Liam and Yeremi Hykel Reveal an Unseen Alliance on 'The Amazing Race 35'
Liam Hykel (top) and Yeremi Hykel (bottom)
Pack your bags, because The Amazing Race is back! Every week, Parade's Mike Bloom will bring you interviews with the team most recently eliminated from the race.
On paper, Liam and Yeremi Hykel seemed to have it all when it comes to criteria for an Amazing Race winning team. They're young and fit. Their respective military experiences have them used to traveling and pushing through stressful situations with little rest. Even their relationship, while on the mend from being estranged for nearly a decade, was not fractured when they went onto the show. But though their foundational skills were as solid as a pile of bricks, the delivery was the problem. Liam and Yeremi started in the back of the pack, and could never find their footing. It culminated in them finishing in last place in Vietnam, only to be granted a reprieve when they were informed they had to keep racing.
The brothers went from "dead last" to bringing their race back to life, as they leapfrogged a few teams to go from eleventh to sixth place. Unfortunately, that would be the highest placement they'd get all season. When they hit the streets of India, it wasn't long before they fell to their usual placement of the back of the pack. When you're in the hunt for elimination, one mistake or piece of bad luck can send you home. In Liam and Yeremi's case, it was their tuk-tuk driver. After a day of slowgoing and navigational difficulties, despite a U-Turn in the picture, it was not Liam and Yeremi's day, and they were eliminated.
Now out of the race, Liam and Yeremi talk with Parade.com about their struggles to connect early on in the race, recovering from being "dead last," and a moment from the starting line that led to them U-Turning Robbin and Chelsea.
Related: Everything to Know About The Amazing Race 35
I need to start with how you guys got onto The Amazing Race. Because you were very open about how you two were estranged until recently, and were looking to make up for lost time. What made you decide the pressurized atmosphere of The Amazing Race was the time to do that?
Liam Hykel: Well, Jeremy and I were obviously both military veterans. So we're very familiar with suffering. So that's not anything new to us. However, this relationship that Yeremi and I have developed, it is new to us. We had initially started working on it at the beginning of the casting process for this season. So whenever Jeremy called me, and he was like, "Hey, did you want you want to go on the show?" to me in my head, my thought process was, "Okay, we can definitely do it, we can tackle anything. Amazing Race, no problem. We can do it. I know we can."
This is a new relationship for me. And I really want it to work. And I want to do what I can to make it as great as it possibly could be. And this looks like this would be a great opportunity to kind of mend our relationship, push it to the limits, and make it absolutely stronger, build a really greatly strong foundation underneath it so that it'll never break in, and it'll never fall. So that was kind of my thought process when going into it. And I was just like, "Dude, let's do it. Sign me up."
Yeremi Hykel: That was mine as well. I mean, like, when we were starting, just like he was saying, our relationship wasn't anything close to what it was like right now. And like Liam was pointing out, we felt like we saw everything that the race had for us. And we were like, "We can do anything if we're together. We know that for sure." So we felt like, especially at the beginning of the process, the most challenging thing for us, was gonna be like, "Okay, can we do this? Yes. But can we be open and vulnerable enough first with each other, to allow each other more insight into our hearts and where we were coming from our perspectives and our paths? Can we do that, ultimately, enough to be successful in this endeavor?"
And that was a huge challenge at the beginning of that. We went through probably several interviews talking about our dynamic, talking about each other. And that's when we really started diving into our past when it started to become difficult for us. There were a couple of times when we talked about some things that happened in our past for our family and our childhood, that we talked with casting about, that we've never talked with each other about. And you can blatantly see that, when we were talking about it, we were breaking down; we were getting really emotional. And it finally got to the point where me and Liam sat down, and we were like, "Hey, we need to talk about this. And we need to talk about this together before we continue to talk about this with other people. That's going to be the best way for us to do that."
We were able to sit down. He was able to understand my point of things; I was able to understand his point of things. We talked about our family, we talked about our childhood, we talked about our relationship growing up together. And, ultimately, we buried the hatchet. And what that allowed us to do is to drop the barriers that have previously been there emotionally for Liam and for me. And that's what led directly into that free-loving, beautiful, blossoming, positive, encouraging relationship that you guys were able to see, which is truly us together with no barriers. Just us together, holding hands, strong face in the world.
So I imagine what was complicating your race on top of hashing all of this out was the fact that you were not doing particularly well in the beginning. What was it like starting the race in the back of the pack, and was that affected at all by you guys figuring things out about yourselves, as we just mentioned?
Liam: So I'll tell you this right now, bro. I'm about to air Todd out right now. He's getting aired out on this [interview]. [Laughs.] Because when we got up to the rooftop where we had to do the billboard thing, I'd never been to L.A., and I've always obviously never been to Thailand. So I didn't know "City of Angels" was the nickname for L.A. or Bangkok. But I did figure out that it was "city of" something. So then we were all kind of working together. They're kind of scheming. And I talked to Victor, and I talked to Todd, and I was like, "Hey, I got 'city of.' It's definitely 'city of' something." They're like, "Oh, City of Angels." And I was like, "Hey, that might be it."
