B.C. team wants to try Amazing Race again
B.C. father-son team eager to try again after experiences on The Amazing Race Canada
They call themselves The Bald and The Beard.
To fans of The Amazing Race Canada, they made their mark this season as determined father-andson team Shabbir and Zed Dhalla.
It looked like the Vancouverbased pair had a solid shot to win two cars, a trip around the world and the $250,000 grand prize — until their chances were wiped out in an intense challenge at an urban beach club in Bangkok, Thailand.
It all played out during a recent episode when Zed and Shabbir chose to “shred it” at the Flow House. This meant riding on a tiny wakeboard in a giant wave tank, staying upright long enough to successfully pull down an overhead flag.
The task was difficult enough for host and former Olympic gold medallist Jon Montgomery to master. He had to tackle the wave tank in order to tape a program intro. And it was no piece of cake for Zed, a 27-year-old — and very fit — national account manager for a health-care company.
For his 57-year-old father, however, it proved too much. Game and competitive, he was also exhausted and sleep deprived.
The duo could have, and eventually did, choose instead to “bling it,” meaning seek out specific decorations at a local market and pimp out one of the ubiquitous “Tuk-Tuks,” tourist scooters seen all over downtown Bangkok.
Unfortunately, they just didn’t switch Detours fast enough. Shabbir kept trying to capture the flag.
“I told my wife that there is a fine line between being determined and being stubborn,” Shabbir says. “For me, on that day, the line was blurred.”
The oldest competitor in the race, he was coming off a gruelling 48-hour stretch as teams raced from Beijing to Shanghai to Bangkok, part of the way on a highspeed train.
In addition to proving himself as a tough competitor, the elder Dhalla is also a cancer survivor.
“By the time they found it, it was Stage 3 and I was given less than 50-50 odds,” he says. For Shabbir, passing his five-year, cancer-free threshold beats any TV title.
“I look at life completely differently now, with a lot more gratitude,” he says. “We’re blessed to live in a country that offers a lot of advanced medical breakthroughs.”
Born in the Congo, he grew up in Tanzania. “My mom was in the UN so we travelled around,” he says. By the time the family moved to Central Africa, the region had become politically unstable under the terror inflicted by Uganda dictator Idi Amin.
“My mom had to make a decision,” he explains of the move that brought the family to Canada. The family started over, taking any jobs they could find and, for a while, lived out of one bedroom in a hotel.
With all his dad has been through, Zed saw an opportunity to enter the race and share a oncein-a-lifetime experience.
“I’ve always pushed him all my life,” he says. “We’ve always been competitive with one another as well — whether it was who could get the highest score on our iPhone game, or, when I was a kid, who could run up the stairs fastest.”
The duo mapped out a strategy before arriving for Day 1 of Amazing Race Canada. Their plan was to play nice and connect with as many teams as possible to try to avoid getting saddled with a nasty “U-Turn.” Four other teams had given assurances they wouldn’t card the Dhallas.
“We had set ourselves up for a really deep run,” says Zed. “Unfortunately, it didn’t pan out that way.”
Zed admits it stings to think of how much farther they could have gone. Until their final day, they had never been in the bottom two teams at any point. They finished first and second in the two legs before their elimination, winning a trip to Chicago along the way.
Going home at the halfway point, “was definitely a tough bullet to bite,” Zed admits. “I’m super proud, however, of how my dad did, mentally and physically. You can imagine how much more difficult it would be for him than for a younger contestant, especially after all he’s been through in life — cancer and everything.”
There were, of course, triumphs and memories along the way. Seeing the Great Wall of China was, as Zed puts it, “pretty damn cool.” Mastering a synchronized dive off the five-metre board at the National Olympic Sports Centre in Beijing was a personal triumph for Shabbir, who had a fear of heights.
“We just went for it,” he says. “We hit the water so hard, that if you don’t shut your eyes, they take a huge hit.”
Their TV run having ended in May, Zed and Shabbir have had to keep a lid on the outcome back home. Even Zed’s mom, Shabbir’s wife, Yasmin, has had to follow along each week on TV.
“She’s been awesome, so enthusiastic and proud of us,” he says. “Not one ounce in her body is jealous or wants to stop hearing about it.”
The Dhallas hosted a screening for friends and relatives a few weeks ago when the episode aired where they won the trip to Chicago. It was all a surprise to Yasmin as well as Zed’s sister, Safeena.
Now that they’ve had a taste of fame, would either enter another reality competition? Zed says he won’t be racing anywhere soon — he tore his ACL playing basketball the day after he got back to Vancouver from Bangkok. He will not, as a few friends have suggested, try out to be the next Bachelor Canada.
Both would, however, line up tomorrow for another shot at The Amazing Race Canada.
“I’d do it in a heartbeat,” Zed says. So would Shabbir. “These legs still have another couple of years left in them.”
The Amazing Race Canada continues Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. on CTV.