Steph LeClair and Kristen McKenzie, winners of season 4 of The Amazing Race Canada, visited St. John’s last week to film part of the upcoming season of The Amazing Race Canada Auditions.

The Amazing Race Canada is a hugely popular reality show that invites people to audition in pairs to compete for a $500,000 prize. The competition involves travelling across Canada and internationally, to complete scavenger hunts and feats of athleticism. The team who successfully finishes all the tasks the fastest takes home the grand prize.

The Amazing Race Canada Auditions airs between seasons of The Amazing Race Canada; it’s hosted by previous winners of the race and highlights the top ten audition videos from the last season of the race.

“We’re doing a top ten count down of some of the funniest and quirkiest auditions,” explained McKenzie.

This year the audition spin-off show is little different than the previous ones because the hosts are bringing back people who auditioned but didn’t get selected to review their audition videos with them.

“If they did something funny in their video like tap dancing, we’ll get them to teach us to do it or we’ll get them to do something that would push them out of their comfort zone a little bit to see how they’d be on the real race,” LeClair added.

LeClair and McKenzie are a queer couple and the first all-woman team to win The Amazing Race Canada. They didn’t expect to be considered role models when they auditioned, but they’re happy to be able to inspire young women.

“Going into it …we just wanted to do the race for us, but the impact we’ve had on other people has been really significant …

“We get messages from young girls and young athletes and even their parents saying ‘thank you for showing us what’s possible,’ ” McKenzie said.

“It’s funny because it’s 2017, we’re so progressed but sometimes it still shocks people that women can be badasses or that they can be tough. We know it’s not shocking, we know lots of amazing women.”

It’s been almost a full year since LeClair and McKenzie collected their $500,000 prize. After winning, they immediately quit their jobs to spend a year travelling. They have been documenting their travels on a Youtube video blog that currently has more than 27,000 subscribers.

“We decided to travel all year so we’ve kind of been all over.  We did Costa Rica, New York , Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, and Indonesia,” McKenzie said.

Bell Media got in touch with the couple while they were travelling to ask if they would be up for hosting this round of The Amazing Race Auditions. McKenzie and LeClaire were excited about the opportunity to continue their travels with a cross Canada tour.

They’ve filmed in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and St. John’s. They’ll be wrapping in Halifax later this week. They didn’t include any auditionees from Newfoundland in their top ten, but they did stop by to take in the sights and shoot some footage for the show.

“This morning we went to Petty Harbour, we took the boat out to see icebergs and we got to touch one, that was really awesome. We went to Cape Spear and we went to the harbour just down there and saw your cute jellybean row houses.  So we got to see some stuff, but we’d love to come back again…” McKenzie said.

The newest season of The Amazing Race Canada Auditions airs this June, and if you watch carefully you just might catch a clip of icebergs in Petty Harbour, or a shot of the scenic cliffs at Cape Spear.