Jen Hudak, of Park City, and teammate Kristi Leskinen, both former professional skiers, make up one of the final four teams on season 30 of “The Amazing Race.” The finale airs Wednesday, Feb. 21, on CBS.
“There have only been three all-female teams to win ‘The Amazing Race,’ and we want to be the fourth team to accomplish that,” Hudak said at the end of last week's episode.
The pair, dubbed Team Extreme, has been first to the mat twice, picking up prizes of trips to Greece and Australia. They have had a top-three finish in each leg, despite seemingly misdirected taxi drivers in Morocco and Thailand.
“I’m really proud of the performance we’ve put in on this race so far,” Leskinen said. “You have to win that final (leg). And that’s what we want to do."
The teams have raced through Iceland, Belgium, Morocco, France, Czech Republic, Zimbabwe, Bahrain and Thailand. Previews for the finale show the teams going to Hong Kong.
“The Amazing Race” has teams of two traveling to various countries and complete various tasks including Roadblocks, which all teams must complete, or Detours, where teams complete one of the two challenges.
Teams have to navigate their way to the challenge sites, sometimes driving themselves or using local public transportation. The goal is to complete the challenge and follow the clues and make it where host Phil Keoghan is waiting on the iconic “Amazing Race” mat before other teams.
This season introduced the head-to-head challenge where, on some legs of the race, teams needed to win a competition against another team before being able to check in with Keoghan. They also had a team swap in Zimbabwe.
In the finale, Hudak and Leskinen face Indy car drivers Alex Rossi and Conor Daly, and couples in former “Big Brother” contestants Cody Nickson and Jessica Graf and former Yale debaters Henry Zhang and Evan Lynyak. Zhang and Lynyak were last to arrive in the most recent episode, but it was a nonelimination leg. They will have to complete an extra challenge, called a Speedbump, during the finale.
In the most recent episode in Thailand, Hudak and Leskinen picked the Detour for calculating the measurements of an elephant at an elephant farm, and, at the Roadblock, Hudak ate cooked scorpions and a bullfrog while Leskinen waited with live scorpions on her shirt.
Also part of season 30 was April Gould, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who, with her teammate Sarah Williams, both of Arizona, were eliminated after the second leg of the race.
In the first leg of the race, they had one of the closest footraces to the mat that Keoghan has seen.
They ran to the mat at the same time as models Dessie Mitcheson and Kayla Fitzgerald. Williams made it to the mat just before Mitcheson.
“Thirty seasons and it’s never been this close,” Keoghan said.
Mitcheson and Fitzgerald were eliminated in the first leg. Gould and Williams were eliminated after Gould, who wore her Young Women torch necklace and CTR ring throughout the race, lost a head-to-head competition in Belgium hauling bags of fries on a hand truck through a course while wearing a fry costume.
“The Amazing Race” finale airs Wednesday at 8 p.m. MT on CBS.