Golden Girls win another leg to advance to ‘Amazing Race Canada’ finale

TORONTO – The Golden Girls reasserted their vise grip on “The Amazing Race Canada” right on time, running a dominant leg in the Maritimes to skate smoothly into this weekend’s finale.

Olympic hockey gold medallists Natalie Spooner and Meaghan Mikkelson finished first for a stunning seventh leg on Tuesday, narrowly besting cheerfully frustrated best-friend duo Mickey Henry and Pete Schmalz.

“Crazy. So crazy,” marvelled Meaghan, somewhat convincingly, after racking up yet another top-of-podium finish. “I think that was our goal from the start, to make it to the Top 3.

“Today was the semifinals. Now, on to the gold medal game.”

Joining the hockey players and Mickey and Pete in Sunday’s finale on CTV will be serendipity-kissed Vancouver bartenders Ryan Steele and Rob Goddard, a pair twice-saved by non-elimination legs who finally bested arch-rival sibling duo Sukhi and Jinder Atwal on Tuesday.

That the entertaining Atwals were sent packing registered as at least a mild surprise, given that the Terrace, B.C., duo crossed Confederation Bridge from Charlottetown to New Brunswick riding high on wins in consecutive legs.

They were indeed “on top of the world” — in Jinder’s characteristically grandiose words — as the race began with a drive into Shediac, N.B., and a promotional visit to a fast-food restaurant that specializes in soft-serve ice cream.

As cheesy as the brief dairy challenge was, at least it inspired this amusing revelation from Mickey: “Pete, I feel like we could totally be employable after this.”

From Rocky Road to a rocky shore, teams then drove 60 kilometres to the Albert County Museum, where they all made the same Detour decision and thus journeyed to the splendour of the Hopewell Rocks at the Bay of Fundy.

There, they were expected to learn the system of international maritime signal flags and apply it to spell out seven universal nautical messages.

On paper, this task proved confusing — Mickey, for instance, seemed to believe he was expected to use his arms to relay the messages, a la the “YMCA.”

Even Natalie and Meaghan initially swam in the wrong direction.

“There was no written message on the inside of the box saying: ‘Hello, help me, help me,’ was there?'” Natalie asked, her intentions unclear.

“We look like a couple idiots,” Meaghan reflected later.

Not to be outdone, Sukhi and Jinder were a couple steps back, mired in vehicular panic — this after already absorbing a crushing 15-minute penalty earlier in the episode for running a red light.

“We may have passed Albert County Museum. Let’s see what this sign says right here,” said Jinder, as the duo approached a sign reading “Albert County Museum.”

“It says museum. Not this, right?”

“No,” Sukhi replied as they drove on. “That’s a county — a country house.”

Eventually all the teams washed up on the same shore and pooled their frustration over the finicky flag challenge.

The differences between flags were minute and all four duos laboured to recognize the subtle flaws in their layouts.

“Everyone is failing inspections at this Detour,” Meaghan summarized. “Everyone is really struggling with it.”

The Atwals were slowed by the fact that they misplaced their clue sheet, which featured instructions on how to complete the challenge. After a frantic search, they campaigned the other teams for help.

Openly lying, Mickey and Pete claimed they’d misplaced theirs too. Ryan and Rob didn’t even feel the need to fib, given their naked disdain for the siblings.

“Sukhi and Jinder you want to ask us for the clue?” Ryan asked rhetorically later. “Aren’t you the one who U-Turned us?”

Meaghan and Natalie had recently conjured complaints of their own against the gritty tactics of the Atwals — specifically, a bit of goofy attempted misdirection in the previous leg — and yet, stone-faced Meaghan ultimately betrayed her soft centre by passing her clue to Jinder.

“We want to win the race but we want to compete fairly,” she explained. “I don’t know if I should have done that. I may have just given away half a million dollars.”

Of course, that was not to be. Natalie and Meaghan briefly considered switching to the other Detour before finally spotting the error in their flag arrangement and, after 12 inspections, raced off to the Road Block. Mickey and Pete, 10 inspections deep, soon followed.

But by this point the conclusion had pretty much been set, given that this wasn’t a Road Block with potential for a shakeup. With a spectacular view along the coast, teams were to rappel down one rock-face and climb another before ziplining to the Pit Stop and a spot in the final.

Despite Mickey capably scrambling up the daunting mountain as if a ladder was etched in its face, the Ontario-raised boys couldn’t catch Mikkelson and Spooner.

