On May 10, sibling teammates Victor Jih ’96 and Tamara Jih ’06 claimed victory in the 14th-season finale of the CBS reality show “The Amazing Race.” Brother and sister took home the million dollar prize for being first over the finish line at Maui’s King Kamehameha Golf Club in Hawaii.
“The Amazing Race 14” lasted for 22 days and stretched over 40,000 miles. Eleven teams of two competed on the racecourse which ran through nine countries on three continents, including Romania for the first time, India, People’s Republic of China and Russia. The teams rode the Trans-Siberian Railway for 13 hours, through a below-zero Siberian snowstorm, raced through suffocating heat in India and completed the world’s second tallest bungee jump.
Victor is a partner at O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles and Tamara is an associate at Quinn Emmanuel in San Francisco.
The Jihs played their “A-plus game,” said Victor, using their ability to speak Mandarin to navigate easily through China and recouping quickly when a disagreement in the Romanian mountains almost cost them the prize.
In news reports of their victory, Victor said: “My entire life I’ve felt I’ve done what was expected of me. This was a crazy thing to do. Crazy, unexpected, completely unconventional, and it actually makes life sort of interesting.”