'It's not over until it's over': Alberta wrestlers head to final leg in finale of Amazing Race Canada

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Taylor McPherson and Katie Mulkay may have some vague geographical connection to fellow competitors Kevin Martin and Gurleen Maan in Season 10 of Amazing Race, but they didn’t feel much sympathy when they left them behind in an episode earlier this week.

On Tuesday, McPherson and Mulkay, best friends and competitive wrestlers from Calgary and Edmonton, became the last Alberta team standing after Martin and Maan reached the finish line last in the semi-finals. Martin, who is from Calgary, and Maan, from Abbotsford, B.C., made a teary and somewhat heartwarming exit from the competition series in last Tuesday’s episode. The couple, who are both reality-TV veterans, reaffirmed their commitment to each other after host Jon Montgomery told them they had been eliminated. They had hit the finish line less than five minutes after their closest competitor.

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“From the beginning, with Kevin and Gurleen, they were just another team,” said Edmonton’s Mulkay, in a Zoom interview alongside McPherson earlier this week. “We didn’t really form a relationship with them. We kind of saw what they were doing and they were willing to backstab a team that they became friends with. They were willing to do whatever it took. We were just like ‘Let’s not surround ourselves with that.’ At the end of the day, this is a race and we’re here with each other and that’s what it is about.”

So they weren’t sorry to see them go?

“Exactly,” confirmed McPherson, with a laugh.

“We knew how they had acted towards other teams: forming alliances and then breaking them immediately,” the Calgarian said. “We’re like, ‘We’re not going to even come close to forming an alliance with one another.’”

Before the debut of Season 10 in July, Martin and Maan made no bones about the fact that they took a take-no-prisoners approach this season, which was filmed across Canada in the spring. On Tuesday’s episode, the final four teams were announced leading up to next week’s finale. McPherson and Mulkay will face former pro-baseball players Michael Crouse and Tyson Gillies of Vancouver, Mississauga twins Lauren and Nicole Peters and Mount Pearl, Nfld., buds Colin Rose and Matt Roberts in the season finale, which was filmed in Edmonton last spring.

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On Tuesday, viewers watched an action-packed episode that began in Moncton but soon moved to other parts of New Brunswick. Teams engaged in challenges that included scouring 1,300 traps for a “golden oyster” outside the village of Neguac, aerial target practise on a zipline where competitors had to score five points, a head-to-head challenge involving a fire-fit relay, solving a “gumshoe” crime by interrogating witnesses, learning Filipino and Irish folk dancing and memorizing the terms and correct pronunciation of Mi’kmaq months of the year.

McPherson and Mulkay were in last place for much of the episode with the most tense moments coming during the zipline challenge, with McPherson having trouble hitting her targets initially.

“The zipline was definitely frustrating, just because I had got my first four points really quick and early and then it just got to the point where I couldn’t get to the final point,” McPherson says. “It was just frustrating because I kept seeing teams leave and I felt like I was letting Katie down, I was letting myself down.”

The ‘golden oyster’ also proved elusive.

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“We struggled with finding the oyster, everybody just seemed to come and have no problem with where they looked,” Mulkay says. “We felt like we searched every row. To start off the leg with that it was ‘Come on! We can’t catch a break here.”

Of course, the team had its ups and downs in the previous eight episodes as well. They were almost eliminated in episode 7 but were saved because it was a non-elimination leg, but pulled ahead in episode 8. They were the second team to cross the finish line during the semi-finals.

“We never had those moments in the race where we said ‘This is it,’ ” says McPherson. “Even in that non-elim leg where we were driving to the mat, we were like ‘It’s not over until it’s over, until Jon says you have been eliminated from the race.’ For us, we just take every task as it is and complete it to our best abilities and hope that we keep pushing through. I think that’s what helped us get that far in the race, just being able to block everything else out and move forward. I think we can thank wrestling for that because it’s very similar. You can lose your first match of the tournament and it puts you all the way to the B-side and you have to bust your butt the next day to work yourself back up to that third-place medal match. It’s not over until it’s over.”

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The two met while on the wrestling team at the University of Alberta. Both continue to wrestle and teach wrestling. McPherson is currently an Indigenous sports co-ordinator in Edmonton.

Unlike Martin and Maan, who were both reality-TV veterans of shows such as Big Brother Canada, Game of Gold and Farming for Love and met when both were competing on The Traitors Canada, McPherson and Mulkay admit they had little interest in the format before learning they had made the cut. That said, both say they are game to do it again.

They both signed up because they wanted to be role models for young women and use the platform to spread a “strong is beautiful” mantra and show that “anything is possible.”

The two have been holding watch parties in Edmonton and Calgary every week and had more than 100 people show up for the first episode in July, where they gathered at a local pub. However, for the finale next Tuesday, the pair say they will likely watch it alone.

“The finale is the end of our journey so I think we’re just going to take it in with each other,” McPherson says. “I’m sure our families will still be cheering on from wherever they are and I’m sure there will still be giant watch parties. But we’ve decided to take it in, just her and I. How we’re going to finish this race together, that’s how we want to finish this episode together.”

The season finale of Amazing Race Canada airs Tuesday on CTV.

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