'The Amazing Race 10' Finnish leg ends with unfinished business

And the latest team to be eliminated from The Amazing Race 10 is... to be continued. Last night's The Amazing Race 10 broadcast saw none of the remaining teams go home. Instead, the first place team of former drug addicts and models Tyler Denk and James Branaman arrived at what they thought was going to be a Pit Stop and discovered that they had merely reached the midway point of a superleg.


The Amazing Race 10's ninth episode began with the five remaining teams departing the Cathedral Andohalo, a 116-year-old church in Antananarivo, Madagascar that served as the site of the Race's eighth Pit Stop. As they left the Pit Stop, the teams received clues instructing them to fly more than 6,000 miles to Helsinki, Finland. Once in Helsinki, the teams would have to find a coffee house and use one of its laptops to access an AOL email message. Due to the limited availability of flights out of Madagascar, all teams were also provided with pre-booked tickets that would take them as far as Paris, France, however the teams were not under any obligation to use the tickets.

With less and a half hour separating the 2:56AM departure time of the first team to leave the Pit Stop (beauty queens Dustin Konzelman and Kandice Pelletier) from the 3:24AM departure time of the fourth team to leave the Pit Stop (brothers Erwin and Godwin Cho), all four of the top four teams quickly became bunched back together at the airport. Once there, the teams discovered that rather than waiting all day for their 9:40PM to Paris to depart and then still having to scramble to book an additional trip to Helsinki, they could board a 5:00AM flight to Johannesburg, South Africa. After arriving in Johannesburg, they could board another flight that, after a stop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and another in Frankfurt, Germany, would get them into Helsinki at about 10:20AM.

All four of the front-running teams immediately booked tickets on the new Johannesburg-bound itinerary, leaving single moms Lyn Turk and Karlyn Harris -- who didn't leave the Pit Stop until 3:55AM -- as the only team that might get stuck waiting to depart on the pre-booked Paris flight. However although it was tight scramble, Lyn and Karlyn -- thanks to the generosity of both the Chos and an understanding Air Madagascar ticket supervisor -- did make it on to the Johannesburg flight, ensuring that all of the teams would remain bunched through their arrival in Helsinki.

Once the teams arrived in Helsinki and located the coffee house, they found video messages from home waiting in their email accounts. After playing the messages and shedding some tears, the teams received a clue that instructed them to take a train 125 miles to Tampere, another of Finland's major cities. Then, once there, they would have to take a taxi to Soppeenharjun Koulu, an area school. Although the teams had scrambled to reach the coffee house and then once again scrambled to find the nearest train station, in the end, it didn't matter -- due to the timing of the train departures, they all ended up on the same train and bunched back together again.


Upon arriving in Tampere, Dustin and Kandice and Tyler and James both managed to jump into idling taxis and quickly leave for the school, however the rest of the teams weren't as lucky. After wandering over to the airport's designated taxi stand and realizing that there was a line of people already patiently waiting for taxis, the rest of the teams faced an unofficial moral Detour -- "Cut," "Plead," or "Wait." Dating couple Rob Diaz and Kimberly Chabollao -- the first team to arrive at the taxi stand -- choose "Plead," and after getting the approval of everyone who was already waiting in line, jumped into the next taxi. Lyn and Karlyn choose "Cut" and -- despite the strong objections of a man who was the next person in line -- cut the line and took the next taxi. Unwilling to be rude, Erwin and Godwin choose "Wait," a decision that forced them to lose valuable time while waiting their turn in the line.

Once at the school, the teams forced their real Detour -- "Swamp This" or "Swamp That." "Swamp This" required the teams to put on cross-country skis and trudge through a mile long muddy course. "Swamp That" required the teams to slog through an even muddier mile long obstacle course -- and do it while one team member carried the other through portions of the course. As the first team to arrive, Dustin and Kandice choose the cleaner cross-country skiing option. Confident that their strength would allow them to complete the extremely muddy course before the girls finished skiing, Tyler and James choose the obstacle course.

Although Rob and Kimberly had been the third team to leave the train station, they fell into fourth place -- and only seconds ahead of Erwin and Godwin -- when their taxi initially took them to the wrong school. After reading that part of the obstacle course required one teammate to carry the other, Lyn and Katlyn quickly designed to follow Dustin and Kandice's skiing lead. Meanwhile, anxious to make up some time on the teams in front of them, Rob and Kimberly and Erwin and Godwin both joined Tyler and James on the obstacle course.

After completing the Detour, the teams received a clue instructing them to take another train 104 miles to the city of Turku and then drive themselves another 78 miles to the town of Lohja. Once there, they would have to find the Tytyrin Limestone Mine and take a tram into the mine to retrieve their next clue.

When Dustin and Kandice and Tyler and James arrived at the train station, they discovered that the next Turku train would depart within minutes -- a development that finally ended the teams' bunching. Although Rob and Kimberly managed to finish the Detour third and arrived at the train station just as Dustin and Kandice and Tyler and James' 3:11PM train was starting to pull away, it was all for nought -- in the end, the ended up on the same 4:11Pm train as Lyn and Katlyn and Erwin and Godwin.


Once they found the mine and traveled deep into its tunnels, the teams faced the Roadblock, a task that required one team member to ride a bicycle thorough another mile worth of tunnels and find a "dig site" that contained a pile of marked limestone blocks. Once they found a limestone block, the team member had to strap it to their bike, ride back up the slopping mile tunnels, and then crack open the block and retrieve a clue inside it.

Given their earlier train departure, Tyler and James (who managed to make the 78 mile drive quicker) and Dustin and Kandice were both able to complete the task before the other teams even arrived at the mine. When they opened their limestone block clue, the teams received instructions telling them to drive themselves 39 miles back to Helsinki and, once there, locate the Helsinki Olympic Stadium, the main site of the 1952 Summer Olympics.

Some time after Tyler and James and Dustin and Kandice began their drive to Helsinki, Lyn and Katlyn, Erwin and Godwin, and Rob and Kimberly all arrived at the mine and completed the Roadblock. Although Rob and Kimberly had gotten lost and fallen into last place during the drive to the mine, Rob was able to close the gap during the Roadblock and all three teams ended up taking the same tram ride back to the surface.

Meanwhile, upon arriving at Olympic Stadium, Tyler and James and Dustin and Kandice had encountered a surprise. Rather than finding The Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan and the Pit Stop mat that they were expecting, they found a new clue that instructed them that they had to "perform one last task" -- repelling face-first down the side of the stadium's 236-foot tower. But as the rest of the teams arrived at the stadium and began frantically running to find what they still thought was going to be a Pit Stop, Tyler and James completed the rappel and received a second surprise clue -- "KEEP RACING!!!"