Chances are you know the answer to that headline. But in case someone still hasn’t caught the finale of The Amazing Race 34, we thought we’d be respectful a bit longer.
So did Big Brother 23 couple Derek Xiao and Claire Rehfuss win The Amazing Race 34? They sure did. The pair took home the $1 million grand prize at the end of Wednesday night’s season finale when they beat the other two teams to the finish line.
Derek and Claire talked to Parade Magazine about their win and who the whole process helped build their new relationship.
“When we started the race, we had been dating for eight months, that’s almost a year,” Derek tells Parade. “I had unfounded confidence in our relationship, illusions of grandeur around how strong our relationship was. And as soon as we started, I realized, ‘Oh, no, this is not cement for our foundation.’Â So that’s kind of the lowest point. I was like, ‘Wait, we have some serious cracks in our foundation.’ But the great thing about the race is you can’t leave the room without your partner. So you really have to work those out and figure out what are the different things that we need from each other? How do we communicate best? And you have to answer all these questions that, with Claire and I, aren’t things that we talked about. We thought we had the answers; we did not have the answers. So the race forced us to break through on some of those things. And coming out of the race now, we have the foundation I thought we had. But it’s not quicksand anymore. It’s actually set, and it’s cement. Until we go into the race again, it becomes quicksand.”
Claire says she really didn’t plan on that being the case.
“It really is such a cliche of, ‘We’re using this race as a test for our relationship,’ ” she tells Parade. “And I didn’t think that would be the case, honestly. I mean, I said it in interviews.”
Sounds like it all worked out well for the Big Brother 23 pair.
To read the full Parade Interview with Derek and Claire, click here.
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