Florinka Pessenti's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Trip Around the World

So imagine you spend a whole season of reality TV watching a team made of the worst girl you’ve ever met and her “deserves better” not-boyfriend go through a pre-break up over the course of twelve episodes. Meet twenty-three year olds Florinka “Flo” Pesenti and Zach Behr. They’re friends who are exploring the potential for a romantic connection. They’re not dating yet, but they’re open to it, maybe.

It doesn’t start off so badly, you can tell Flo’s a little anxious, but as a team they do well enough, hovering near the top of the pack in the early legs. But then something changes for us, the audience, when Flo refuses to rappel down the face of a cliff in Portugal: we learn Flo will never bend. She will stand her ground even to the detriment of her partner. But it’s out of anxiety, and a fear of heights, sure, I’ll let her have it. It hasn’t had a direct negative impact yet this deep into the season. They even win a leg in the following few episodes! They’re at the top of the pack and doing great!

But this is where the show decides that it’s time to hone in on one of the biggest storylines of the season: Florinka Pessenti’s miserable, weeks long vacation across the world. In the following legs through Germany and Switzerland, high in the alps, Flo continuously complains about how the air is “too thick”, forcing Zach to carry double the load of their bags, for one key example. I think something breaks in Flo the moment they arrive in last place in the ninth leg. She’s done and ready for it all to be over (all being the race, her not-relationship with Zach, etc.) only to learn that it’s a non-elimination leg. From the tenth leg onward Flo clearly does not want to be there, nor with Zach, but doesn’t have the wherewithal to say either.

All the while, Zach is a fucking TROOPER. He is a constant source of general positivity through the remaining five episodes of the show. Five long episodes of Flo wailing, and Zach essentially no-selling her with a general sense of trust and care that goes entirely wasted in this humble reviewer’s opinion. Flo literally flirts with a dude (Drew) from a different team WHILE STILL on a team Zach. REGULARLY. She CRIES when Derek and Drew are eliminated right before the finale. It is so obvious she and Drew are going to date after the season, and yet Zach champions on all the same. There is at $500,000 dollars and a life with a better person waiting for him if he can get through the end of the race. Meanwhile, Flo was asked back on All-Stars, not with Zach, but with Drew. ¹

Through this whole ordeal, my partner was having none of it. As an anxious person herself, she found herself empathizing with Flo initially, but over time grew to gaze at this woman with nothing but contempt. She pitied Zach, hoping that they would win so that, if nothing else, he would have some money as compensation for what must’ve been some of the worst weeks of his life. It was fun knowing what the outcome of the race was going to be already. I told her nothing, of course.

someone's having a bad time.......

The finale is one of the most insane culminations of a storyline I’ve ever seen in a reality TV show. It’s one of those cliched moments where I can claim “I do not think that if this were a fiction story, it would be taken seriously for a moment.”. While in Vietnam, Flo threatens to quit on every single task, including quitting both legs of the “detour” (pick between two tasks, do one to progress type challenge), and thus the pair comes in last. Despite this, they are once again spared by the non-elimination leg, and then fly to the United States. You’d think that being back in the her home country would allieve some of Flo’s stress, and yet Flo threatens to quit multiple times too. Flo threatens to quite literally while in a taxi on their way to Gas Works park in Seattle, the finish line, in a race for FIRST PLACE.

And then Flo and Zach cross the Finish Line first and win the Amazing Race 3.

It is bewildering. It’s a result so akin to a knock-out sucker punch that my jaw hurt after watching it. There is no other reality tv game show win quite like it.

I have never seen a season of a Reality TV Game Show where I was so blown away by its winner as I have with Amazing 3 when I first saw it. It’s why I really cannot emphasize enough that Amazing Race 3 is one of those seasons of TV that you need to watch if you want to know some of the most important pieces of popular American Media.

This is the outcome that led to that picture. An event that got my partner to have a genuine emotional reaction to a TV show that aired over twenty years ago.

A fitting closing picture: Flo celebrating the win above everyone else while entirely on the shuolders of her teammate Zach.

If you’d like to read a more contemporary reaction to this outcome, local internet poster Mario J. Lanza wrote about it in his piece Mario Lanza’s Top 10 TROUBLING MOMENTS in Reality TV History (though do keep in mind this was written by a white man gen X-er in 2005, it’s got some casual sexism of the time in it.).

If you take nothing else from this, please go watch Amazing Race 3. It’s not hard to find online (via the paramount plus app, or other online hosting services), so give it a smoke over the course of a week or however long it takes you to watch twelve 45ish minute episodes.

Also Amazing Race 5. and then if you want something to REALLY make a video essay about, watch Amazing Race 8.

okay, back to the rest of the ohmies~!

a somewhat interesting theory of mine, I think that the Amazing Race was looking for their own Boston Rob and Amber moment on their season of Allstars, (never mind that Rob and Amber were already on Amazing Race Allstars). I think the Amazing Race was hoping to cast Flo and Drew on the season in hopes that he might propose to her as “the couple who met and then got married from the race”↩︎