Amazing Race's Gary and Will: We're Responsible for Our Own Demise

After two close-call finishes, Gary and Will's Amazing Race luck ran out Sunday when they were eliminated after initially taking the wrong way to the Pit Stop. "We weren't close at all, but we knew we had to keep trying until Phil [Keoghan] told us we were eliminated," Will tells TVGuide.com. The self-professed super-fans of the Race are disappointed they didn't put up a better showing for fellow die-hards, but the substitute teachers say they are proud of one thing.

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That wasn't a very suspenseful finish like last week since you guys had to go back to take the boat to the Pit Stop.
Gary: Yeah, we were maybe 30 minutes behind [Trey and Lexi]. We knew we were far behind because when we saw them at the boat landing, they were nice enough to let us know the taxi driver had sent us to the wrong side of the river, so we had to take the boat back and take another boat back to where we are, and that took a while. How did you bypass the boat ride section?
Gary: The clue was very interesting. The top part said, "Make your way to the next Pit Stop at the boat landing." The middle part said you must go to a certain side of the river, take a boat across the river, then walk to the Pit Stop. We had shown our cab driver the clue. We had folded it because the important information was the middle paragraph ... so he would just see that section. However, at one point, he got out of the taxi to ask for directions and we think he unfolded the clue and showed someone the top part of the clue, which just say go to the Pit Stop, so that's how we ended up driving to the wrong side of the river.Do you think it was that that did you in or choosing the cotton Detour since you did pass Trey and Lexi on the road?
Will: The cotton did take a bit of time. I think that's when Trey and Lexi ultimately passed us up since they did iron. But we don't know the time frame on the iron either. The mattress did take a lot of time, but I thought we kept a good pace on it. Ultimately, we were so far behind from the Roadblock that it hurt us. We were responsible for our own demise.Gary: Yeah, and we took that taxi to the Pit Stop.Why did you have so much trouble with the Roadblock?
Gary: Well, it was 101 degrees in Bangladesh that day. I know how to use the [putty] to repair the bus ... but I had to scrape it off and start it over twice. It wasn't the best surface to put it on. But it was what everybody else had to work with too. I wasn't the only who had difficulty with that.Will: I think they were doing it a different way Gary was used to working with it.Gary: It took probably two and a half hours. It was quite humid and quite oppressive, but it was something we all had to do.Did you think you could make another comeback after your past two finishes?
Will: We definitely thought we were still in it when we passed Trey and Lexi. We just kept trucking and hoped we would beat them. At some point, they passed us, but we didn't see that.

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It was nice of them to tell you the right direction about the boat since they could've easily screwed with you.
Will: Yeah, they were very helpful to us on the Race.Gary: Trey is a great guy. All the teams — they are all fantastic. I mean, Amy and Daniel set up an organization for disabled athletes. We were helping back and forth with Trey and Lexi the whole time. I gave him one of my shirts because he needed one. We exchanged food at one point. We tried to be positive with all the teams.Rob and Sheila told me you guys had an alliance and they were upset that you broke it when you didn't tell them where the abacus was.
Will: At the time, we thought maybe Rob and Sheila and us were the last two teams, and we didn't really want to race them head-to-head, so we figured we shouldn't tell them where the clue was. It's a race, you know? We had an alliance, but if it's just us two left, we're not going to let them beat us by telling them where the clue was. We love them, but we couldn't tell them when we didn't know if we were last or not. When there's no danger of elimination, you can keep up that alliance, but the rules go out when you don't know.Gary: If we had known the Chippendales were still out there, we would've definitely told Rob and Sheila where the clue was.A lot of fans are upset that you didn't run to the Pit Stop on the second leg.
Will: What happened was, at the bull race, Gary got hurt, and his foot was swollen. I told him to get medical attention, but he was so afraid to ask for medical attention because he thought it would get us thrown out of the Race, so he couldn't run. We couldn't run through the market area.Gary: We didn't want to give medical any chance to hold us back. I kept my foot on ice at the hotel. I slept with my shoe on, so it wouldn't swell up. We're bikers, so we had this thing called biofreeze, which I kept on my foot so I wouldn't feel anything. We're not making excuses, but it did hurt quite a bit.Did that affect you the next two legs?
Gary: A little bit. It was better because we had a longer Pit Stop.

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As super-fans, how disappointing is it to go out early?
Gary: We wanted to win for ourselves, but we really wanted to win for all the people who love the show. It was the ultimate experience of my life. The Race is so much harder in person than it is on TV. The hardest part is going from Point A to Point B. You don't understand all that's involved in going from one place to another.Will: We are extremely proud that we treated all the locals well. We stuck to their cultures, we stuck to their lifestyle. It's not their responsibility to speak English; it's our responsibility to communicate with them as best we can, whether with signs or in their language, because we're in their country. We were very generous with our money too. Gary: Yeah, the average wage in Bangladesh is like $600 a year. The money we gave them might have helped them out for a month, I don't know. The people in Indonesia and Bangladesh had smiles on their faces and were laughing. They were making the best of a really horrible economic situation. Even though we couldn't speak their language, there is a universal language of smiling and nodding your head and giving thumbs up. Will: Yeah, and I mean, the taxicab drivers aren't racing for $1 million dollars. I think people forget that. Our pedicab driver in Indonesia was an older gentleman and we just kept handing him money and hopefully that made up for all the hard work he did for us.You pre-paid him before he dropped you off at the Pit Stop.
Gary: Yeah, as we were racing the girls, I just kept reaching in and giving him more money, I guess, as an incentive to go faster and as a way to thank him for busting his butt to get us to the Pit Stop. He really busted his butt for us and that finish was even closer than how it appeared.What are you up to now?
Will: We're still depressed that we're no longer on the show! [Laughs]Gary: At the school I'm teaching at now, the kids really got behind the show. We had Amazing Race Friday before the premiere. Every week, we talk about it. I'm really happy I'm in this profession where we can talk about it and they can learn about the world.