SANTA BARBARA, California, January 22. FORMER UC Santa Barbara swimmer TK Erwin, and his girlfriend, Rachel, captured the top prize during the 12th season of The Amazing Race as televised on CBS.
Erwin, the Gaucho men's team captain during the 2005-06 season, set a school record in the 200 backstroke during his junior campaign with a time of 1:47.14. The record has since been broken by teammate Chris Good. He was a four-year letterwinner for the Gauchos and was also an All-Big West All-Academic team honoree and Golden Eagle Award winner.
According to CBS, the couple raced through 10 cities, four continents and rang up nearly 30,000 miles in travel during the reality show contents that features couples going head-to-head as contestants are eliminated each episode.
The following is an excerpt of CBS' episode recap:
THE WINNERS
As the previous eight Teams stood cheering alongside Phil with the gorgeous green background of Alaskan mountains behind them, dating couple TK & Rachel stepped onto the mat to be named the winners of THE AMAZING RACE 12 and the one million dollar prize. On his partner, TK remarked, "I'm incredibly proud of Rachel. She is petite, but she still went out and beat a hell of a lot of very competitive people. It's just a testament to how tough she actually is."
One half of the newly crowned winners, Rachel commented on her partner. "My feelings for TK are very real. He's my best friend. He's my rock and he's just my favorite person and I got to do all this with him." On how they ran the Race, TK noted, "Being able to do the entire race, not compromising our relationship in any way and in the process making great friendships just makes winning it that much sweeter. Nice guys can definitely finish first and I think we proved it with this."
Special thanks to UCSB and CBS for contributing to this report.