theamazingrace

A comprehensive, tidy dataset and companion R package for the multi-Emmy award-winning reality television series The Amazing Race (US Franchise, Seasons 1–36+).

Modeled after popular reality TV tidy data packages such as alone, survivoR, and bakeoff.

Installation

Install the development version of theamazingrace directly from GitHub:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("nicholaswilde/the-amazing-race/r")

Or install via R-universe:

install.packages("theamazingrace", repos = "https://nicholaswilde.r-universe.dev")

Datasets Included

The package exports 7 clean, relational data frames:

Dataset	Rows	Description
seasons	36	Season dates, distance traveled, winning teams, and route totals
episodes	356	Broadcast episode titles, premiere air dates, and Nielsen ratings
contestants	832	Contestant demographics, ages, hometowns, and occupations
teams	404	Two-person teams, relationship categories, and final placements
legs	429	Leg-by-leg routing, countries visited, itinerary stops, and narratives
leg_results	3,001	Arrival placements, non-eliminations, Fast Forwards, and U-Turns
tasks	1,621	Roadblocks, Detours, Route Info challenges, and descriptions

Quickstart

library(theamazingrace)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)

# Inspect seasons overview
head(seasons)

# Average race distance over eras
seasons |>
  mutate(era = case_when(
    season <= 10 ~ "Early Era (1-10)",
    season <= 20 ~ "Middle Era (11-20)",
    season <= 30 ~ "Modern Era (21-30)",
    TRUE         ~ "Recent Era (31-36)"
  )) |>
  group_by(era) |>
  summarize(
    avg_distance = mean(distance_miles, na.rm = TRUE),
    total_episodes = sum(n_episodes)
  )

# Explore Fast Forward usage
leg_results |>
  filter(fast_forward) |>
  count(team_name, sort = TRUE)

Direct Parquet / Arrow Usage

For users who prefer high-performance columnar reads without loading package .rda objects, read the pre-compiled Parquet tables directly using the {arrow} package:

library(arrow)

seasons <- read_parquet("https://github.com/nicholaswilde/the-amazing-race/raw/main/data/processed/seasons.parquet")
episodes <- read_parquet("https://github.com/nicholaswilde/the-amazing-race/raw/main/data/processed/episodes.parquet")

License

This package is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.