Really, it’s unclear how anyone could. The physically capable Ryan and Rob — who enjoyed enough of a lead on the Atwals to ride to the finale with relatively drama-free ease — have struggled routinely with directions, finishing last on two separate legs and struggling mightily in others. Even host Jon Montgomery admitted it was “pretty miraculous” the team made the final.

Meanwhile, Mickey and Pete have been under-the-radar solid throughout the entire race but have never summoned the cutthroat intensity necessary to win a single leg.

Still, they’ve already proved wrong anyone who thought they were better-suited for a show called “The Amazing Daze” — perhaps even themselves.

“Oh man, I never would have bet on us,” enthused an awed Mickey.

So Mikkelson and Spooner find themselves in a familiar place — entering a pressure-packed, winner-take-all showdown — but perhaps without the familiar presence of a formidably dangerous rival.

With $500,000 on the line, the pair likely won’t need to search far for motivation regardless.

“Canadian girls rock,” Natalie enthused post-win. “We’re hoping we can be the first Canadian girls to win in ‘Amazing Race Canada.'”

Sukhi and Jinder, prone to stressy confusion but also as sharp and clever as any team in the race, may have looked like the hockey players’ chief competition before their ouster Tuesday.

Still, Sukhi doggedly hoisted herself up the mountain in defeat and they exited the race buoyed by mutual admiration.

“You were amazing,” attested a tearful Sukhi. “You led this race and this team and I’m just so grateful.”

“She’s just amazing,” Jinder answered back. “I look up to her, actually.

“Now that we’re done this race, I don’t want our life to be any less extraordinary.”

Sukhi and Jinder caught up with The Canadian Press following their elimination.

CP: So you lost because of a red light.

Sukhi: It was the red light. Because we lost by like minutes.

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CP: What happened?

Jinder: Honestly it was Prince Edward Island. It was like, empty. The streets are completely empty. We actually stopped at the red light and at that point Sukh had no idea if it was a red light becuase the light wasn’t in the centre, it was on the side. So we stopped and we were like, “Is this a red light?”

We both decided it wasn’t a red light and we slowly rolled through and immediately we got locked down for the 15 minutes. And that’s when Meaghan and Natalie passed us, Mickey and Pete passed us, and then Rob and Ryan caught up as well.

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CP: Is that hard to get over, the fact that you really stumbled on this technicality?

Jinder: We decided not to replay it over and over in our heads because everything was so close.

Sukhi: We kinda numbed it out. It wasn’t meant to be.

Jinder: There was two things that we blocked out — the naked challenge and this entire day.

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CP: Meaghan helped you out when you lost the clue. Were you surprised by that?

Sukhi: Yeah, I was surprised. It’s the final three and I’m like oh my gosh, we already have this penalty with the red light and now we lost our clue. She originally said no, and then 15 minutes later, I asked again and she said yes and I was blown away. It was so nice of her to do that.

Jinder: You don’t really see it throughout the entire series but we had developed such a solid friendship with the girls. We loved them, we knew they were amazing people and this just confirms their character. Meaghan just has a heart of gold. No one would do that in the final four.

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CP: You came into this week having won two consecutive legs. Were you surprised to finish behind Ryan and Rob, who had struggled?

Jinder: At this point it’s the team that makes the least amount of mistakes that goes through. We were hoping that it would be Rob and Ryan getting lost again, because they got lost in Normandy, they got lost in France, they got lost everywhere. So we were kind of banking on the fact that they’d get last.

We were hoping for a non-elimination, “keep racing,” to be honest.

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CP: Your French is not the best. Is that fair?

Sukhi: We did learn “vite, s’il vous plait,” but they never showed it! All the French we did speak properly was not aired. I swear. You can go to the archives. They showed our “repeato.”

Jinder: At the end of the day you don’t need to know French to make it to the Top 4.

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CP: How’d your family feel about the naked pose?

Jinder: Our sister had to set it up — because I’m gluten-free and lactose-intolerant, that pretty much lined it up that if I went to the perogy challenge I would die. So I thank my sister for us.

Sukhi: I kept my eyes closed and you forget. It wasn’t until the next night when I was sleeping I woke up at like, 3 a.m., I was like: “Jinder, I didn’t have any clothes. What did I do?!” He was like, “Dude, just go to bed. Who cares?”

— Follow @CP_Patch on Twitter.