‘The Amazing Race 38’s Jack and Chelsie Baham Reveal Unseen Injury That Nearly Made Them Quit
Pack your bags, because The Amazing Race is back! Every week, Parade’sMike Bloom will bring you interviews with the team of Big Brother alumni and their loved ones most recently eliminated from the race.
According to Chelsie Baham, less than a week after leaving the Big Brother house, she was asked to hop onto another CBS reality show. And her unscripted TV jetsetting would be a real one, as she’d be participating on The Amazing Race alongside her dad, Jack Baham. With Chelsie’s record-tying competition prowess, and Jack’s physique and tenacity from being a firefighter, the two were ready to set the game ablaze and give her another W.
Unfortunately, rather than secure a back-to-back victory for Chelsie, they found themselves in the back for the majority of the race. Granted, as predicted, the two didn’t seem to ever struggle at all in the tasks themselves. It was getting to those tasks that proved to be the issue. Nearly every leg, Jack and Chelsie ran into trouble getting from Point A to Point B, putting their race in jeopardy from the get-go. Chelsie, who had just put together one of the most dominant performances in Big Brother history, was in an unconventional position: An underdog, consistently scraping by week after week.
When the two flew into Italy, though, the wind was in their sails. They had started the leg in first place, their highest finish by far in the race. And they had an hour-long lead on Kyland Young and Taylor Hale, who were touching down on a different flight. They even left the first Roadblock comfortably tied in third place. But, like a flower sitting in the excruciating sun, their chances of surviving quickly wilted after that. Jack and Chelsie got completely turned around, causing them to accidentally backtrack to where they started. All of a sudden, they were now fighting for their lives alongside Kyland and Taylor, any buffer of safety completely gone. The stability of their spot in the Final Four collapsed like a hastily-built Davinci bridge, as they said, “Arrivederci” to the race.
Now, out of the race, Jack and Chelsie talk with Parade about how close their elimination actually was, how an unseen injury from Jack contributed to their struggles, and the biggest reasons behind their navigational difficulties.
Chelsie, as someone who had just won Big Brother, what was your reaction when you were asked to be on The Amazing Race? And was Jack always your first choice for partner?
Jack Baham: Great question!
Chelsie Baham: [Laughs.] I was so honored that they called me, honestly. It was three or four days after I got out of the Big Brother house. So it was immediately after I was put back into society that this opportunity came. So I was grateful, because that’s not normal. So I was living my best life when Jesse [Tannenbaum] called. I said, “What? Let’s go Let me get another W under my belt.”
But he did request my dad, and I didn’t hesitate. Honestly, I didn’t even think about, “Why my dad? What about my brother?” I thought, “My dad, people would love him, and we would be great together.” So the only time I thought about bringing somebody else was thinking about when he got hesitant because he didn’t want to get injured. He’s a firefighter; he still has a couple more years on the job. So when he was a little hesitant, immediately I was like, “Well, I’m still going. So who could I bring?” But the initial ask was with my dad, and I understood why. Because we did have a storyline on Big Brother that I thought would be beautiful carried onto The Amazing Race.
Jack, you had just watched your daughter in the spotlight for three months when she got the offer to be on The Amazing Race. So what were your thoughts about putting yourself in the spotlight as well by becoming a reality TV star?
Jack: “Back to back, baby. How can we get her back to back?” That’s what I was thinking. I was excited and looking forward to it, just the fact that I get to do this with my daughter and just give her another opportunity to try to be victorious. And even if we weren’t victorious, I’ve talked to many people just saying the experience that we share together will be memories that we can cherish for a lifetime. So that was the most important part to me. Whether we go get a million —which would have been nice, because I probably wouldn’t have went back to work if I would have got that half a million, or whatever my portion would have been. After Uncle Sam got his I probably still wouldn’t have went back to work. But just like I said, the opportunity to do something with my daughter in places that I would have never gone. Some of those places weren’t on my bucket list. So the fact that I was in other countries and seeing things and traveling trains, planes and automobiles and taxis, what a great experience. So I’m glad I did it.
Let’s go from the beginning of your journey to the end. Chelsie, you posted on social media that you only arrived at the Pit Stop seconds after Kyland and Taylor. Talk to me about that.
