It took a lot to get Nicky Getz and Kim DeJesus out of “The Amazing Race.”
They finished last in two Legs, but it happened that those Legs were a “Keep on racing…” Leg and a Non-Elimination Leg. Then, in this past Sunday’s Leg, it took a burnt-out clutch on an early task, a U-Turn and a Speed Bump to finally push them so far behind the rest of the pack that they couldn’t catch up.
Still, when Nicky & Kim reached Phil Keoghan, they were all smiles, echoing their upbeat approach to nearly everything this season, or everything other than Kim’s regular freakouts at height-based challenges.
The wives of major league baseball players Chris Getz and David DeJesus, Nicky & Kim made for a likable pairing and no matter what Marie thinks, we saw no evidence at all that they did anything wrong in getting on the standby list first in Brazil.
In this week’s “Amazing Race” exit interview, Kim & Nicky talk about Marie’s confusing grudge, Kim’s acrophobia and some funny moments we never got to see on TV.
Full Q&A after the break…
HitFix: Having been saved twice when you finished last, did you guys have any hope of one last reprieve at that last pit stop?
Kim DeJesus: I think we really knew we were done. Some other teams were joking, they’re like, “They’re not bunnies. They’re cats. They have nine lives.” But we definitely kinda knew going in that that was our last Leg.
Nicky Getz: Yeah, Phil asked us. He’s like, “Why aren’t you guys crying?” And we’re like, “Well, we’ve been saved twice already, so at this point, we kind of knew it was our good-bye.”
HitFix: Did having gone through the emotional wringer of thinking you were going home twice before make it easier for you guys to keep it together and keep the smile in that moment?
Kim: No, I just think that once we got the U-Turn, we had a lot of hours to digest the fact that we knew. It was such a long day and they didn’t show how far things were apart. It was just a lot of driving around. We knew we were gone once we got U-Turned, but we weren’t just going to cry all day. I think the other times we were on the mat, it was such sudden emotion, but that day we had so many hours to digest it like, “OK. This is our last Leg. Let’s just make the best of it and have a good day.”
HitFix: It took a *lot* to get you guys out. It was the U-Turn. It was the Speed Bump. It was the clutch burning out in that dune buggy. Talk about all of the things that had to go wrong in that Leg to get you guys out the game.
Nicky: Yeah, we were battling, but unfortunately things that day were just not going our way, just from the very beginning of the day. Yeah, you can’t control any of that, but we had such a fun day that day and looking back when we were watching the episode, it was so bittersweet, because we knew we were getting kicked off at the end, we had so much fun that day that it was kinda fun to watch either way.
HitFix: You guys kept a good attitude, particularly in how you interacted with each other, throughout the entire run. Were you guys pleased and impressed with how, I guess, “functional” your relationship was?
Kim: Awww. Thanks! I feel like we definitely are positive people in general and that’s kinda why we picked each other to go on, because we both like to just have so much fun and laugh and make the most of every day and I just think we carried that into the Race. We are proud of ourselves. We were able to stay calm under pressure and I think it says a lot about our friendship and I’m just so proud of Nicky and the way she ran then Race and…
Nicky: Awww. You too, Kim. During the whole Race, you just have to be so open about things, too. So after a certain Leg, we’d come back and have a little pow-wow and say all the positive things we did and maybe the things we could work to improve on. When we got into that last Leg of the Race and we were talking about how we weren’t bunnies anymore, we were ninjas, it was kinda like we’d talked about it before and we were like, “We need to be more aggressive and make faster decisions and do this and do that!” So yeah, just the entire Race, we were trying to be positive and trying to improve our game as much as possible.
Kim: I think too, just in life in general, when something’s not going right, throwing a tantrum or getting really upset about it is not going to make it better. There were definitely times where we were really stressed out, but I think it’s just a good learning lessons. Throwing a tantrum is not going to make you come in first? Know what I mean? You’re just gonna waste energy yelling.
HitFix: OK, then. Let’s talk about about some people who maybe didn’t respond to things in the same way. [They both laugh.] You guys knew that Tim & Marie had U-Turned you, but were you surprised to watch last night’s episode and see that she was still harping on that airplane thing where you didn’t didn’t actually do anything wrong?
Kim: If she had just been like, “OK, we’re U-Turning them because we’re stressed out,” we would have understood, but the fact that she U-Turned us because of the airport thing where we were legitimately and rightfully and honestly first on the stand-by list? I just felt like we were kinda bullied at that airport. They just wanted us to not get on first, so they were mad at us and we were like, “Well what do you want us to do? We were really first.”
Nicky: Yeah and also, I thought the funniest part about that was that even some of the other teams were made at us for doing and I’m like, “I don’t know. I just kinda thought that was a smart thing to do.” I don’t think it was unfair. I thought it was a totally fair way to run the Race, but people were angry that we did that and I’m like, “I think if you had done that, you wouldn’t have thought it was a big deal at all.” So I thought that was a little confusing.
Kim: Yeah, if you’re in last place or you think you’re potentially in last place, doing a U-Turn is totally what you should be doing, U-Turning a team. Even when the Afghanimals lied to the ER Doctors about it, I was like, “You don’t need to lie. You can just be honest and people understand that’s how you have to run the Race.”
HitFix: Let’s talk about Little White Lies on the Race. We saw on Sunday’s episode that the Afghanimals lied to you about how long the Detour was taking and the week before, you two hid the information about the figs from them. Was that just gameplay? Or was there actual annoyance you two teams?
