From the Good News/Bad News File

It seems Indie Race Car driver Helio Castroneves’ life is in overdrive this week. On Tuesday night, he and professional ballroom dancing partner Julianne Hough won season five of the ABC reality TV show, Dancing With the Stars. Just one day later, the news breaks that Helio’s engagement to Aliette (Ali) Vazquez is off, and there are way too many questions, and not enough answers regarding a certain kiss at the end of the quickstep dance.

Hello admitted today that his engagement to Ali was off, and had been so for the last week or two. He, of course, had nothing but good things to say about her. There seems to always be Dancing With the Stars romances starting up, the most recent of which was Sabrina Bryan and Mark Ballas, who admitted after they were eliminated that they were in a relationship, so it’s entirely possible that there could be a Helio/Julianne thing going.

It’s hard to miss the timeframe of all this. A few weeks back, Helio and Julianne performed a quickstep routine that included a kiss at the end. It was widely known that Ali was not happy with this kiss. They ended up doing the same dance as an encore the following night, and the second time around, the kiss was mysteriously missing. At the time, the dancers explained it away, saying they just wanted to keep surprising the audience, not knowing if the kiss was coming or not.

When it came time to pick a favorite dance for the finale, Helio chose the quickstep again, and this time the kiss wasn’t only included, it was prolonged. It’s almost as if the kiss was included the first time, and Ail got mad, and it was dropped for the encore. Now after the broken engagement, it no longer matters, so it was back in and longer. The two videos below illustrate this. The first shows the kiss/no kiss from the first two performances, and the second shows the full dance with the prolonged kiss from the finale.

It should be noted that after he talked about Ali not being happy with the kiss after the first time, Helio then told Access Hollywood he could only think, “Yea! I got a kiss! Yea!” Yet, Julianne still staunchly denies any romantic involvement with the race car driver. If it wasn’t for the timing, I think it could all be easily explained away, but once you put it together and see

1. Kiss
2. Ali upset
3. No Kiss
4. Broken Engagement
5. Longer Kiss

I think it pretty much explains the whole thing.

You decide. Which is the good news, and which is the bad news?

Comments about The Amazing Race? Contact me at LauraBelle@sofachip.com

For more information on Dancing With the Stars, see SirLinksalot: Dancing With the Stars.