Jackye Clayton and Lauren McKinney may not have won The Amazing Race but the sisters did conquer some big fears.
In the season 37 premiere, fans saw Clayton, 51, get emotional as she and McKinney, 61, were tasked with climbing up a colossal series of stairs at the Tian Tan Buddha in Hong Kong. Clayton explained on the show that she suffered a scary fall from a series of steps that required her to get surgery and sparked a phobia.
“I think about it every time I see stairs,” Clayton exclusively told Us Weekly on Thursday, March, following their elimination from the competition series. “Like last week at a basketball game, I had to hold popcorn and there wasn’t an aisle. And I was like, ‘Oh, let me do it.’ I just wanted to call my sister and say, ‘Lauren, I took the stairs without a guardrail.’”
Clayton couldn’t help but feel “so proud” of herself for facing the fear and she was even more grateful that the series included it in the episode.
“I don’t know if everyone watching would know this was major for me. This is my jumping out of an airplane or trying to do a trapeze,” she said. “Like, for me it was a major deal. So I am ultimately proud of myself.”
When watching the show back, Clayton looked at the aerial shot of the lengthy stairs and was still amazed she climbed up and down them. While a fear of stairs might not be an ideal trait for an Amazing Race competitor, Clayton explained that she trained and practiced for it since stairs have popped up before.
“The first thing that we had to do was run down the stairs,” she quipped. “‘And I was like, ‘Oh good. We got the stairs over with out of the way.’”
McKinney, for her part, gushed about how proud she was of her sister for not backing down from the challenge.
“I never felt like she disappointed me at all. All I could think about was, ‘Wow, there’s somebody out there that’s watching this because there’s a fear. There’s something that they don’t talk about with someone because they feel like they’ll be ridiculed or judged or whatever because it’s so minor,’” McKinney told Us. “Maybe it’ll help us all just stop. Everybody’s going through something on their own, sometimes their own silent journey. And you can extend a hand and be a help to somebody and let them actually it’s the opposite.”
In addition to Clayton taking on the stairs, McKinney had a moment herself when she stepped up to complete the first Roadblock of the season. McKinney was tasked with climbing up a Cheung Chau Bun Festival bamboo tower — which she did without an issue. However, tackling the heights-themed challenges was not on McKinney’s radar.
“We watched every season of The Amazing Race. Leading up to this, we decided in advance who’s going to do this, who’s gonna eat that if it comes up, who’s gonna, and she was gonna do all the height things,” she explained. “Put me in the mud. I’ll climb through mud, I’ll push ox, I don’t care, swim, whatever she was gonna do all the height things jump out of a plane bunch, whatever. So I was not gonna do that.”
After Clayton’s emotional moment with the stairs, McKinney knew that the pair had a significant delay and were already in last place. So she decided to give her sister a break and master the tower herself.
“She had just conquered those stairs. I had to conquer this tower,” McKinney told Us. “So I just knew something within me you don’t like, I didn’t even feel scared. It just went away. I just went straight into, ‘I have to do this.’”
Once McKinney accomplished the feat, she felt “joy” and “pride.”
“There was that feeling of when you overcome something that you didn’t think you could. I knew my sister was waiting for me at the bottom,” she reflected. “I couldn’t see her, but I knew she was there cheering me on the whole way. So it was absolutely amazing and quite a moment.”
The Amazing Race airs on CBS on Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. ET and is available to stream on Paramount+ the next day.
