The Amazing Race season 39 contestant Jody Rebhun exited the competition with a fractured leg.
“I broke my leg. I fractured my femur, and I think it was my tibia,” Jody, 44, exclusively told Us after she and longtime best friend Jenn Naso were eliminated from the race in Marrakesh, Morocco, during the Wednesday, October 14, episode. “So either side of the knee.”
According to Jody, the injury happened in the desert after the Talk detour, in which teams drove through the desert on dune buggies to find, memorize and recite tea names.
“After Jenn miraculously, phenomenally, in one try, gets the language after the dune buggies, I get so excited that I do a heel clap like a leprechaun in the desert,” Jody explained. “And they got that on film. I don’t fall, but I was like, ‘Oh, something seriously wrong here.’ And sure enough, six hours later, a few flights home, I had fractured two bones in my leg doing that.”
Jenn, 44, said the injury was a testament to Jody’s strength.
“She did that, immediately realized something was wrong, and is yelling at me, ‘Give me your bag!’ And we’re running back to the taxi, and she’s carrying both of our bags, and then proceeded to sprint through the fruit stand,” Jenn recalled of getting to the next task, where teams had to stack fruit on a stand in a particular pattern.
“Adrenaline can do great things,” Jody quipped. “I didn’t realize how how badly I had hurt it. I knew it hurt, but more importantly, I knew we needed to stack that fruit and get after it. We needed to find [host Phil Keoghan] and worry about the leg later. But yeah, that wound up being a bummer.”
Leg 3 of the race, which began during the October 6 episode, featured a Roadblock where one member of each team had to smash pottery to find their next clue — much like finding a needle in a haystack. Jenn was the last person standing among the clay creations and spent around three hours searching for the clue, she and Jody revealed to Us.
“It was long. It was hot. It was exhausting. There were parts where I was starting to, you know, really feel defeated in the moment,” Jenn recalled. “Mentally, I just kept on telling myself, ‘It’s here. I just have to find it,’ and the entire time, Jody was cheering me on relentlessly, and that really gave me, when I started to go down, that gave me the push to keep going.”
Jody chimed in, “How do you not root for somebody who’s trying their best in what was starting to feel like an impossible task? She just kept at it for hours; the heat was incredibly grueling. … She never stopped moving. Her pace may have slowed a little bit at, like, hour two, at the two and a half hour mark, but she just kept going, regardless of how many pots she picked up and smashed, and they weren’t the one. She just never gave up.”
Even after their three-hour delay at the Roadblock, Jody and Jenn were able to catch up to other teams and completed the fruit stand challenge at the same time as grandfather-grandson duo Doug and Dylan Matter. The leg ended in a tense footrace to the mat, with Jody and Jenn finding Phil just seconds after Doug and Dylan. Jody and Jenn were the last team to arrive at the Pit Stop and were subsequently eliminated.
“It was chaotic. It was intense. It was inspirational,” Jody told Us. “We were on fire. We were on fire from the moment we left the pots, and you know, we’re not stressing because we figured there was no way we were gonna catch up, and then to see them still there at the fruit challenge was just a feeling that I’ll hold on to forever.”
The Amazing Race airs Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. ET on CBS.
