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'The Amazing Race Canada' says goodbye to pro-wrestling duo Gail Kim and Gisele Shaw

Posted: Jul 7th 2023 By: Elisabetta Bianchini

They may have only made it through the first episode of The Amazing Race Canada Season 9, but pro-wrestling duo Gail Kim and Gisele Shaw clearly showed their resiliency racing through Winnipeg and Calgary.

Following the season premiere on Tuesday, Kim said she had a sense of "fear" for the episode to air to the public.

"I did not expect to be the first team eliminated, and of course you know that's a possibility, but you never want to be that first team," she told Yahoo Canada.

"So it was just more [nerves] of, 'oh gosh we let down our fans,' and all those negative feelings, but it all came out so positively in the end."

In the episode we saw that Shaw had to take on the brunt of the work in the two challenges, having to rappel down the side of a Winnipeg library to find three words and running pancakes to a hungry group in Calgary. We saw the team have a big delay at the library, when Shaw struggled to find the three words necessary to move on. But as Kim highlights, the delay started with a cab issue earlier in the day that may have made a more significant impact on their performance than we saw in the episode.

"There was a cab stolen right off the bat, [which] kind of switched the order of getting to the public library," Kim explained. "So we were supposed to be second cab."

"Looking in hindsight to everything that could have happened, ... if we didn't get that cab stolen then we would have been second to the library, would have went for the Express Passes. But because of the way that it went, we were last in the cabs to go to the public library. So we said, OK game plan changed, we've got to go straight to this challenge."

Kim stressed that she had "100 per cent" confidence in her partner to succeed in this competition, but you never know how things are going to play out in Amazing Race Canada.

"When you're seeing something from the outside and you want to help your partner so much, and you just feel so helpless, those are the moments that maybe people didn't get to see on camera last night," Kim said. "You go from first to last in one challenge, that can be disheartening."

"But then at the same time, I never felt like I ever gave up until we saw Jon on the mat."

'Gisele's moment' on 'The Amazing Race Canada'

While Kim, as a retired pro-wrestler now living in Florida, wanted to experience that sense of competition by participating in Amazing Race Canada, being on the show was very much her partner's "dream come true."

"The Amazing Race, in general over the last 15 years, has come into my life three times by chance, the American one and the [Canadian]," Kim said. "These opportunities kept on just presenting themselves and I never took any of those opportunities before, because I was so caught up in my wrestling career at that time."

"So now I'm retired from the ring and it just kind of presented itself to me. ... I am a believer in everything comes into your life for a reason. It's like, OK I'm retired now, I'm missing some pieces of competition here for myself, excitement, and knowing that it was Gisele's ... dream experience, I was like, oh my gosh this is just coming together so nicely that I can't pass up this opportunity."

Kim very much wanted Shaw to take the lead in their team, stressing that she felt it was "Gisele's moment."

"Gisele [is just now] living freely as a transgender woman and just to have her on that pedestal to show everyone, inspire the LGBTQ audience, as well as others, that she could do this," Kim said. "She did that only a year ago, now she's doing Amazing Race Canada and just living so fearlessly, and she inspired me.

"I know her and so I know that she has inspired many others out there who watched her [Tuesday] night."