EMBRACING THE HATE
Duo competing on reality TV
Dave Leduc and Irina Terehova are feeling a lot of heat these days, but they insist they couldn’t care less.
“It’s cool, it’s fun, I love that they’re reacting this way,” Terehova said during an interview Wednesday from Yangon in Myanmar (also known as Burma).
Adds Leduc, with tongue in cheek: “I would hate us, too.”
Leduc and Terehova were speaking from a tattoo parlour in Yangon where Leduc was having extensive tattoo work done on his leg, “20 hours of non-stop pain,” according to Leduc.
The married couple from Montreal are one of the 10 teams participating in this year’s edition of The Amazing Race Canada, the No. 1 show in Canada this summer. They remain in the hunt for the grand prize, along with five other duos, even though it sometimes seems like the other participants and the majority of the viewers would love to see them ejected from the show.
Leduc, who is originally from Gatineau, just won the World Lethwei Championship in Myanmar. That’s his day job — champion bare-knuckle boxer. Terehova moved from Moldova to Montreal at the age of 12 and has worked as an actress, model and journalist. They met when she wrote a story on him for MTL Blog. They moved to Dubai last year and are moving to Cyprus next week.
And it’s not just regular viewers who are upset with Leduc and Terehova. Olympic champion skater Meagan Duhamel also blasted the pair.
Their fellow participants aren’t too impressed, either. Halifax twins Meaghan and Marie Wright, who have been sent home, told the Toronto Sun: “They brought negative energy, but they also brought a lot of game.”
Leduc and Terehova have referred to other contestants as “peasants” and Terehova has made no secret of the fact that she’s the type of person who doesn’t really want to break a sweat or ruin her look while doing the challenges.
In the episode that aired Tuesday night on CTV, Leduc and Terehova called a meeting at the Nanaimo airport to clear the air.
“In the last leg we felt that everyone was working together to eliminate us and it really didn’t feel good,” Terehova told the other teams. “Being all together against one team, that’s not fair.”
Talking Wednesday, Leduc and Terehova shrugged off the criticism and seemed unconcerned they have become Canada’s favourite TV villains this summer.
“It’s really flattering, it’s really not a problem to us, we enjoyed it,” continued Leduc. “We’re being ourselves. We know that hate is camouflaged love. All these people are fans. If they saw me and Irina on the street, they’d ask for a selfie.”
Leduc is a huge fan of The Amazing Race and had dreamed of being on the show. He said he would have paid to do it. His wife, however, couldn’t disagree more.
“It’s my worst nightmare to be on the show because, I’ve said it before, I love my comfort zone,” Terehova noted. “And this whole Amazing Race thing has totally taken me out of my comfort zone. For me, it’s a huge challenge, but Dave loved every second of it.”
She only agreed to do it because of him and both agree he did much of the heavy lifting on the show.
“For people who say it’s (not) feminist, I think it’s feminist to give women the freedom to do whatever they want to do whether you want to be a stay-at-home mom or whether you want to go work or whether you want to let your man take care of you,” Terehova said. “If this is the choice we make as a couple, I should be as free to do this as somebody else who wants to do all the work herself.”
If their personalities grate on you on the show, you should see them off screen, insists Leduc.
“We kind of toned it down because we’re worse than that in real life,” Leduc said.
The other participants and viewers are mad at them in part because they’ll take penalties rather than doing an arduous task, like for example digging for clams. For Leduc and Terehova, it’s all about strategy and doing what you have to to win, even if it means stealing information from another team.
Leduc said they’d be criticized no matter what they did on the show because of who they are.
“We had targets on our back because she’s a tall blond and I’m a fighter,” Leduc said.
They have no time for those who say they’re bad role models.
“It’s a TV show,” Leduc said. “Why am I supposed to be a role model? I’m racing for a quarter of a million dollars.”