The Amazing Race season 36 contestants Anthony Smith and Bailey Smith couldn’t make up their minds during their final episode on the reality competition series.
The 26-year-old twin brothers switched detour challenges a staggering three times during the Wednesday, March 27, episode before finally committing to cooking a Colombian dish over carefully stacking a tower of items on the back of a Jeep.
“We were tired, and I don’t know, it was just, like, a panic thing,” Bailey exclusively told Us Weekly on Thursday, March 28. “Watching it back now, it’s hilarious. I’m like, ‘Wow. We should have really just chilled out for a second.’”
Anthony, meanwhile, shed some light on what the pair found so daunting about the cooking detour.
“We do cook, but the whole instruction, the whole thing was in Spanish, and that scared us off pretty hard,” he said when explaining their “indecisiveness.”
Once the brothers put their minds to the cooking challenge, they did well, but they’d already lost a lot of time. Bailey told Us that the experience provided a “good life lesson” not to count yourself out so quickly.
“Believe in yourself more, especially when you’re stressed out in certain situations,” he said.
Anthony added: “If you make a decision, just stick with it.”
Despite being at the back of the pack for the majority of the episode, Anthony and Bailey enjoyed themselves, pausing to appreciate a water taxi ride and to admire a beautiful local bird while picking berries.
“I think for us, that’s the only way we can live,” Bailey said of the duo’s relaxed demeanor on the show. “There’s so many stressful things in life in general, and just to take everything on like, ‘We’re here, we’re doing it, we’re going to enjoy the time’ — I think that’s the only thing you can do.”
Anthony chimed in: “We have goals and ambitions with life, but every single day, we try to just enjoy that day for what it is.”
The twins’ positive attitude was perfectly summed up during the final moment of the episode. After host Phil Keoghan told them they’d been eliminated from the race and right before the credits rolled, Anthony said, “This is pretty chill.”
“It was a pretty chill view, I will say,” Anthony quipped to Us.
In addition to thoroughly enjoying their time on the show, Bailey and Anthony have maintained strong bonds with their fellow contestants. They’re particularly close with father-daughter duo Chis Foster and Mary Cardona-Foster, who came to visit them in Florida after filming ended.
“They’re seriously such great people. Just so genuine,” Bailey said of Chris, 60, and Mary, 27, who were eliminated one episode before them. The brothers were so impressed by Chris’ “presence” that they assumed he was a celebrity when they first met him.
“We thought he was somebody and he thought we were somebody. We’re like, ‘We’re no one.’ He’s like, ‘I’m no one too,’” Anthony said. “He’s a total hippie at heart too. We have a lot in common.”
The Amazing Race airs on CBS Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. ET.
