Did an Amazing Race camera crew cause a team to lose?

For the past several The Amazing Race 36 episodes, Danny has continued to say that he and his mom Angie want to run their own race. Then they end up working with other teams, just as they did at the start of this episode, sharing directions with Ricky and Cesar.

So there’s some irony to Danny and Angie were eliminated from TAR not due to their own actions, but very possibly because of something someone else did.

But it wasn’t another team who caused that: it was The Amazing Race crew members. Were they at fault, or were Angie and Danny?

The Amazing Race 36 finally left South America, heading back north to Barbados.

A reminder that this season was filmed in the fall of 2022, with travel affected by the pandemic, resulting in another limited route, just like season 34 mostly stayed in Western Europe.

There, teams had to drive themselves in small, open-air, Jeep-like vehicles. Most driving on the race has one team member driving and another sitting behind them, so the camera operator can sit in the driver’s seat and the sound engineer can sit behind the passenger seat—out of sight.

Perhaps because of the size of these vehicles, on this leg, teams sat in the driver and passenger seats, and their crew members followed them in a white van.

This seemed like either poor design—and/or designed for drama. It started raining immediately, soaking the first teams to leave: Angie and Danny, and Ricky and Cesar.

(Ricky and Cesar ended up staying in first place, their fifth first place win—incredible. It’s also incredible how some smooth brains are accusing the race of rigging things because one of them speaks Spanish. Never mind that other people on this season do too, and never mind that we’ve seen teams dominate the race like this before.)

Because teams were driving apart from their camera crew, they had to stay with their crew vehicle, even though it was behind them. Have you ever tried to follow someone, even through a familiar area? It’s tough! And so easy to get caught at a light.

All of this connects back to a fundamental Amazing Race rule: teams must stay with their camera crews.

For my behind-the-scenes story about The Amazing Race season one, producer Brady Connell told me that when they were planning the race, this was a question. “It could have been the fatal flaw of the show. How do we keep the crews with them?” The answer, he said, was “they are part of your team. It was that simple.”

Season-one winner Brennan Swain told me that the crew “are like your kids. Every time you buy a ticket to do anything, you’ve got to buy a ticket for your kids that you got to keep them close.”

So, yes, Amazing Race teams have to treat their crew members like children: they always have to be with them and within sight.

Angie and Danny lost their crew while driving to the Detour. The episode broke the fourth wall to show us this happening.

“I’m waiting for our crew,” she said.

Cut to an interview where Danny explained that the “crew’s behind us, and so mom and I kept looking behind us to make sure that we didn’t lose our crew. It’s a rule: you can’t continue until you are with your crew.”

Back in the car, Angie asked, “Is that our crew back there?”

Danny said, “Don’t worry about the guys—they’ll tell us on the radio.”

Over the radio, said “Behind you. We’re right behind you.”

“Thank you. I appreciate the assurance,” Angie said.

Then they went into a roundabout. Danny said they needed to take “the two-o’clock exit,” meaning they had to travel about two-thirds of the way around the roundabout.

They apparently missed it, and Angie said, “Do you want me to go around again?” People were honking because she was in the outer lane—which is the lane you exit from. The inside lane is for going around or going to a far exit.

So she should have been in the inside lane, either to make their turn or to go around again.

“It’s fine. Just keep going around in the roundabout,” Danny said, giving the wrong kind of encouragement. “Because you need to be in the right-hand side.”

The editors circled the crew van and followed it as it took an exit behind them—not the exit they were about to take. It’s unclear why the crew van exited there.

Angie said, “I lost the crew. Yeah, I did.” Danny said, “It’s okay. Don’t worry. They’ll tell us.” He tried to radio them, and they were apparently out of range.

“Danny, I feel like we really need to find them,” Angie said, but Danny was unconcerned: “They’ll just meet us at the next stop.”

Upon arriving, they told another producer, who said, “We know. We’re gonna hold until your crew gets here.” How long did that take? If the crew really just got off at the wrong exit, wouldn’t it be easy to circle back, or just head to the detour location?

During the actual race, Angie and Danny took the blame. While waiting, Angie said, “It is on us—we lost our crew.”

Once they were able to continue, Danny referred to the time they waited as a penalty: “I think with our penalty, that put us back.” (Was it a prescribed amount of time, or just waiting until the crew van arrived?)

At the pit stop, Danny said, “We took a wrong turn in a roundabout today and our lost our crew.” Phil Keoghan said, “tough way to be eliminated”—though he gave them a nice send-off by lifting his hat, raised his eyebrow, and even said “Phileminated.”

Since the race was filmed back in 2022, Danny has apparently changed his mind about who was at fault. In an Instagram post, Danny wrote, “to go out in what might be an amazing race first… the crew losing a team (because you know we didn’t turn the wrong way in the roundabout 😘) legendary.”

In other words, they’re not taking the blame for the screw-up. There may be good reason for that. In an interview today with Mike Bloom, Angie revealed that their crew van never arrived at the Detour. “We never did see our crew,” she said.

Danny said producers “had us say a line that’s like, ‘Hey, our crew has arrived.’ Out [sic] crew hadn’t arrived.”

As to their decision to drive directly to the Detour, Danny said all team members “had been debriefed by security that morning. And they said, ‘If you ever feel unsafe, or you lose your crew, make your way to the next location, and wait for your crew to get there.'”

Once they arrived at the Detour, they discovered “we’re about five to ten minutes behind” Cesar and Ricky. “And we just wait. And wait, and wait. I’m sitting there going, ‘What’s the rule? Give us a penalty on the mat. This is something that’s never happened before on The Amazing Race.'”

Angie said producers “were having a meeting as we got there. They’re trying to figure it out, too. You can see these little huddles of meanings and franticness. They came to our car; they went away from our car. They came to our car; they went away from our car. So, to their defense, I think it was new for them too. I don’t think anybody really knew what to do with us. So that was hard.”

They waited for 45 minutes to an hour, Angie estimated, and then someone told them, “Hey, y’all have waited long enough. Y’all have had a penalty long enough. We’re just going to grab a crew.”

All of this is very weird, and leaves me with a lot of questions. From the footage, it seems like Angie’s driving created a problem, but why did the crew just disappear? Producers seemed to be in contact with them, yet held Danny and Angie for maybe 45 minutes or an hour? Why not make an exception and not have an elimination if it was indeed the production’s fault? And why have Danny and Angie switched from blaming themselves to blaming the production?