‘Destination X’ Winner Rick Szabo on Biggy Betrayal & the Real Cause of That Bus Blowup

If there was anyone who had a tough ride on Destination X, it was Rick Szabo. The professional bird watcher found himself on the outs from most of his fellow competitors after the very first exit, when Josh Martinez told the others that he could not be trusted. After that, no one else wanted to work with him — save for Christian “Biggy” Bailey, who still had much deeper ties to others on the bus. However, once Peter Weber and JaNa Craig joined the fold after the third challenge, Rick finally found some friends and was able to earn a ticket to the finale on the strength of his alliance and individual performances. In the end, after Rick revealed his deal with Peter and successfully ousted Biggy from the final challenge, it came down to just him and The Bachelor and The Traitors alum, and only he correctly guessed that the final “Destination X” marker belonged on Big Ben.

So how does the reality competition newcomer feel about getting the series’ first bag, betraying Biggy, and what we didn’t get to see on-screen? TV Insider caught up with Rick Szabo to find out.

First of all, have you gotten to spend your money yet, or are you still waiting?

No, the money doesn’t come ’til later.

Yeah, that seems standard these days. So about the finale, it seemed like Peter was getting pretty close on guessing Big Ben as well. Do you know if there was a contingency plan, if he would’ve pick that, too?

I always assumed. And even remembering back to that night, I thought he had chosen Big Ben. I thought it was going to be down to time, like, how fast in that 1:30 that we had — you saw that the time ticking down — how fast did we figure out the clues and place our X? So even when I was going up the elevator and up the stairs to Big Ben, I thought I was gonna get there second, and I was gonna see Pete there with the money, and I was gonna have an empty suitcase. So even I remember saying, “Where’s Pete? Where’s Pete? Where is he? He must be hiding in the shadows.” And so when I open the briefcase and I see the money, I’m shocked. You see my scream, because I truly thought I had lost the game. But there was somebody hiding in the shadows, and that was Jeffrey [Dean Morgan, host]. So when he came out, we hugged, embraced. I was crying. He was crying. I mean, it was a touching moment, but that was genuine tears… because I was convinced I got second place.

Your victory comes after you were kind of backed into a wall sometimes by your fellow contestants, even early on with Josh taking a shot at you during his exit. What was it like for you to play against pretty much most of the house against you?

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Yeah, I had, I think, the hardest path to the end. Because my game [plan] was to try to play the middle, no target on my back, just kind of under the radar, be the friendly dad, the fun uncle. And then Josh happened, and he threw me under the bus, called me a snake, came out with this dramatic speech of how you can’t trust anything coming out of my mouth. And so instantly, I was in damage control mode… Look, my whole team thought we were in Milan. So I’m just telling them, “I was just trying to help him out. Don’t get mad at me for trying to help him out. You would want me to help you out, too.” And I’m like, “Tai [Lowry], I told you Milan as well. So back me up here. I’m not a snake. I’m just trying to help out.” But in reality, I was being a little snaky. I mean, there was a lot of my background and story that I hadn’t told anybody. I was purposely misleading how much I had traveled, what my childhood was like, there was a lot of things. So I was like, “Shoot, did Josh figure that out so fast that I’m a snake?” But I’m like, “No, no, he didn’t clue into that. He was just trying to put his target on somebody that wasn’t in his alliance.” But that’s what happened in my game, as I had to recover from that for episodes and episodes. I think I would have been gone had Peter and JaNa not gotten on the bus. That was the lifeline I needed to win this game is to have some new friends, some new alliances, and a common enemy with the original cast. We all could say, “All right, our goal now is to get rid of Pete and JaNa.” They didn’t know I was working with them. “Get rid of Pete and JaNa,” because that took all the heat off me.

A two-fold benefit. There was one person that was kind of friendly with you the whole time, and that was Biggy. So when it came to that final three, did you hesitate or have any regrets about kind of turning on him?

You saw how hard it was for me. You saw that I couldn’t even turn around and look Biggy in the face. I was crushed knowing that I was crushing him because we had been friends since day one. And we were bunkmates, we would talk for hours at night, we were noodling clues together. You saw that I shared the Swiss flag clue with him after the helicopter, right? But at the end of the day, he chose Shayne [Cureton]. At the beginning of Episode 2, I went to everybody saying, “Who wants to work with Rick?” And you saw, nobody would even look at me in the eyes. Nobody wanted to have an alliance with Rick. He chose Shayne. That was his bed that he had to sleep in, like, I’m sorry. So when Pete and I had a real alliance, I knew I had to be faithful and loyal to that alliance. I was going to take him into the end, even if it meant hurting Biggy, which it did.

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Are you guys cool now? And has anybody that maybe was kind of sour to you during the show reached out and made friends with you outside of it?

Yeah. So I’ve reached out to everybody. We’ve all connected on social media. We’re all good. There’s no ill feelings. But I had to do a lot of damage control after the bus, too, because they would Google me or find my social media, and they would find out that I’m a content creator. I’m this birding influencer, which I kept all that quiet. And so they were shocked to find out who the real Rick is outside the bus. And I want them to know the real Rick because I am fun, I am honest, I have integrity. I’m a good dude! I’m a good family guy, but in this game, I was strategic, and I was playing hard. It worked. I won the money, but it did feel kind of icky to some players after the fact.

Do you think that if you hadn’t been put up against the wall early on by Josh that you might have opened up some more about kind of your credentials?

No, no, I made a choice from the very beginning, I am not telling anybody anything, even Pete. I didn’t tell him what I was capable of, or all the knowledge I had, or all my experience. I kept that quiet to him, but I was loyal, and I kept feeding him the clues. And so he knew that he could trust me because I told him that we are in Amsterdam. I told him we’re in Salzburg. I told him we were in Munich. I had fed him the answers, right, just so that he would be loyal to me. And that’s the only reason Mack [Fitzgerald] got out. That’s the only reason that we got Shayne out in Monaco, and that’s how we got Biggy out, is by having Pete so that we could gang up on people.

After you won, did you get to celebrate in London?

No, no. We were sequestered in a hotel, and we had two days of interview catch-ups, and then they flew me home.

So was there anywhere throughout the season that you’re like, “I really need to go back there?”

Yeah, I want to go back to the Swiss Alps. I loved the helicopter ride. I loved the chalet looking out over the mountains. There were so many birds that day soaring in the Alps. I just want to go back and actually take photos of and get my binoculars on them. I tried bringing my binoculars on the bus, they wouldn’t let me. So I need to go back and do some birding in all those locations.

What was your favorite challenge, looking back? I know you mentioned Swiss Alps, but was there anywhere else, any other challenge that you just enjoyed the gameplay aspect of it the most?

Besides the Swiss Alps — because that was my favorite, digging in the snow and making the fire that, to me, was such a Canadian show as a game. I also love the canoe challenge that also got to show off my skills of paddling and steering a canoe. And I crushed those trivia questions. I like that when there’s a physical part, then also using your brain. So that was the snow challenge and the boat challenge.

Is there anything we didn’t get to see throughout the season or that we did see but you want to set the record straight on?

The big blow-up between Pete and Shayne, it wasn’t about loyalty. It was about Pete finally being fed up with Shayne talking about conspiracy theories about moon landings and even if the moon is real, and chem trails and flat earth — the guy talks about conspiracy theories all day long, and we’re like, “Shayne, it’s not real. Pete’s a pilot. He’s seen the curvature of the Earth. It’s not flat.” And so we had so many mic drop moments where Pete’s like, “Dude, you believe the Earth is flat?” That’s what the fight was about. And I really wish we could have exposed some of Shayne’s thoughts.