Canadian Jeopardy! champ Mattea Roach reflects on win streak after losing by a dollar
Mattea Roach always knew her record-breaking reign at the Jeopardy! podium would come to an end.
The all-time Canadian champion said her success on the show was as much about luck as it was trivia prowess.
“I just kind of felt like, why would I possibly be upset about this?” she said in a phone interview before the episode that ended her run aired on Friday. “Obviously, I would have preferred to have won. But I was always going to lose eventually, and most people lose their first game. I’m lucky I got to win 23.”
She’s also had months to process the loss, given that the episode was filmed on Feb. 15.
“Any possible angle I could have dissected my last game from, I feel like I did in the week after I taped it.”
Roach came to the conclusion that things could have ended differently had she tweaked her strategy, but she’s opting not to dwell on it. She was lucky “so many more times” than she was unlucky, she said.
And after weeks of media attention on both sides of the border, she’s ready to take a breath — something that’s gotten easier, given her $560,983 US in winnings. It’s the fifth largest haul of any contestant in the game show’s regular season.
The law school tutor will turn law school student in the fall. She got her first acceptance while taping the show and is still deciding where to enrol, but until then, she plans to take it easy.
“Maybe I just won’t really work more than part time between now and then,” Roach said. “And I’ll just enjoy a last summer of freedom.
“There’s so much stuff that I have not done in my life yet, because I’m relatively young,” she said. “I haven’t travelled in a long time. I have money now, I guess. I can go places if I want to.”
She’s also looking forward to thinking about things other than TV and trivia.
“Before Jeopardy! I was in a place in my life where there wasn’t really forward motion,” she said. “And now I feel like, for reasons both related to and unrelated to Jeopardy!, that’s not true anymore.”
When she lost on Friday’s show, her final score was $15,599 US. The winner, Danielle Maurer, a digital marketing manager from Georgia — ended up with $15,600.
But Roach’s Jeopardy! journey isn’t over — she has qualified for the show’s Tournament of Champions.
The tournament is set to air in the fall.
Roach lives in Toronto, but she has said on the show that she spent her childhood and part of her adolescence in Halifax, and has also lived in Calgary and Moncton, N.B.
Unlike her second-to-last match, Roach went into the final question with the lead Friday. But the Final Jeopardy question was about the name of Atlanta’s airport, right near where Maurer lived.
The category was USA, and the clue was: “These two mayors gave their names to a facility built on the site of an old racetrack owned by Coca-Cola magnate Asa Candler.”
The correct response was: “Who are William Hartsfield and Maynard Jackson?”
Roach was wrong, Maurer was right, and she bet enough to win.
“It feels still kind of like a dream,” Roach said. “I really came down here hoping to maybe win one game and so I still can’t believe it. You know, it’s strange, obviously I didn’t come through in the last one, but I still feel so happy and so lucky to have had this experience.”