Stinson: The more amazing race

Camels, Dave Salmoni explains, are ornery. They are a prickly lot, not given to following human instruction very well.
So when Salmoni, the host of the new reality show Expedition: Impossible, saw contestants about to do something that would lead to about 1,000 pounds of angry dromedary, his instinct was to jump in and prevent it.
“But you can’t,” he says. Salmoni, the Canadian animal trainer and host of shows on Discovery and Animal Planet, says he quickly learned that offering help to any one team was off limits.
“It’s a race, and you can’t give advice to a team that would give them an advantage over the others,” he says. “The lawyers step in and say, ‘No.’ ”
The clips suggest there would have been plenty of opportunity to provide camel-related guidance. Expedition: Impossible, the latest show from reality king Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Apprentice, The Voice), follows a reliable format in which 13 teams of three vie in a 10-episode race across Morocco.
It draws obvious parallels to The Amazing Race, which even after 18 races continues to draw huge ratings (in Canada it was among the Top 5 shows last season).
But Salmoni says Expedition is much tougher. Thus, the Impossible part of the title.
“The Amazing Race is like a scavenger hunt. This is a race. This is big, it’s probably the most epic show I’ve seen on TV,” he says. “It’s a physical challenge. It’s a mental challenge. You’re never going to see somebody in a cab, you’re never going to see somebody in a hotel.
“You’re going to make that comparison [to The Amazing Race], but after about five minutes you’re never going to make that comparison again.”
Expedition, he says, involves a constant succession of tasks such as mountain climbing, rappelling, horseback (and camelback) riding, even skydiving.
“The racers never see the inside of a building from when they start to when they finish,” he says.
Asked if this made the production a bit simpler than that surrounding Amazing Race, which sends crews hopping across the globe to find arrangements for their contestants, Salmoni says Expedition, even though it stayed outdoors, had its own challenges.
“They’d decide, OK, they’re going to race to the top of that mountain, and then four camera crews would have to figure out how to get 12 cameras to the top of that mountain,” he says.
“It’s like a circus. We had a crew of anywhere from 300 to 400 people. I’d come home after shooting to camp, and it would look like a freaking army. But when you’re dealing with Mark Burnett, they do it big.”
As one of the contestants remarks: “We’re in the middle of the Sahara Desert. There’s sand everywhere, yo.”
Indeed.
Expedition:Impossible premieres on June 23 at 9 p.m. on CTV