‘The Amazing Race’ Season 30 Finale Recap: Team ‘Big Brother’ Wins

The finale of The Amazing Race season 30 aired last at 9 p.m. on CBS, and there were just four teams left. In the final two hours of the season, the competitors headed from Thailand to Hong Kong, and ended up back in San Francisco with the hopes of winning the coveted $1 million prize.

WHO WON THE AMAZING RACE?

The final tour teams are made up of Indycar racers Conor Daly and Alexander Rossi, skiers Kristi Leski and Jen Hudak, Big Brother couple Jessica Graf and Cody Nickson, and Yale alumni Henry Zhang with Evan Lynyak. As they trek across Southeast Asia, the teams had to light and hang 40 Chinese lanterns, successfully relay and entire dinner order in Cantonese to their partner to prepare, destroy old electronics with baseball bats to find hidden tokens inside, and finally retrieve a 3-number code to open a briefcase.

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At the end of all this, Conor and Alexander are the slowest and are eliminated, leaving Team Yale, Team Big Brother and Team Xtreme to fight it out to the end. Once back in the Bay Area, the teams must engage in a frightening climb up and fall from the center of the Bay Bridge. Yale finds themselves in last place at this point.

Next up, the teams must go to the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Company and assemble 50 near-perfect cookies before moving on. The final mat is aboard the USS Hornet, and the teams must complete one final task before heading to it. According to host Phil Keoghan, it is “the season’s most difficult test of both physical endurance and mental strength.”

The teams must scour over 1,000 containers spread over seven decks on the ship to assemble a model plane out of 12 large pieces they have to find. The trick is, though there are 12 pieces, only six are necessary to build the plane, but each contains a symbol to represent the 12 legs of this season’s race. When their planes are done, the teams should see all 12 symbols with no duplicates.

As the teams race to the finish, Team Big Brother is the first to finish successfully and stand on the mat, making Jessica and Cody this season’s big winners. Team Yale came in second and Team Xtreme in third.

Funnily, host Phil Keoghan revealed that he initially thought Kristi and Jen would win in an interview with TV Guide. “They’re strong women. I can tell they have no problem going toe-to-toe with anyone,” he shared. “They’re a little older, so they’ve got a little more experience at competing. And that experience may play really well for them going into this because a lot of competing is about the experience of competing, knowing how to deal with stress. And just as competitors with more hours competing than anybody else, that’s going to give them a good shot at winning this thing.”

Jessica and Cody, however, recently became engaged after the show’s filming, as reported by Us Weekly, so the $1 million will go a long way in planning their perfect wedding and honeymoon.