Well, I almost called the final four in exact order. Too bad David & Jeff got stranded in Sydney; it would have been cool to have the three teams separated by only a few minutes at the end, like last year. How big a mistake was it for D&J to head straight to Sydney (besides the obvious answer "Big enough to knock them out of the running, dumbass!")? First, heading for a bigger airport as soon as possible without all-the-way-through tickets in your hand is generally considered a bad idea. Second, I think they would have been better off staying in contact (i.e., on the same flights wherever possible) on the basis that they would beat the other two teams in a footrace. If this opinion puzzles you, take a close look at how Reichen runs (what do you mean, you haven't been capturing and zaprudering every episode all along?). He looks like a shambling Frankenstein speeded up maybe 20%. He has the gait of someone with bad knees and/or ankles, and when I had achillies tendonitis about ten years ago, that's exactly how I looked like when I tried to run.
I could tell from last week's previews that nobody was really going to flip their SUV, but Chip got pretty damn lucky that he didn't get stuck, or get a flat tire, or hit something--anything that might have delayed them long enough to not be able to get a plane ticket. Dammit.
It looked like Reichen & Chip and Kelly & Jon finished sometime around 8:30 Mountain time (based on Reichen saying "It's about 8:00, traffic is starting to pick up" as they approached the final park), but I'm not sure how much time they spent on the bikes. I don't think it was very long, and I think they could see the finish line from the bike pickup, because they didn't seem to be in any hurry on the bikes. So that means that when David & Jeff get to the volcano at 5:30 AM local (three time zones back), and their clue said that the other two teams had finished, they must have just finished.
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