Tuesday night’s episode of The Amazing Race Canada brought its contestants to the Nanaimo area for the first time, where a team with a local connection leaped from fourth place to take the lead.
Sarah Wells and Sam Effah, a pair of Team Canada track athletes from Toronto, were last on the Island to compete at an international track event in Victoria. This was their first time in Nanaimo, where Wells has family.
“My cousin actually lives in Nanaimo and I have never gone there to visit her,” she said. “So it was fun once [last week’s] episode got aired she was like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re coming to my city.’”
On the Nanaimo leg of the race, the teams of two completed a number of challenges that showed off the area’s parks, wildlife and natural beauty.
Amazing Race host Jon Montgomery said the Nanaimo area has a “treasure trove of flora, fauna and outdoor activities to keep people like the Amazing Race producers just noodling on endless possibilities to torture racers with.”
“It’s next level what we can achieve with what Nanaimo has to offer,” he said. “It’s pretty thrilling from both a visual perspective – what you can achieve from the shots and what it looks like – to great gameplay and being able to challenge these racers with lots of cerebral tasks, not just physical ones.”
Wells said she and Effah had a motivational word of the day they would “lean into” to help them through the competition and in Nanaimo it was “persistence.”
“We just kind of had this word in our head of ‘persistence’ that we were going to relentlessly pursue and push past every obstacle we faced, no matter what the challenge,” she said.
The first team to arrive in the Nanaimo Harbour via sea planes from Vancouver were Vancouver couple Aarthy Ketheeswaran and Thinesh Kumarakulasingam, winners of the previous two legs of the race. They said they’ve visited Victoria in the past but this was their first time in Nanaimo.
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