Matea Roach has always known that her record-breaking run on the Jeopardy podium will be over.
The all-time Canadian champion said her success on the show was as much luck as she was curious.
“I just had a feeling why I would be upset about that?” She said in a telephone interview before the episode that ended her run aired on Friday. “Obviously I would have preferred to win. But I would always lose in the end and most people lose their first game. I’m lucky I won 23.”
She also has months to process the loss, given that the episode was filmed on February 15.
“Every possible angle from which I could analyze my last game, I feel like in the week after I shot it.”
Roach concluded that things could have ended differently if she had changed her strategy, but she decided not to dwell on that. She was lucky “so many times more” than she was lucky, she said.
And after weeks of media attention on both sides of the border, she is ready to catch her breath – something that has become easier given her $ 560,983 earnings. This is the fifth biggest draw of any athlete in the regular season of “Jeopardy’s”.
The law teacher will become a law student in the fall. She received her first approval while recording the show and is still deciding where to record, but until then she plans to calm down.
“Maybe I just won’t work more than part-time between now and then,” Roach said. “And I’ll just enjoy the last summer of freedom.”
“There are so many things I haven’t done in my life because I’m relatively young,” she said. “I haven’t traveled in a long time. I guess I have money now. I can go to places if I want to.”
She also looks forward to thinking about things other than television and trivia.
“Before Jeopardy, I was in a place in my life where there was really no moving forward,” she said. “And now I have a feeling that for reasons related to and unrelated to Jeopardy, that’s not true anymore.”
This Canadian Press report was first published on May 7, 2022.
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