The Amazing Race eliminated Racers Brandon Squyres and Adam Switzer during Sunday night's fifth broadcast of the CBS reality competition's 23rd season.

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The "Childhood Friends and Beard Lovers" became the fourth team eliminated from the around-the-world competition after they arrived at the Race's fifth Pit Stop at Poland's Sopot Pier, the longest wooden pier in Europe, in last place upon completion of a super-leg.

Halfway through the super-leg, Brandon and Adam had checked in with The Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan in first place and did not experience a rest period of any kind.

In an exclusive interview with Reality TV World on Monday, Brandon and Adam talked about their The Amazing Race experience. Below is the first half. Check back with us on Tuesday for the concluding portion.

Reality TV World: How long after Allison "Ally" Mello and Ashley Covert do you think you finally arrived at the Pit Stop? How far behind the pack do you think you were?

Adam Switzer: I'll let Brandon answer this because I didn't actually see the show yesterday.

Brandon Squyres: But you were there! (Laughs)

Adam Switzer: I was there! (Laughs)

Brandon Squyres: We don't really know. We felt like we were probably about 25 minutes behind them, because we were at the statue thing for a long time. One of the times, like the first time we were at the statue, we were there longer than the other two [teams] were there combined -- the first time. And so...

Adam Switzer: And then when we got back up, it's the fake beards that throws people off. Nobody likes a plastic beard over a real beard. They know you're faking!

Reality TV World: Did your elimination sting a little bit more given you guys finished the first half of the super-leg in first place? That couldn't have felt good.

Adam Switzer: Thanks for bringing it up!

Reality TV World: Sorry! (Laughs)

Adam Switzer: No, it's fine. I'll just cry myself to sleep again.

Brandon Squyres: I think the part that stung the most is on that boat ride down the coast of Norway, Ashley and Ally and the "Baseball Wives" [Nicole "Nicky" Getz and Kim DeJesus] -- they were really concerned that they were getting U-Turned. I was like, "You don't have any control over it. Don't worry about it. What is anybody going to have against you?"

And we turned down -- a lot of people came to us, like, "Hey, let's have an alliance, let's get the Afghanimals [Leo Temory and Jamal Zadran]." And we said, "Hey, we're not going to burn those guys just because you've got a problem with them, we don't have any issue." And when they did -- the only smart move on their part, which was to, you know, U-Turn.

On a Double U-Turn, if you're U-Turned, you U-Turn the people behind you. So they pulled the smart move to stay in the Race, and that kind of stung. We're like, "Damn!" Had we just burned someone for the sake of an alliance, we might still be in this. But we ran the Race on our own two legs, and I'm pretty proud of the way that we did it and I have no hard feelings against the Afghanimals.

Reality TV World: Speaking of whether you had hard feelings against Leo and Jamal, when I talked to [Rowan Joseph and Shane Partlow] earlier in the season, they said they really disliked the guys because they had lied to their faces and cheated them on money and the list kind of continued. So it sounds like the pair never did anything bad to you two?

Brandon Squyres: I don't think the Afghanimals really did anything wrong to anybody. They're playing the game and they're good at it. A lot of people just didn't like the way that they were playing it because people forget that it's a game, especially early on, you're trying to make friends and you're trying to do this.

They were "game on" from Day 1, and people just didn't like it. They thought it was shady the way they just -- I mean, yeah, some of the things were kind of shady, but it's all within the rules of the game. They didn't break any rules, and you know, they're just not trying to make friends. They're trying to win a game and that's what we're all really there for.

Reality TV World: Because of the super-leg and the fact you knew all the teams were told to keep racing at its halfway point, did you have any hope it'd be a non-elimination leg or did you think the chances were pretty slim of that happening back-to-back?

Adam Switzer: We knew because it was a "keep racing" [leg] and it was already a non-elim that it was an elimination. We were just holding out hoping that someone got lost on the Roadblock or got a sh-tty taxi or fell down a flight of stairs. (Laughs)

Brandon Squyres: We also didn't know that it was going to be a Double U-Turn, and so, we still had pretty high hopes until we were almost to the U-Turn thing and we saw the Afghanimals. They were like, "Sorry we U-Turned you!" But we could see they were doing the second task. So we knew they got U-Turned and were like, "Ahh, it's a double. I see."

