Gay-Straight Brother Alliance Wins

What were your relationships like with the other teams?
Dan: We really got along with almost every team. We wanted to get along with everyone — we thought it would be a good thing, not only for making friendships and bonds, having shared such a special experience, but strategically, with U-turns [with which one team can force another to go to a previous point in the race and perform a task] possibly being on the horizon, getting on people’s bad sides would only result in negative parts of our race. There were two U-turns and both led to immediate eliminations. It was a good thing to stay on people’s good side.

Including Carol and Brandy?
Jordan: I would wager a guess that Brandy and Carol would probably say they were closest with us on the race of the other teams. We never had a problem with them, and both my brother and I try to see the good in people and there was a lot of good in Carol and Brandy, and they were also fierce competitors, very smart, very strategic, and very savvy with the relationships they created on the race, and they were good allies for parts of this race. And they are good people. I think they got caught up in a personal issue that they had with Caite and it got the best of them on this race, but I definitely can speak from experience and conversations that I’ve had with them and days that I’ve spent with them on this race, they are good people, and we really did not have any problems with them. They and Caite had personal issues with each other, but none of it had to do with sexuality.

Up until the final, you guys had won just one leg, and that was with a fast-forward, which allows teams to skip the remaining tasks on that leg of the race and proceed to the end. Did you feel like the underdogs in any way?

Jordan: I think that some people have that perception, but our big strategy going into the race was to kind of fly under the radar and not put a big target on our backs. There are teams that will see two guys, 23 and 25 years old, in decent physical shape, as a strong physical threat, and we didn’t want that to happen. It wasn’t about getting first place in every leg, it was about getting first place in the final leg, and that’s what we did.

It seemed like the cowboys, brothers Jet and Cord McCoy, were kind of the favorites and the front-runners for a good deal of the race. Did you feel a particular threat from them?

Jordan: I think that the final six teams or so had an equal chance of winning this race — it’s not a matter of who came in first the most times. There are so many intangibles and things that are sort of out of their control, and we knew in this final leg we had to really put the pedal to metal. For good reason, a people watching the show saw Jet and Cord as quite a threat, but if you were on the race, it you would realize that any one of these teams had an equal shot of winning this thing.