The Amazing Stripped Down Race

The Amazing Race has spent a lot of this season's race in Russia. The Sunday's episode was, I think the second week in a row of being stuck in the Siberia part of Russia.

Siberia is known for being cold. And where you got sent if the Soviets thought you were an enemy. The Soviets sent a lot of enemies to Siberia.

The Detour and Roadblock tasks on this season of Amazing Race seem not to be up to the caliber of seasons past. Or so it seems to my memory.

Like last night's Roadblock. Host Phil Keoghan introduced the Roadblock while standing in the sub-freezing temperatures in his underwear. I did not like seeing Phil in his underwear. Could he not have chosen to wear baggy boxers if he had to do this?

And why did Phil take his clothes off? Well, that's what the teammate who chose to do the Roadblock had to do. And then run 1.4 miles to the Pitstop at the Novosibirsk Ballet & Opera Theater. Novosibirsk was the Siberian city they were racing in. It was amusing listening to the teams try to read their clues with all those Russian names with "too many consonants," as one teammate put it.

Deaf Luke and his mom, Margie, made it to the Pitstop first. Margie said if it had been her who had chosen to do the Roadblock, that the game would have been over for them. I guess that meant she would have refused to run the Siberian streets in her unmentionables. Luke said it was embarrassing and that he looked down the entire time because he didn't want to see anyone looking at him.

The last 2 teams to arrive at the Underwear Race were sister's Kisha & Jen and the previous leg's first place winners, Christie & Jodi. Jen does not wear underwear, she told us. So, she was given some. She looked good in her borrowed undies, saying of herself, "Don't I look hot in my underwear?"

Christie did the run for her team. Christie had her own underwear, but they were thong/g-string type undies. This made for a lot of blurring. I don't get why if it was okay for Christie to run down a Siberian street in front of hundreds of Russians, all able to see her thong, why was this not considered something appropriate for us viewers to view?

One of the racers wondered, "Is it legal to run around in your underwear in Russia?"

Christie and Jodi came in last. But Phil did not tell them they were eliminated from the race. Next week the pair of flight attendants will come up a Speed Bump with a task only they have to do. Speed Bumps usually turn out to be easy. Unlike last week's cruel Blind U-Turn.

Next week it looks like they are heading to India. Again. The previews showed Luke sobbing hard after seeing the extreme poverty.

The previews for next week showed everyone keeping their clothes on, including Phil.