Derek Xiao and Claire Rehfuss, who met on Big Brother 23 and won The Amazing Race 34, have broken up after four years together.
The announcement was made by Rehfuss, who posted the news in an Instagram story. “After 4 wonderful years together, Derek and I have decided to end our relationship,” she wrote. “Nothing dramatic happened, just the realisation that we’re different people who want different things.”
“We still deeply care about each other, are grateful for the time we shared, and will remain friends,” she clarified. “Thank you all for the love and support, it truly means so much. We hope that by sharing, we can be given the space and grace to move forward without any speculation or drama.”
How Derek Xiao and Claire Rehfuss Met
Xiao and Rehfuss met when they were both houseguests on Season 23 of the CBS summer series back in 2021. She was a last-minute add to the cast, brought in at the eleventh hour to replace someone who had tested positive for COVID. While the two were allies, fans didn’t observe any sense of romantic interest from either party. That began, apparently, after Xiao and Rehfuss were evicted in tenth and eighth place, respectively.
It wasn’t long after Rehfuss arrived at the jury house that the two began to strike something up. Xiao told Us in a 2021 interview, “I remember the first or second night that she was there, we stayed up all night just talking until 5:00 a.m. That happened every single night for the first, like, five days. That’s when I started really thinking like, ‘Wait a second, why didn’t this happen in the house? There’s such a strong connection and chemistry between us.’ I think that was the beginning of us thinking about what this could be.”
The two shocked the Big Brother community weeks after Big Brother 23 wrapped in October, with a social media announcement and accompanying steamy photoshoot. At the time, Rehfuss called their relationship “the absolute best thing to come out of the most stressful 3 months of my life.”
Things moved quickly for the couple following their time in the house. Despite both living in New York City at the time of Big Brother, they both relocated to San Francisco in August 2022. The same month, it was announced that they would be competing as one of 12 teams on The Amazing Race 34. Despite being reality TV veterans at that point, this was the first on-screen test of them as a couple.
Derek Xiao and Claire Rehfuss’ Journey on The Amazing Race
“When we started the race, we had been dating for eight months, that’s almost a year,” Xiao said in a postseason interview with Parade. “I had unfounded confidence in our relationship, illusions of grandeur around how strong our relationship was. And as soon as we started, I realized, ‘Oh, no, this is not cement for our foundation.’”
“The great thing about the race is you can’t leave the room without your partner,” he added. “So you really have to work those out and figure out what are the different things that we need from each other? How do we communicate best? And you have to answer all these questions that, with Claire and I, aren’t things that we talked about. We thought we had the answers; we did not have the answers. So the race forced us to break through on some of those things. And coming out of the race now, we have the foundation I thought we had.”
And that foundation came with a million dollars to boot! After finishing in first place in the premiere leg, they would go on to claim first place three more times. The most crucial one came in the final leg, where their long-term strategy, memory and piano skills had them crossing the finish line in first place. They became the second team of Big Brother alumni to win the Emmy-winning reality series.
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