‘The Amazing Race’: Matt & Michelle Explain What Went Wrong & Call Out ‘Pathetic’ Alliance

For several legs in a row, Michelle Rozalski Patterson and Matt Patterson were the team to beat on Season 39 of The Amazing Race. However, their journey on the show came to an end during the November 12 episode when they got lost trying to find the Detour and simply could not recover.

“It had an address to go to, but it was kind of like, I don’t know … it wasn’t a clear set place,” Michelle tells TV Insider. “We ended up getting dropped off, but we should have stayed in our taxi until we were actually at the right place. These were one-way streets and there’s people walking everywhere. It’s not a regular American street where you just turn left.”

After getting dropped off at the “total wrong location” and getting “wrong directions from people that didn’t really speak English,” Matt and Michelle “lost a big chunk of time,” while the other teams were already hard at work on the Detour tasks. “We ran very, very far in the wrong direction,” Matt says, estimating it took him and his wife about “30 to 35 minutes” to figure out where to go. “We ran our bad leg on the day we couldn’t really afford to.”

The married couple wound up switching which side of the Detour they wanted to complete, but when they made it to the next clue box, they saw that they were victims of another Double U-Turn, which meant they had to go back and complete the other side.

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“We have to now find the place that we couldn’t find before,” Matt points out. “And it was 103 degrees. Race brain is real.” Michelle adds that the issue wasn’t having to do another task but rather having to find it.

Once they finally got there, Daisha Wilks and Dalton Hamby, who had also been U-Turned, were able to pull ahead thanks to some help from Andrea Tager Ballesca and Anuar Tager. The other teams then all worked together at the Route Info Task, and had already completed it by the time Matt and Michelle showed up.

While the couple doesn’t blame the others for the “pack mentality” against them, they were admittedly frustrated with Daisha and Dalton, as well as Ann-Marie Tejcek and Riley Tejcek, for U-Turning them in the previous leg.

“I didn’t think that Daisha and Dalton were going to U-Turn us after we worked together the day before,” Michelle admits. “I was also upset with Ann-Marie and Riley when they U-Turned us because they told us earlier on in the airport that there was no way. They owed us all this loyalty because we gave them the lesser amounts when we had the Driver’s Seat. Meanwhile, I had no idea I gave them both the lesser amounts. I also had no idea there was an all-woman alliance, so I definitely wouldn’t have been doing that.”

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Matt says the alliance of the all-female teams was “pathetic,” adding, “Boss lady, what? They just keep betraying each other. It’s like … everyone’s an opportunist when there’s a million dollars on the line. There’s no loyalty, there’s no friends.”

Although the couple doesn’t really keep in touch with any of the other contestants from the season, aside from Jaime Tribo, they still had an overall “memorable” experience. “It was really an experience of a lifetime,” Matt confirms. “The people, the places, the things. It was cool. And we weren’t on some ‘happy to be here’ race. We came to win, but we ran our bad leg on the day we really couldn’t run a bad leg.”

The Amazing Race, Season 39, Wednesdays, 9:30/8:30c, CBS