One of the competitors in the newest hit television show Amazing Race Canada visited family in Sylvan Lake on the weekend.
Darren Trapp, who with his girlfriend Kristen Idiens, won the first leg of the race which was shown on CTV last Monday, was in town for the wedding of his second cousin.
While here he reminisced about his connections with Sylvan Lake. His grandfather, Korny Hansen, started Top O’ The Hill Golf Course which is currently operated by his uncle Brian Hansen, his mother’s brother.
“I worked at the golf course for a couple of seasons. I love this place,” Trapp said Saturday afternoon.
Applying to be contestants in the race was Kristen’s idea, he said. “She found out they were accepting applications and set, ‘Let’s do it’. Immediately I felt like throwing up. I knew if we applied, we were going to get on the show. Two days after we submitted our video we got a call back.”
“It was pretty intense,” he said of the experience.
“The preparation for the race, time leading up to it. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. As soon as they say GO, it’s full on, nonstop until the say STOP. Every emotion is running through your body all at once.”
The race was filmed over 22 days in May, Trapp said.
Host Jon Montgomery told competitors at the beginning “they were about to embark on a physically grueling 23,000 km adventure from coast to coast.” The race will be ten legs long and feature potential stops in all 10 provinces and three territories, criss-crossing up to 9,000 kilometres. The first episode was neck and neck up until the drive to the winery. Brett and Holly ended up taking a different route. At that moment, we knew we’d won.
“To be the first winners of the first leg of the first Amazing Race Canada, that’s incredible.” They won a trip to Australia as a result.
While he couldn’t speak about what happens in future episodes, Trapp said they went into the race thinking win or lose it’s the perfect opportunity to get exposure.
He and Kristen want to develop a sustainable community. “Getting selected gives us a huge platform. We get the opportunity to meet people in the loop. Win or lose we already consider ourselves winners.”
Trapp would like to see a reality show based on the creation of their dream community.
The pair already have experience working in Africa as volunteers, spending two weeks there with a group and the rest of the three month trip doing research for a non-government organization into such topics as viability of women’s initiative groups, nursery school feeding programs and PTA teacher wage supplement programs.
He’s back at his regular job of adventure guiding at Fairmont Hot Springs, B.C. where work includes rafting, dog sledding and ATVing. He’s also worked as an oilfield medic with seismic. It was money earned through that job that paid for the trip to Africa, he said, indicating that as an environmentalist he justified taking oilfield money and putting it to something worthwhile.
Asked about highlights of the race that he could talk about, Trapp listed getting to know the rest of the teams. “They’re so diverse, their personalities, stories and what they’ve done in life. Jon (Montgomery, the show’s host and an Olympic gold medal skeleton racer), an icon I’ve seen as a kid, that’s pretty cool.”
The series premiere of Amazing Race Canada “smashed records (last Monday) with an amazing audience of three million viewers on CTV. It was the highest-rated series premier of a Canadian series ever,” said a media release from BellMedia.
Amazing Race Canada may be viewed on CTV Monday nights at 9 p.m.