Chelsie: A couple seconds, Mike! I saw them hit the mat. So what they don’t show for obvious reasons, when we got to the tower where the Pit Stop was, we pulled up, and we knew we were at the right place because we saw production. And that was usually a signal. When you’re making it to the Pit Stop, you start to see the cameras near you, the drone. You’re like, “Phil is close. We’re in the right place.” Especially for people who couldn’t navigate. We were like, “Where are the cameras at? Somebody help.” So we get to the parking lot, but then we realize we’re in the wrong parking lot.
Jawan: We were in the production parking lot.
Chelsie: So we have to drive around, which probably took us a good two minutes. I was driving, and I don’t think my dad was paying attention. But as soon as I parked, I saw them leap on the mat, and I was like, “Oh my gosh!” We were held, then allowed to go on the mat. It was that close.
Talking about something else we didn’t get to see, I know you’ve both talked about the fact that Jack was injured on the race, to the point where you talked to producers in Greece about nearly leaving in the middle of the leg. What happened?
Jack: So the first week and a half, I was hanging with the youngsters. I stopped running years ago, because running is bad for your knees. So I put weights on and get on the treadmill and I go all day long. But I don’t run because of the pounding and the banging, plus 31 years of what I do, especially getting in and out of the rigs. And so after that first week and a half, my knee said, “Yo, you are 58 years old. Slow down.” So my knees were I was in excruciating pain the whole entire race after that. And if you notice toward the end, when you see me running, all you see are my arms moving, but I’m walking.
Chelsie: Mike, his arms were moving so fast. But we were going absolutely nowhere. [Laughs.]
Jack: I could not run. So the rest of the race, a lot of times, my mind was not where it should have been, because I was in excruciating pain. Luckily, I’d had some medication with me. Ibuprofen, or, however the heck you say it, I had a lot of that. I think one day I probably popped four pills, which was considered ODing on it. But when we got back to the room, my day consisted of putting ice on my knees. At one or two hotels, they had a bathtub. I ordered a bunch of ice, and I threw the ice in the water and made an ice bath. I was doing everything I could, because I did not want to quit. And at one point, Chelsie said, “We can stop. You don’t have to continue.” And I said, “First of all, don’t tell me when to quit. I’m not a quitter. Number two, if I can’t continue, I will let you know.” Because I knew I had to go back to work.
Chelsie: We had a conversation mid-Greece. And it wasn’t as noticeable [before], because other legs, we were so far apart that we’re not really seeing other teams. So you’re just in your own bubble. But when we’re in Greece and everything is so close to each other, and you just see teams popping around, and we’re just walking, that was the point where I saw him in so much pain. We literally stopped mid-leg, and I said, “Who do I talk to in production? We can end this right now. We’ve made it nine legs. This is insane.” So they don’t see the behind-the-scenes of how bad it actually was. There was one point, the creator of the show, when we were going to the medieval place, he was like, “This is The Amazing Race. Run!” I said, “Bertram, you better change the title of this show. Because we’ve been walking, brother! I don’t know what to tell you.”
Jack: But, Mike, you saw the episode before that, when we made the bricks. When we got to Izzy and Paige, and we saw them get out to the spot before us, and they were heading to the field, did you see me sprint past them?! So my knees were hurting, but we didn’t know where Natalie and Steph were, so we didn’t know if we were going to be last. So I said, “Oh no, here we go. Come on knees!” And I talked to my knees, and we just took off sprinting. And we passed them up and beat them to the mat. So when I had to put it in overdrive, I put it in overdrive, baby! Come on!
Well your knees may have been ailing you, but your sense of direction seemed to be hurting even more. Your story was largely based around your difficulties navigating. Did you find there was a common thread that caused you to struggle so much?
Chelsie: So the strategy was my dad navigates, I drive. He grew up on maps. He does this for his job where he tells the driver on the truck where to go. I didn’t fight it out till literally yesterday or two days ago, that he wasn’t that good at that job as a firefighter! [Laughs.] So I was like, “I could have known this going into the race!” I just found this out, Mike.
