Phil Keoghan

“Amazing Race” host Phil Keoghan called just now from Lima, Ohio, to catch me up on his cross-country bicycle ride and talk about the current “Race,” which wraps up Sunday, May 10. Phil is riding from LA to NY to raise money for multiple sclerosis research, help cast and publicize the “Race,” and sell his “One Square Meal” bars, available at GNC. (He’s been eating them for four years whole shooting the “Race,” he says, and they sound tasty.)

At this point, Phil has covered more than 2,600 miles, with a thousand or so left to ride. Saturday in Chicago, Mark Reardon of KMOX radio in St. Louis rode with Phil for 30-plus miles (more than 60 total for him, because he then had to turn around and ride back to Chicago). I’ll have a story on Mark’s experience (and Phil’s commentary on it) in Friday’s GO! section, but meanwhile, I got a chance to ask Phil about the whole Luke-Jen shoving match, which led to an ongoing blood feud between mom and son Margie and Luke and friends Kisha and Jen.

People along the route of the ride want to talk first about how much they love the “Race” and then about the Luke-Jen incident, he said. “People are still all talking about it. I did an informal poll today and people were split on whose fault it was. But Margie and Luke seem to be a lot of people’s favorites to win this season.” The incident “was shown the way it happened,” he said. As for the scene being repeated over and over until it achieved the proportions of the Zapruder film, “I can’t be responsible for the editing of the show, but obviously people were interested and wanted to see it again.” Told that I was now rooting for Tammy and Victor because I thought they’d grown in the course of the “Race,” he said the brother-and-sister “are two of the people least prepared for real life and the real world” who’ve ever been on the show. “They are so smart, but ask them to do something practical, outside of books, and they’re baffled.”

Yeah, and how could that dive have been so difficult? Were you annoyed by the cliffhanger “this leg isn’t over” ending of Sunday night’s episode? “People have been telling me all day that they yelled at the TV,” Phil said.