So it was me, Victor, and Todd that knew the answer. But when one person went to get the check, everybody went. Everybody wanted to just be there. Nobody knew the answer except me, Victor, and Todd. And I was in the back, right in front of Joel. And Todd was two people in front of me. And then he tells the entire line of people, which it wouldn't have mattered because nobody knows the answer except for me, Todd, and Victor. So they're gonna go get it wrong. I was like, "Cool. I don't even care where I'm at in line." Todd's like, "Hey, you let me go to the front, I'll tell everybody the answer right now."
So he went to the front and told everybody the answer. And now I'm in last place. Now we're in the back. So Todd definitely kind of did me dirty like that. He apologized for it later. So we're good now. But he definitely did me dirty. But, throughout the race and whatnot, like I said, we did what we could. We did our very best and we enjoyed doing it. We weren't beating ourselves up being in whatever place we were in. When you see us arrive at the pitstop, and we're excited and we're dapping each other up every single time for being in eighth place or something like that, we're genuinely excited. It is genuine excitement. We're just happy to be there.
Yeremi: It's like survival, oh my god. Just staying above water!
That's the name of the game! Just do better than at least one other team. Now, on that note, there was a time when you didn't do that, and you finished in "dead last" in Vietnam. How tough was it to bounce back from that mentally when you're told to keep racing?
Yeremi: When we got to that to that Pit stop where Phil told us, "You're going to continue racing," we had originally thought we were doing really, really well. I mean, we had talked about it on the taxi ride to that Pit Stop. We're like, "Dude, we've been crushing these challenges. We've been doing really well. We feel like we've ticked up a couple spots in the leaderboards." And then we get there and he says "dead last. "And we were like, "Oh my god." It crushed us. I was like, "No way How did this happen?" I didn't see this coming in at all. But [then] he said, "Keep racing." And I knew from that moment on, as we were going in, it was do or die right now. We were going to have to give everything that we have if we want to stay in this race.
It very quickly shifted my mentality into that second leg in Vietnam. From the mattresses to the temple to making a wish, I don't think that I was a very nice guy. [Laughs.] The Marine in me kicked in, and I was like, "We need to pick these mattresses up, we need to put them on my back, and we need to run up there, and put them up there and back and forth." And I was dying. I mean, we were dripping sweat. We had drenched every inch of our bodies running back and forth doing those mattresses. I remember Liam was dying. There was a couple of times he was like, "Yeremi, bro. Let's take a second real fast." I was like, "There's no seconds. There's no time. We need to go now." I mean, on our second trip with the mattresses, Liam dropped them twice. And we're holding them on the floor, and the second we dropped them at the floor, we're like, "We've got to get them back up. 1, 2, 3. Let's go." Put them back up and then we kept on running. The mentality switched really, really fast.
Liam: I'll be honest, I pretty much blacked out for that entire leg. So it kind of is what it is. [Laughs.]
Joe and Ian told me last week that they told you and Morgan and Lena after their elimination to U-Turn Steve and Anna Leigh. But you end up U-Turning Robbin and Chelsea instead. Why was that the case?
Liam: So, Todd and Ashlie, Steve and Anna Leigh, and Yeremi and I were all in alliance kind of thing.
Yeremi: We made an alliance.
Liam: Yeah, we initially had made an alliance. So we were like, "Try not to do each other dirty." Obviously, after Todd was specifically dirty. [Laughs.] But that's in the past. We're not going to harp on that. So we decided we're gonna U-Turn any of our alliances. And then Robbin and Chelsea were the absolute least likely to help us. I mean, there was no doubt about it. Everybody else was relatively willing to help us. Just from a statistical standpoint, Robbin and Chelsea are the least beneficial for our team in particular. Let's just go for that. And then I know a lot of the other teams have had some less-than-ideal experiences with Robbin and Chelsea. So most of them were very willing to do it. I mean, you saw they were one vote away from being U-Turned. But we decided not to U-Turn Steve and Anna Leigh. Texas, stand up, baby! Let's go.
Yeremi: We had to stand together. Like we said, we had shared information with a lot of other teams. We had shared information with Todd; we had shared information with Steve and Anna Leigh. And we had that previous alliance with them. And Robbin also did me dirty in the first episode. I'm gonna make sure that I could talk about that every single time. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] Please, go ahead!
Yeremi: We were coming down from the Hollywood sign. We were racing to the cars. And I had found a car, opened the door, put my bags in. And I'm like, "I'm in the car. It's my car." Robbin runs up, sees that the clue on my car is still under the windshield wiper. And she grabs it, and then she looks at me she said, "This is our car now." And I was like, "Ooo, I'm U-Turning the [expletive] out of you. I don't care anymore." We knew when the U-Turn came up. We knew Steve and Anna Leigh were going to get U-Turned. They were frontrunners; they had just won. We knew it was going to happen. But it was about the principal, Mike.
Liam: Exactly. Can't leave those questions unanswered, no.
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