Phil Keoghan

Phil Keoghan: When I first started bungy-jumping in the 80s, everyone was thinking it was an extreme, dangerous sport. Now, we have a little more perspective and it's really not extreme. Now it's hard to impress somebody by doing it.

Phil Keoghan: (About the Amazing Race) The teams that I root for are the teams that are giving us good TV. So it's not about necessarily liking them the most, it's about liking that they're giving us the most. Does that make sense?

Phil Keoghan: Imagine if, all your life, you wanted to climb Mount Everest. If I were to suddenly plunk you on the summit, it would be a great experience for you to be there, but it wouldn't feel half as good as if you looked back down and realized you had put in all this hard work and effort to get to the top.

Phil Keoghan: (When asked if they deliberately try to make teams bunch up on The Amazing Race): It's not something we deliberately do; it just happens. Obviously the race is much more interesting if it's tight. It helps create tension. Also, a team never knows when it's beneficial to surge ahead or hold back.

Phil Keoghan: (On the best challenge of The Amazing Race): One of the challenges the teams talk about as being the most fun was the zorb in New Zealand; that big PVC ball that rolled down the hill. I was one of the guinea pigs to go down in that ball and test that hill. I definitely loved that.

Phil Keoghan: (On the worst challenge of The Amazing Race): Eating the caviar in Russia. We probably overestimated how much people could eat. We test a lot of the challenges in the office, but clearly we were a bit off.

Phil Keoghan: (When asked what he does during the mandatory rest periods in The Amazing Race): In that twelve-hour window, I'm shooting the opening for the next show, interviewing teams, shooting the pit stops and trying to get a lead on the first team leaving. There are times when the first team leaves immediately after the last team arrives, so I'm on the same flight with them. There have been occasions when they've been ahead of us. I've literally been running up to the mat in one direction and they've been running in the other way. It's been very close.

Phil Keoghan: (About The Amazing Race): I really wish we could stay longer in the countries we visit, but I've been lucky to have visited most of them before because I've done a tremendous amount of travel.

Phil Keoghan: (About The Amazing Race): People ask me what the most important thing to take on the race is and I always say it's a sense of humor. If you've got nothing, but a sense of humor, you will survive.

Phil Keoghan: (About The Amazing Race): There's always been rumors and speculation. Everyone feels like they can pick the winner. The show is all about the enjoyment of entertainment and enjoying their journey.

Phil Keoghan: (About The Amazing Race): I wasn't nervous (about the family edition) because I knew or felt that after seven seasons it would be good to do something a little different, just to mix it up a little bit.

Phil Keoghan: (About The Amazing Race; some fans have pointed out that the teams appear to be covering less ground this season, which in previous seasons has had contestants travel 60,000 miles or more) I think in terms of the miles of the race, it might be less than the average, but it's not about how far they travel, it's about what they do.

Phil Keoghan: (About The Amazing Race): Forage requires luck, but can be accomplished quickly. Gorge is easy and a sure thing, but completing this task will take a very long time.

Phil Keoghan: (About The Amazing Race): It's the most number of miles we've done in that short amount of time. People clearly wanted the international element. They missed it. The places are as much the stars of the show as the people themselves. That was illustrated when you look at season eight. People were missing that exotic element, the fish-out-of-water element. That is a huge hook.

Phil Keoghan: With any good story, you need the adversary, the heroes and villains. You need a good mixture to make it work.

Phil Keoghan: (About The Amazing Race): We tried something. I'm really proud that we tried something because I think if we hadn't tried to change the race, people might have criticized us for not being adventurous and doing something different. I'm proud of what we managed to pull together, but there is no denying that the race is most successful when it has less faces, more places and teams of two racing around the world.

Phil Keoghan: (About The Amazing Race): With the reaction that we got from the family version; people clearly made a statement that they wanted that international element in the show. I think it showed that the places are as much stars in the show as the people themselves. People were missing that exotic element; that fish-out-of-water element where people were completely and utterly dumbfounded as to what to do because of culture shock and language barriers. They missed that and I think that is a huge hook for us.

Phil Keoghan: (About The Amazing Race): For me, personally, I love to see the teams going to places we never get to see in mainstream media. It's always a big eye-opener for these teams to go to someplace that is just very different from their local community. There's one location that we get to in the Middle East where the teams are immersed in a daily task that a lot of the local people have to go through and it's great to see teams that are used to going down to the 7-Eleven suddenly having to cope with living life in a completely different way.

Phil Keoghan: (About The Amazing Race) I think the locations themselves are sometimes the bigger star then perhaps we realized.

Phil Keoghan: (About The Amazing Race) I think if we would have put people that were extraordinary athletes, extraordinary travelers, in, this extraordinary situation would be a total disconnect with the audience. The fact that they are more ordinary, the fact that a lot of them are unfit and have never traveled - that's what makes the show work.