Kim: We didn’t have annoyance with them, but we just knew if we told them that they were gonna start screaming, which they did do and then everyone found it. They were never quiet about anything. We’re like, “We can’t just tell them. They’re not gonna help us.” They were always with the Ice Girls, so we’re like, “There’s really no advantage in it.” And it wasn’t that we lied to them. We didn’t tell them that we didn’t know where they were. We just said, “Hey, we’re in the middle of counting. Leave us alone.”
Nicky: We were already distracted from counting the figs by Tim & Marie yelling so much that we were kinda just like, “We just wanna work at our own pace.” And I feel like Kim and I kinda did that the whole Race and whether that was a good idea or a bad idea, I don’t, but we kinda seemed to stick to ourselves and just try to figure things out on our own and hope that it worked.
HitFix: There was that brief moment that it looked like you guys and Tim & Marie might be able to have an alliance, but then that passed. Was that really entirely undone by what happened at that airport?
Kim: I think in Marie’s mind it was. I don’t think Marie likes to give second chances.
Nicky: I think after the airport, I know for myself that I was a little bit scared of her. You try your best to be nice and be cordial, but I think she’d pretty much written us off at that point.
Kim: Let’s be honest: I was really scared of her.
HitFix: Kim, along those lines, you announced at the very beginning that you were not good with heights, but then you seemed to get stuck with one challenge after another that required you to deal with that. What was going through your mind as that kept happening?
Kim: I used to not be afraid of heights. I think it’s when you have a child that everything becomes scarier because you’re like, “I have this little person who depends on me for every single thing and here I am doing these things for fun and adventure and if something were to happen, I would feel so guilty.” So I think these thoughts just run through my head. I don’t know why that makes me so scared. It shouldn’t. But then I just magnified the scare in my head when I’m there. I just felt like I had to keep facing fears and I think it was amazing for me, because honestly none of those things are that unsafe. It’s not like they were unsafe, but it was just basically facing a fear and I felt like every day I was literally doing something physically that I could never have done before or a fear that I literally had to overcome and I learned so much on the Race. I literally do feel like I can do anything. I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do now, because some of that stuff, if you’d told me I was gonna do it, I wouldn’t have believe you. So I definitely feel like I grew a lot from the Race and I would encourage anybody that has fears to face them, because it’s such an exhilarating experience once you do it.
HitFix: And Nicky, we never got to see you freak out about anything. Was there anything that might have caused you to face your fears or freak out in any way?
Nicky: I feel like there wasn’t anything I was that scared of just because you kinda know in the back of your head that everything you’re doing has been tested so many time and that they couldn’t really be that unsafe, but I definitely got a kick out of watching Kim. This past Leg, I was like, “Kim, I’m pretty sure your sun could jump into this wave pool right now.” Sometimes I had to bring her confidence up and that was pretty amusing. I was like, “Kim, this doesn’t look scary at all. We’re jumping into a pool.”
HitFix: You guys have husbands who are ultra-competitive in their professional lives. How competitive and intense did David and Chris get rooting for you on TV these past couple weeks?
Nicky: I think they were really proud of us. There were a couple times where I think Chris was like, “Why did you guys do that?” or “You should have done that!” But overall, they were super-supportive. I think both of them were like, “Man. We wish we could have gone on.” So yeah, I think they loved watching us.
Kim: Yeah, I think Dave, every time he watched it, he pretty much laughed the whole time, because he thinks it’s hilarious to see me pushed out of my comfort zone. I think he was proud of me, but also a little shocked, because he always say that my arms look like twigs and that I have no muscles and he always tells me I’m like the weakest human on Earth, but I feel like he was pretty much shocked, because some of that stuff was really hard!
HitFix: Was it a satisfying reversal to have them watching you on TV and cheering for you?
Kim: We watch them all the time on TV and go to their games and cheer and that’s such a big part of our lives and it was fun, I think, for them to watch us in a competition for once.
HitFix: And my regular last question: Each of you give me a favorite moment from this experience that we didn’t get to see on TV.
Nicky: One of my favorite moments that didn’t air is this last episode and we were driving up this mountain to get to the Pit Stop and we knew were in last place and we were bummed, but still kinda thinking about how great the Race was and Kim I were comparing it to baseball and just the things were saying were just hysterical and I wish they would have aired it, because sometimes I feel like they aired a lot of the stuff that is part of the Race, but some of the more funny parts that we experienced weren’t actually aired.
Kim: Yeah, that was really funny. I would say that I definitely feel like they caught a lot of my emotional, scared, pussy moments. Wait. Am I allowed to say “pussy”? But I feel like we laughed so much on the Race. Sometimes our camera guys, their cameras would start bouncing up and down because they were laughing at us because we were just so ridiculous. So I feel like they didn’t show maybe our more ridiculous side.
Nicky: I have my favorite time! When we were doing the salt mine, we were in last place by an hour, because we couldn’t carry those bags.
Kim: Wait. Correction. Kim couldn’t carry the bags.
Nicky: Kim couldn’t carry the bags. Correction. So we were running back and we had to ride our bikes back. So we get to the place where we parked our bikes and we know we’re in last place and there’s two bikes and miles and miles and miles and miles of desert and Kim looks at me and she goes, “Are you sure these are our bikes?” And I’m like, “Of course these are our bikes! These are the only bikes in like 5000 miles right now.”
Kim: And our camera guys just started dying laughing.
Nicky: It was just so ridiculous.
Kim: And the problem is that I was serious. I was like, “Wait!” Yeah, we had some moments. And then one time Nicky, she was just so overwhelmed and couldn’t find the clue and she was asking a cat for our clue. She was literally talking to this cat. Oh man.
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