done any studying
after that either.
THE DEADBOLT: Although you guys were eliminated, how amazing was the task with the planes overhead and the action going on beside you?
HEIDI WANG: You know, it was absolutely amazing. I mean, that has got to be the Emmy winning show of the season. The sound effects and what was going on, the war reenactment, you really did feel like you were in that time and place.
THE DEADBOLT: Joe, how much do you think your knee played a factor in that leg?
JOE: You know, actually, on that leg my knee was not the problem. We did crawl through there. Even before we knew about the difficulties with Morse Code, as you guys can remember, I said, "No way. With a bad knee, I'm going to go do this crawl because the Morse code is more difficult." When we went through, I was so relieved. I'm like, "All right, great! We finished that task, let's get on to the next one." Just seeing our photo on that U-Turn was just devastating.
THE DEADBOLT: Well, how do you think Louie and Michael should've played the U-Turn?
JOE: That I don't know, other than the U-Turn is definitely one of the game aspects and they decided to use it very early on.
THE DEADBOLT: Who would you guys have U-Turned?
JOE:
You know, Phil actually asked us the same question
and basically Heidi and I had a strategy: If
we're ever in second-to-last place is when we
would use the U-Turn. Then, at that point, our
goal was just running to the U-Turn spot and
then we weren't going to U-Turn anybody. We
were already in the front, so we weren't going
to use that.
THE DEADBOLT: Looking back, is there anything you should or could've done differently with the Morse Code?
JOE: I think we did the best we can. I mean, just going through the process of listening to the Morse Code and hoping you heard it, it was almost an impossible task. I'm assuming that someone who has been trained and taught [Morse Code], it would come easy. But for us, definitely, it was something that was impossible.
HEIDI: Yeah. I mean, the Morse Code, the reel that you were listening to was so quick that you could not decipher between a dot and a dash and a space. I mean, we listened to it hundreds and hundreds of times over. With the planes flying overhead and the bombs exploding, it was just a really hard task.
THE DEADBOLT: In what ways do you think the race tested you as a couple for the better or worse?
HEIDI: You know what? First of all, when people are watching the show at home - I mean the race is challenging but until you're actually on the race as a contestant, it is a lot more difficult and challenging than it appears on TV. I don't think people realize how long the travel legs are. Joe and I, we're seasoned travelers and we fly extensively and my ankles were constantly swollen by how much travel we did in such a short amount of time. So that was definitely a challenging aspect of it.
Also,
we were sleep deprived. That leg where we were
in France, we had no sleep in twenty-four hours.
Actually, that baguette in France was the first
thing that we had to eat and I actually didn't
drink anything for twelve hours. So you're sleep
deprived, you're hungry, you're water deprived,
and you're just exhausted.
THE DEADBOLT: Was there anything from your time on the race you wish was aired, something that we didn't see?
JOE: The Hamburg leg was a crucial leg where the cops [Louie and Michael] were actually at the end of the pack and their flight, low and behold, got them there earlier even though we were supposed to arrive an hour ahead. That was a turning point. Those are the chances that happen on the race.
THE DEADBOLT: Heidi, did you eventually get your silver after you were looking for it in Mexico when you went to the Elimination Station?
HEIDI: [laughs] You know, I did. We actually got it through another vendor. We got it for a great price. It was actually a steal. So I'm very happy and I wear that ring all of the time.
