Winners of hit new reality show Hunted plan to use prize money to start families

In their very different ways, the two winners of the first season of the hit reality show Hunted – in which nine teams of two tried to evade capture for 21 days while being pursued by dozens of former cops and surveillance experts – each felt they had something to prove to the world.

“I’m the type of person who plans, then over-plans, and then plans again on top of that,” says Rob Harneiss, a 33-year-old married hairdresser from WA. “There’s a certain perception about what I do, so I felt they wouldn’t expect that from me.”

Stathi Vamvoulidis and Rob Harneiss, the winners of the first Australian season of reality series Hunted. Credit:Network 10

Melburnian Stathi Vamvoulidis, 35, who competed with his friend Matt Bergin, also wanted to shift perceptions. “We were gay men wanting to defy some stereotypes, but also to reinforce some others,” he says. “It’s really important to show the queer community is not just creative artists – we can excel in an operational game-play strategy environment. When we grew up in the 1980s, early ’90s, our community didn’t really have that visibility.”

As the winners of 10’s surprise hit – it has averaged more than a million viewers per episode – Vamvoulidis and Harneiss got to split a prize pool of $100,000. Each plans to use that money to start a family: Vamvoulidis, who is single, through surrogacy, Harneiss and his wife Prue through IVF.

“I’ve been a sperm donor for the past 17 years so IVF has always been a part of my life, and I’ve known for as long as I can remember that I wanted to be a dad,” says Vamvoulidis, who made no secret of his plans on the show.

But it wasn’t until the series began airing that Harneiss knew they had this ambition in common.

“I never heard about Stathi’s story until after the fact. I was like, ‘You’re stealing my story’,” he quips.

The pair have one more thing in common: each was determined to share the prize money with the other member of their team.

Vamvoulidis’ friend Bergin and Harneiss’ co-fugitive, policeman Jake Rozario, both made it to day 19 before being captured. But splitting the money was never in question.

“I’m the one who forced him into doing this show, so it’s only right,” says Harneiss of Rozario.

“From the get-go we entered as a team, and whatever outcome eventuated everything was going to be split 50-50,” says Vamvoulidis of Bergin. “When we withdrew money we split it 50-50, when people gave us a mattress to sleep on we split it 50-50, even though Matt snores. Everything was 50-50 and there was never a moment I doubted it. I know if Matt was in my shoes it would be the exact same thing.”

The surveillance experts who were charged with tracking and finding the escaped “fugitives”.Credit:Network 10

It’s been five months since the series was filmed, but watching it over the past three weeks took Vamvoulidis right back to the experience of being on the lam.

“Even knowing the outcome, my heart is still beating,” he says. “The intensity of the experience has carried over into my day-to-day life. Watching it, I’m still running towards that extraction point. It’s hard to express but I’m trying to embrace all the emotions. I feel like I’m in a Hollywood thriller.”

For Harneiss, the experience was much as he’d anticipated. Not everything he and Rozario had planned panned out exactly, but the only thing he’d change, he says, was the way he toyed with the hunters. “I’d probably taunt a lot more,” he says.

The one thing he hadn’t anticipated, though, was tearing his calf muscle and injuring his knee the instant he leapt from an escape vehicle in the very first moments of the show. The pain plagued him throughout, and became almost unbearable in the final moments as he raced along the sand to the competition’s extraction point.

All in all, he says, the only thing he didn’t enjoy about being on the run was actually having to run. Other than that, “I was like a kid in a candy shop”.

Email the author at [email protected], or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin.

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