(Los Angeles) A transgender American lost her place as champion of the legendary game show on Wednesday Jeopardy!after rising to second place in the show’s history on Monday with 39 wins.
Posted at 10:55 a.m.
Amy Schneider, a 42-year-old engineer from Oakland, California, became the first woman to reach $1 million in earnings in early January. Jeopardy!at his 28and Victoire.
She leaves the game with 40 wins and a check for nearly $1.4 million.
The champion failed in the final test on Wednesday by not finding the only country in the world whose English name ends with the letter “h”, also among the 10 most populous on the planet. Rhone Talsma, a librarian from Chicago, thus became the new champion with the correct answer, Bangladesh.
When Amy Schneider became the first woman to hit $1 million in earnings, some critics tried to downplay her record because of her trans identity.
“The best thing for me is to be on television, being my true self, expressing myself and representing the whole transgender community”, she had replied to them on Monday on the show Good Morning. America, on the ABC channel.
She said she wanted to show “something different by just being a smart, confident woman doing something very normal like switching to Jeopardy! “.
To explain her journey, she claimed to be “only curious” and to have “spent (her) life learning a lot of things”.
Amy Schneider ultimately failed to break the record set by Ken Jennings, who racked up 74 wins in 2004, and is now one of the game’s acting hosts.
Jeopardy! made its debut on American television in 1964. In this game, based on general knowledge and offering different categories, participants start from a given answer to deduce the corresponding question.
It was featured for 36 years by host Alex Trebek, who died of cancer in November 2020.