But the common thread was, well, a few things. We just got unlucky with some people who gave us directions. Because you can run into people who just give you really bad directions; we ran into a couple of those. But also what we didn’t do was just sit. You feel the need to rush while writing directions. So we rushed through it, and we didn’t write down the kilometers. Because that’s really all you have to go off of is kilometers. So we would have the right directions down, but we would either go too far past it, or we would turn too soon. So it was just not trusting our navigation, and we would try to make decisions on our own. Also, I was writing down the directions, then giving them to my dad, and then I was driving. So translating the phone to paper was difficult for him. Our strategy was just off, and we couldn’t find our rhythm. You feel so rushed. You feel like you don’t have time to sit and figure out what works.
Jack: And Mike, what I will say the biggest thing is, if you notice, Izzy and Paige, they always took their time taking down directions. Chelsie and I would hurry up and rush and we’re off. And Izzy and Paige didn’t do a lot of running either, because Izzy had bad knees. She had surgery also, so she was walking half of the race as well. But they were really efficient on their directions.
What I struggle with, Mike, was, first of all, you’re in other countries. And when you’re looking at their phones, it’s in their language. People don’t understand that. They think, “Oh, just look at someone’s phone.” No, it’s in another language. And then they don’t have street signs, Mike! We grew up, you go right, left, you can see the street signs. Their street signs are literally 14 by 14 on the side of a building, in another language. So anyway, we didn’t really have a good strategy. And I noticed on one episode when I saw Jag and Jas writing down directions, they wrote line for line for line for line on what they were gonna do.
Chelsie: What took teams probably 20 minutes to get directions, we probably did in like six or seven, just trying to get ahead. And you feel the pressure of, “We’re already behind. We can’t run, we can’t do all these things. We have to make up time.” So there is an amalgamation of things that caused us to be terrible at navigation.
Jack: But Mike, if we had the opportunity to do it again, I would let her do it.
Chelsie: I would navigate the whole race.
Jack: The youth are better at translating from the phone. I can care less about all that. I know how to read a Thomas guide and give me an actual map. When we had a map, we didn’t have a big issue. And maybe we had a map like six times in a race. So if we were to do it all again, I would let Chelsie write down everything, take directions down, and then just tell me which way to go. I would have been her Uber driver.
I do want to finish by talking about a rather tense moment we got to see during the one of the times you were lost and there were accusations of “crying over spilled milk.” It was definitely the most conflict we saw of you on the race. Do you feel that represented your overall dynamic?
Chelsie: No, that actually wasn’t representation. In that moment after four hours, I was the one that was trying to regulate my dad. I’m like, “Listen, we got lost. Now we’re back on track. There’s no reason to cry over this. Why are we no pouting?” So usually he’s that person for me. But in those pressure situations, there’s times throughout this race where we had to switch roles, and he did a really good job at learning how to not be dad. We struggled with that and be teammates. You see that moment of us being teammates.
So me kind of leading in that moment is not normal in our relationship. He’s the one that’s regulating my emotions, telling me to chill. I didn’t know spilled milk was gonna be such a thing! I should make shirts. But I was like, “Dude, chill.” And what they didn’t show is I wasn’t frustrated with my dad, and he kept feeling that I was frustrated with him. I wasn’t. I was frustrated at the reality that we’re just lost. I’m frustrated at the thing. So we have to get over those bumps. But y’all saw our frustration of like, “We’re over getting lost. Somebody come find us, please!”
Jack: Here’s the thing about that. No, that wasn’t a representation of our relationship. She explained. We actually did well. We argued. But every single team is going to argue. I guarantee you, whether they showed or not. Probably Jas and Jag didn’t, because they were doing everything great, and they didn’t have to argue. Even Eric and Tucker had a little disagreement on the cheese race part. So I will tell you this, when we had the spilled milk session, it was because I don’t like losing. We do not like losing!
Chelsie: I was like, “The race is not over till it’s over, and pouting is not going to help aid this. I’ve got my Big Brother hat on. Figure it out. Get your emotions intact.”
Jack: But check this out, Mike, not only did we get lost, that was a leg of the race where we had to do a lot of walking. So in Romania,we were going up hills, down hills, through parks, through neighborhoods, and we had been lost for three hours. My freaking knees were killing me so bad. Then I’m thinking, “We’re last place. We’re going to go home, we’re not going to be able to experience any more parts of the world.” That’s why we got into our spilled milk conversation.
