The Amazing Race 18 (also known as The Amazing Race: Unfinished Business) is the eighteenth season of the American reality television show The Amazing Race. It featured eleven teams of two, each returning from a previous edition of the series, in a race around the world. The season premiered on CBS on Sunday, February 20, 2011, and the finale aired on May 8, 2011. Sisters Kisha and Jen Hoffman were the winners of this season, while Herbert "Flight Time" Lang and Nathaniel "Big Easy" Lofton of the Harlem Globetrotters finished in second place, and father and daughter Gary Ervin and Mallory Ervin finished in third. Production Development and filming The Amazing Race 18 was the first season of the United States series to be broadcast on high-definition television. While most other prime-time television shows had transitioned to high definition, including other reality television shows, previous seasons of The Amazing Race used standard-definition television due to the cost and fragility of high-definition recording equipment. This season traveled a little over across 23 cities and five continents. Filming started on November 20, 2010, at the San Gorgonio Pass wind farm near Palm Springs, California. Teams were spotted at Oceanworld Manly around November 22, 2010, and a day later around the mining town of Broken Hill, New South Wales, in the Australian Outback. Other locales cited as destinations were Yokohama, Japan, where teams swam in freezing waters near Mount Fuji, and the series' first visit to Liechtenstein. The Express Pass, introduced in the previous season, returned and allowed a team to bypass one single task later in the season. The last team to complete the first task was forced to complete a U-Turn in the next leg, performing both tasks of the leg's Detour. The double-length legs format previously used were changed in this season to legs without a mandatory rest period between them. At the end of the first leg in Sydney, Australia, and the fourth leg in Lijiang, China, teams were ordered to keep racing and given their next clue. The first team to check in was still awarded a prize, but the last team to check in was not eliminated and did not have to perform a Speed Bump. Casting Phil Keoghan described all the contestants as teams that "came so close to winning but for one reason or another just didn't quite make it over the finish line in