The Amazing Race’s Jonathan and Ana Break Down Their Train Station Fight in Portugal: ‘That Was Wild’

The Amazing Race season 37’s most controversial couple, Jonathan Towns and Ana Towns, are looking back and reflecting on their infamous train station fight in Porto, Portugal.

“We were in line at the train station, and you had gone under the ropes, and I kind of do this weird, weird thing … I say, ‘Don’t step in front of me,’” Jonathan, 42, said during his and his wife’s recap of leg 11 on their YouTube channel on Tuesday, May 27. Ana, 35, chimed in to say that she had “no idea” Jonathan was standing behind her in line at the train station.

Jonathan admitted that, after watching the episode and seeing himself snap at Ana like that, he found himself saying, “That was wild.”

“It was just the one thing that set me off, and I looked ridiculous,” the software developer, who received backlash from fans throughout the season due to the way he treated Ana, added in the video.

While Ana had mostly been patient with her husband and rarely fired back whenever he made comments like this during the race, she said in their recap that she was “hangry” and tired, which led her to respond to Jonathan’s remark. As fans saw during the May 14 episode, after Jonathan snapped at her, the couple got into a fight about his behavior that day.

“Why are you treating me like I did something wrong? You’ve been treating me like this for the last two hours,” Ana told him.

In a confessional, she said of his comment about “cutting in front of him” in line, “I feel like he overreacted.” Ana also said she felt like his bad mood “started with the navigation,” referring to their struggles with getting lost earlier in the episode.

Reflecting on their blowup argument at the train station in their recap, Ana said, “It was louder than it looked, y’all.”

“It was ugly, it was irrational. I’m talking about disrespect. Nothing is making sense,” Jonathan added, later revealing that he and Ana were still fighting once they got on the train, even though these scenes were not shown on TV.

“People were staring,” Ana said.

Jonathan then spoke about his autism diagnosis, which he revealed during his and Ana’s April 8 YouTube video.

“Being autistic, you lose your ability to process and rationalize and even communicate in these times, so what I’m saying does not make sense. And when you see it on TV, it does not make sense,” he added.

Jonathan, who crossed the finish line with Ana in third place in Miami during the finale on May 15, revealed in a post-race interview with Parade that he was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) after returning home from filming in June 2024. Ana had given him the book Nonviolent Communication to read, but it wasn’t until several months later that he realized that people would see his negative behavior play out on TV and jumped into action.

“It’s so difficult because, when you’re a late-diagnosed autistic person, you have developed by this time in your life a number of adaptations and masking strategies that you’re not even aware of,” he said. “So, it took my doctor some time to kind of go through my history and go through some of my characteristics and really understand, ‘Are you actually autistic?’ Because I disguise it so well, and I’ve learned to adapt to the neurotypical world around me. And so, eventually we got there, but it was a journey. It was not straightforward at all.”