Second chances are tough to come by in life, let alone on The Amazing Race. Third chances are rarified air. But fourth chances and beyond may just be reserved for Arun and Natalia Kumar. The father/daughter team had their superfan dream crushed when they were eliminated early. But when several teams couldn’t come back after the 19-month hiatus, they were given another opportunity to race. And their second run went much longer than their first, culminating in them becoming the last team eliminated from the season. Looking at the teams around them, Arun and Natalia knew they were outmatched in strength. But they hoped their smarts, knowledge of the show, and support of one another would be the qualities to bear out at the end of the day. They came into Scotland having placed third, which would turn out to be their highest of the season. But it all came crashing down for them like a pair of ill-fitting trousers. Arun was convinced to do a musical performance task, and his lack of skills sent them to last place. Though they went out on a low note by being eliminated, they were granted a reprise a year and a half later. They were put back in the race after four teams dropped out from the return. And though they didn’t have much time to prepare beforehand, they had a fire in their bellies to make good on the opportunity. Unfortunately, Arun and Natalia found another weakness in their second run on the race besides singing and dancing. The new COVID-accommodating route drastically increased the amount of self-driving, which proved to be challenging for them. They were plagued with navigational issues throughout the rest of the season, which consistently sent them to the back of the pack. But Lady Luck, like the Oracle of Delphi, can provide both good and bad. Arun and Natalia were twice saved by non-elimination legs, and when it mattered most, they escaped last place by the skin of their teeth. But things finally ran out in Portugal. Arun’s difficulty in the water during a Roadblock had him up a creek without a paddle (though he had two at the time). By the time they finished, the other three teams had left them in the rearview mirror, meaning their re-elimination had finally come. Now out of the race, Arun and Natalia talk with Parade.com about what led to both eliminations, their struggles with catching up to the other teams, and why their dynamic on the race surprised them. So I have to start with the obvious. Arun, have you gotten near a rowboat since your time in Portugal?Arun Kumar: No, no, no! (Laughs.) No more “row, row, row your boat.” I’ve been spending the entire season just waiting for this episode.Natalia Kumar: It’s funny. We got little goodie bags from Lulu and Lala at our finale party. And ours had a little oar in it. (Laughs.) I love that. Well, let’s start with that task. Arun, how accurate was the edit for the trouble you were experiencing during the boat Roadblock?arun: There were about 30 boats or whatever. So you have to go to the back of the boat and look at the name. I knew Cristiano Ronaldo was a football player, so I figured that out immediately. And in the heat of the moment, I went with António Costa. Later, I found out he is the prime minister of Portugal. But with the rowing, I couldn’t get the traction. When I was trying to go forward, I was going backward. When I was trying to go backward, I was going to move forward. And I got stuck in the corner. Then when I see the boats, I see the name of Vasco de Gama. And I knew he was an explorer because he traveled to India. So I wanted to get back there. I’m yelling at Ryan, saying, “Oh, that’s my boat! Don’t take it. Don’t take it.” I choked the championship game going to the Super Bowl. That’s what happened. I’m a big football fan. And that was the championship game. That was my time to shine. But that was a choke. That being said, you had escaped elimination plenty of times before. How much hope were you holding out that you could move out of last place in the rest of the leg?Natalia: When we were doing the painting, they had some music going on. So when Ryan and Dusty left, we were like, “Okay, this might be it. So let’s enjoy the painting.” But at the same time, you never know. There was an entire Roadblock left to go.Arun: We were surprised to still see Ryan and Dusty. We still had hope at that time. Because you know in the race, stranger things have happened. But once we got to the counting task, we didn’t see any other teams. We knew already all the teams had checked in. And we knew there were no more non-elimination legs coming. So at that moment, we truly realized we were going home.Natalia: Because we could see the pit stop from the counting Roadblock. So we saw Ryan and Dusty checking in. Let’s go back to your first elimination in Scotland. How did it feel to finish in last so early on and then get that call that you’re running the race again when things restart?Arun: The thing is that we didn’t know four or five weeks before the race restarted that we were going back. We had just given up hope. Our Amazing Race journey came to an end. We were surprised when we got a call back. But the first time, I was so…Donald, Where’s Your Troosers! We had finished seventh or eighth in the first leg and third in the second leg. And when we got to the whiskey barrel challenge, we were fourth or fifth. I don’t know why we changed Detours and decided to sing and dance after five minutes. That was the biggest mistake we made. We never recovered after that.Natalia: Yeah, it was all downhill from there. But we went to sequester after we got eliminated the first time. Mike and Moe and we were just sitting around saying, “Well, you never know. Maybe there’s a chance.” So there’s that little bit of hope during the pandemic. Who knows what’s going to happen with our season. We never knew it was even going to see the light of day. So then we ended up getting the chance to go back, and that’s when we were like, “We’re gonna fight through this.” Early in the race, you talked about how Natalia wanted to rush ahead while Arun wanted to hang back. And that was actually