I agree entirely with Beth that the race is supposed to make you push yourself and your boundaries. Margarita climbing a mountain, Margaretta declaring the zipline “way cool,” even the not-so-gutsy grannies being persuaded to try the hang-gliding – those are some of the scenes that made the early seasons of this show so great. But if that’s what they’re going for, they shouldn’t be casting people who are unwilling to push themselves and their boundaries.

My point is this: When determining whether there is or isn’t a female-team problem, you need to look at least as much at the casting as at the design of the race. Is there a bias against casting competent, likable female teams, or are pairs of competent, likable women really as rare as this show makes them out to be? Or is there another explanation that I’m not seeing?

Correct. I played a round of farmer’s golf when I was visiting family there last year, and there is almost exactly no strength at all required to do it. Besides, an entire nine-hole course works out to just over two hundred metres (it’s actually closer to miniature golf than real golf, despite the oversized props), so each hole is a little over twenty. When you’ve got eight shots to hit it that far, you’re looking at maybe eight or nine feet. In that windy weather? Yeah, it’d be fairly hard (and I’m willing to bet either the high-striker or the soused herring was added to combat expected poor weather and get people to choose the golf anyway, because UNDERPANTS). But the girls screwed themselves over by switching so much.

Besides, tailoring tasks to fit the abilities of the racers would not only be boring, it would go against the notion that the race is supposed to make you push yourself and your boundaries.

Linda, thanks again SO much for doing this! Your insight always brings an added dimension of enjoyment to watching the Race!!

I disagree. I don’t think the golf clubs were “heavy mallets.” I think they were wooden sticks hitting plastic balls, and that they were much more awkward than they were heavy. And as I explained, I just don’t agree with you that the golf task “relied heavily on arm strength.” I don’t see ANY indication that you needed a huge amount of arm strength, as opposed to technique and patience, for the golf. Neither of us was there; we can’t know for sure. But to me, the indications are that it did not require a huge amount of strength. Just patience and effort from both partners on the team.

The reason I consider it obviously significant whether other female teams could have done it, then it’s not impossible for any female team, which Maria has claimed it is. It’s just harder if you have weak arms. Their problem isn’t being women; their problem is where they fall along the continuum of athleticism among women.

To me, they can’t give extra strokes based on the weather. The weather wouldn’t have been so brutal, or the girls so cold, if they hadn’t screwed around and gone back and forth across the creek. If a change in the weather was the culprit, then it’s no different from when a taxi is the culprit or some other unlucky element.

If you make sure that everyone can do everything pretty easily, then there’s basically no reason to do the show at all. People run up against their strengths and their weaknesses, and either they persevere/succeed or they don’t.

But ultimately, the heart of our disagreement is that I simply don’t think it is true that they weren’t capable of doing this Detour because of some preexisting characteristic. I think they could have done the golf, as I explained. They just didn’t, because Maria didn’t contribute anything. You can’t possibly set up every Detour so that if one member of the team completely lies down on both options — which is exactly what Maria did — the other one can cover her.

The way I see it, whether a different female team could have done the task is irrelevant, because a different female team didn’t have a chance to try. TPTB chose to cast a team lacking in arm strength as the only female team and to design a detour the depended heavily on arm strength.

It’s also irrelevant whether M/T could have done the task if the weather had been different. Cold and windy weather is not unusual in northern Europe, even in the summer. If TPTB didn’t account for that, I see that as poor planning. They could have changed the allowed number of strokes on the golf task based on the weather, or they could have allowed eight strokes on your first attempt, nine on your second, ten on your third, and so forth.

My biggest complaint with this episode, though, is that it’s not fun to watch people fail miserably at things. It’s especially not fun to watch a task that some people can do instantaneously and others basically can’t do at all, and where the distinction between those two is based on a pre-existing characteristic that the producers knew about or should have known about. It’s not fun to watch M/T fail miserably at hitting things with heavy mallets. It wasn’t fun to watch Mika fail miserably at going down the slide. It wasn’t fun to watch the other Maria back in season 6 fail miserably at driving stick. I blame her for coming on the race without learning how to drive stick, but I also blame TPTB for letting her come on the race without learning how to drive stick.

Presumably they screen the would-be racers pretty carefully, and presumably there’s no shortage of would-be racers to choose from. Everybody doesn’t have to be equally skilled at everything – that would be impossible (and boring). But is it too much to ask to choose racers who are at least capable of completing all the tasks?

OTOH, I think that the set up of TAR has shown to be a more difficult game to win for an all women team. Its not so much whether there are physical tasks but it seems to me that Killer Fatigue has affected the women more, which I think is significantly contributed to by the physical tasks. When we are shown a physical task, for the most part the male on a m/f team will do it. I think the men have usually been able to do those tasks easier and expend less energy, and thus are able to recover from those tasks quicker. While most of the all-women teams haven’t lost directly because of a physical task, I think that the physical challenges increased or sped up KF because they had to spend more energy doing them and didn’t have sufficient time to fully recover. Thus KF affected the women more, which then manifested on the mental tasks, including navigation.

Momily is a good example, where that team got eliminated solely because Emily suffered from extreme KF which caused her to want to ditch the whole detour and just take a cab, rather than the bus (although I’m not sure she realized that taking a cab meant that they didn’t “perform” the detour and would suffer such a penalty, again possibly also due to KF). Even the BQ’s inability to quickly perform the mental challenge at the end could be chalked up to the cumulative effects of KF.

I just wonder that if they had a season which perhaps cut the amount of physical challenges in half and increased the number of mental-type challenges (but could still keep in the fun challenges such as bungie jumping, etc.) would increase the odds of having a female team win.

To me, Lena is the perfect example of what a not-necessarily-physically-fit woman can do on the race. She was in that field for hours and she never once quit. If Phil hadn’t shown up, she could still be there to this day. And she was there longer than Tiffany and Maria were at either Detour. I’m sure Lena didn’t have it easy, either, but she did more in that one task than Maria did on the whole race. So until Maria and Tiffany unroll bales of hay for half a dozen hours, they can eat a bee.

The Bowling Moms were great at those tasks that they could relate to being moms (remember making the bricks in India? “Oh, it’s like kneading bread dough!”) and sped through them, giving them a time cushion for the stuff they couldn’t do as quickly. Unlike those plucky ladies, Tiffany and Maria didn’t have any particular strengths to weigh against their physical limitations.

Best female team ever? Certainly the BQs. Oh, what could have been!