Reality TV World: So it sounds like it didn't surprise you guys at all that it was Leo and Jamal who U-Turned you, is that correct?

Adam Switzer: Well they had just finished dancing right before we did.

Brandon Squyres: Well, a little bit before we did. And they had been there forever! We knew that someone in there would U-Turn them, because so many people told us they were going to.

So we knew they'd be U-Turned. We thought about a Double U-Turn, but we didn't know for sure until we saw them again. And then yeah, we kind of expected it, they did the smart move. I would've done it to anyone on that Race!

Reality TV World: You guys apparently got lost on your way to the shipyard. Could you talk about what happened there? You weren't the only team who got lost, so I'm assuming there was something pretty confusing that happened.

Brandon Squyres: There's a thing that said, "Go to the Cdanska shipyard." It was the birth place of the Solidarity movement, and everyone looked it up on the Internet before and it said, "the Cdanska shipyard." Well, the clue was actually on this little circle right BEFORE the shipyard, and a lot of the taxis, they didn't speak English very well, so they all took them to the ACTUAL shipyard.

So when you got there, everybody was just like -- security guards and stuff were not letting you go onto the shipyard. So everybody just starts freaking out. But there was a big, like, plaza right before it, and then we remembered that after and had him drive back and found it. But it was kind of confusing.

Adam Switzer: We knew that it was the Three-Crosses [Monument] memorial. We had that in our research. We just hadn't -- he drove by it and was like, "Oh, we have to enter over here."

That taxi driver was the worst taxi driver ever. That guy didn't know where anything was, because even after we left that and we tried to get to the Golden Gate, he had no clue. And I don't know if it was shown on TV, but he called someone else's taxi...

Reality TV World: If I recall correctly, it was Jason Case and Amy Diaz's taxi who got the call and their cab driver didn't help out your driver.

Brandon Squyres: Had they known it was us -- and they told us right after that and everything -- had they known it was us, they would've told him because they really liked us and we had helped them out earlier. But they didn't know who it was.

And I heard Amy's voice through the phone, and when he hung up, I said, "Call back!" I was like, "If you tell them that it's Brandon and Adam, they'll tell us, I swear!" And he's like, "No, no, you guys said no. I won't call him back." And so we were like, "Ugh, alright."

Reality TV World: Going back to the leg's Detour tasks, you switched at first from "Pose" to "Polka" before the Double U-Turn forced you to do both anyway. Looking back, do you think had you stuck with the posing one for awhile longer to begin with that might've changed your fate in the leg at all?

Adam Switzer: Having done a lot of busking and known a lot of buskers, when a crowd's worked, it's worked. We showed up at a bad moment, the "Baseball Wives" and the Afghanimals collectively were not there for as long as we were there the first time we went, you know.

And we went there, we were there for 20 minutes, we had seven zloty or 10 zloty or whatever, and you do the math! It's like, "Ugh, we're killing ourselves here! We're wasting a bunch of time. Let's go do the thing where it's in our control, because we can move and groove. Let's do that."

Brandon Squyres: That's one of the first tasks that they -- they had gotten there and so it was the same crowd when we got there. So they had just given all their money to the "Baseball Wives," and like Adam said, we sat there and it was just like 20 minutes.

They were only there, I think, five to 10 minutes maybe. We were there 20 minutes and only had seven zloty and we needed 75. It was just like, "Yeah, we possibly could've sat down and waited 20 minutes and then been fine," but could you imagine being on the Race and sitting down for 20 minutes? You want to go do something!

Adam Switzer: That's a call you have to make, you know? If whatever you're doing isn't working, you have to change something. And we thought -- had we found the dancing even a little sooner or even if we showed up when the Afghanimals showed up, we would've smashed them. We did it in a quarter of the time they did it...

It took us four tries. The Ice Queens [Ally and Ashley] did it in three, and we're not considered nimble, I guess. People wouldn't expect us to be such good dancers unless of course the people have danced with us! Wow, boy, never the polka though!

Above is the first half of Brandon and Adam's exclusive interview with Reality TV World. Check back with us on Tuesday for the concluding portion.


About The Author: Elizabeth Kwiatkowski

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