the opposite dynamic you expected to have preseason. Talk to me more about that.Natalia: I normally am very patient. I’m pretty laid back in real life. But I was frantic when the race started because adrenaline’s rushing. I’m like, “Let’s go here, let’s go there.” And he was the one that was like, “Okay, let’s just step back a little bit.” Which is a weird dynamic, because normally, he has so much energy and is running all the place. And sometimes, I’m actually the parent in this relationship and pulling him back! So it was a weird role reversal. But I think as we settled in, we both learned that we needed to calm down a little bit.Arun: Generally, Mike I have a lot of patience. But in the end, I also want to win. We try to win in anything, whatever we do. But in Amazing Race, you really have to step back, read the clue, make the right decisions, and then spend two to five minutes extra on finding directions. That’s so key. And that’s what I was trying to tell her. “Where are you running? You don’t even know. It’s like somebody cut your head off. You’re just wandering off.” I think we settled down once we came back on the race. That being said, we need to talk about the directions issue. What made navigation so difficult for the two of you when you came back to the race?Natalia: Our strategy with directions changed as we progressed through the race. We were in Scotland during the first self-drive. I was writing down a lot of detailed step-by-step directions. The issue is the map you have is very important. And we had a map with that we had gotten, that was more of the big landmarks. So it didn’t have detailed streets. That map we had in Scotland was no use. And so, I was heavily relying on writing down step-by-step directions. The problem is you go off of that, then you’re totally lost, and you have to stop again. So when we came back, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to draw the map from Google Maps and have that if we don’t have an actual physical map, instead of trying to always do the detailed directions. And so that helped. But then, when you get to your destination, it’s hard to find those specific moments. And that’s where you need the step-by-step directions. So it’s a balance between those two. But I think a lot of the time, it was small mistakes. In the Switzerland leg, when we were headed to the dam, we didn’t notice the map was in there. So it wasn’t like we didn’t know how to read a map. We were halfway through, and we just didn’t realize there was a map in the car. Sometimes we had one, and sometimes we didn’t. And I think the edit was part of it as well. There were times when we watched the show, and we’re like, “We know we didn’t get lost there.“Arun: The story they created was that Natalia and I were always going to get lost. But to answer your question, Mike, there is some truth to that. I think we just made the wrong mistake at the right time. Instead of taking a left, we probably took a right. And that cost us the legs so many times. That being said, I could imagine constantly trailing had a mixture of emotions. On the one hand, you had to deal with always being behind teams. On the other hand, you knew you had been able to avoid elimination beforehand. How did you reconcile those feelings?Arun: We always believed in us. We said we would race one leg at a time. So as long as we continued to stay alive, we were fine. And in the tenth leg, we were right there! We got to the rowing challenge right before Ryan and Dusty. And so, in spite of everything, we still had the opportunity to survive if I didn’t choke. We had the painting, and Natalia did a great job with the counting thing. We believed in ourselves. We thought that we could survive every leg and be fine. We had confidence in ourselves that we could do well.Natalia: We just had to beat one team. That was our goal.Arun: And this season, the way the legs were structured was different. We were able to catch up during the challenges, except for the singing and dancing and rowing. We had done well in most of them.Natalia: We were always starting either 30 minutes behind the first group or always in that last group. So with the new structure of the departure times, it’s hard to make up that time. Even though 15 minutes doesn’t seem like a lot of time, it is when you’re racing. Look at Ryan and Dusty. Once they fell into that second group, they were never able to make it back up.Arun: Also, the “Detroit vs. Everybody” mantra was happening. The teams on the top were working together. I don’t know if it was an official alliance. But we were by ourselves in it. The only time we worked with the team was Lulu and Lala on the fishing task. Otherwise, we were on our own island out there. And all the teams were on a different island. So let’s focus on the island of Arun and Natalia. You constantly talked about growing closer over the course of the race. What did you learn about each other racing around the world together?Natalia: My whole life, he’s always showing up. He never missed like a recital, a game I had. But I got to see in action the perseverance and the positivity. Growing up, one of my pet peeves about him is he was always so positive. So energetic and smiling. He motivated me so much, even behind the scenes. He was telling me, “Don’t give up; we just have to keep going.” Him being able to give that to me was just a life-changing experience. It’s cliche, but it does bring you closer together.Arun: We normally don’t agree. A lot of things in real life, I’ll say, “That won’t work. That’s not good.” But on the race, our chemistry was pretty good. I was surprised by how well we worked together on the race. We were able to look at the positives and the negatives and balance it out.Natalia: We normally fight a lot more in real life. And you see the little spats that we had in Greece. But I was expecting us to fight a lot more. And we didn’t! We worked pretty well together. So the chemistry was much better than I expected. Next, check out our interview with The Amazing Race 33 third-place finishers Ryan Ferguson and Dusty Harris.
