The Amazing Race season 36 contestants Maya Mody and Rohan Mody know that their stuck car moment was funny.
“We had a crowd of about 15 people watching us,” Rohan, 23, exclusively told Us Weekly on Thursday, March 14, one day after he and Maya, 20, became the first eliminated team of the season. “They were just standing there, laughing at us. … They were just entertained.”
The siblings got off to a rough start during the premiere episode, getting lost on the way to their first clue and then finding themselves stuck when they tried to turn their car around in a narrow alley.
“I thought that was going to be it,” Maya told Us of the tight spot with a laugh. “I thought we weren’t going to get the car out [and host] Phil [Keoghan] was gonna have to walk over and eliminate us there.”
Despite their setbacks, Maya and Rohan stayed relatively calm.
“I knew that if I would’ve gotten worked up, I would’ve had tunnel vision and I would’ve broken down,” Maya said. “It was a tactic that we had that we needed to stay calm and that we would figure it out.”
After “about 20 minutes” and what looked to be an 80-point turn, Maya and Rohan made it out of the alley during the Wednesday, March 13 episode. They then breezed through a memory challenge involving luchadores and a roadblock where Rohan had to jump through spinning lasso loops without knocking a wide-brimmed hat off his head.
However, the pair’s impressive performance in the challenges wasn’t enough to make up for the time they lost finding the first clue, and Phil, 56, had to eliminate Maya and Rohan at the season’s first pit stop.
The duo — who intentionally took different languages in school to prepare to compete on The Amazing Race one day — took their defeat in stride during the episode, walking off hand in hand and expressing their gratitude for the experience.
Off camera, however, the superfans allowed themselves to mourn a bit.
“We’re super competitive people when it comes down to it, so we definitely were bummed,” Rohan said. “When we went back, Maya took the longest nap ever. … It was a little bit of a solemn night, but we’ve been able to reflect on it since then and we’re proud that we got to make it onto the show.”
Maya added that the twosome have “no regrets at all” when looking back at the experience. “If they ever asked us to do it again, we would do it again in a heartbeat,” she said.
“We’d race tomorrow,” Rohan added.
The Amazing Race airs on CBS Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. ET.
