MANILA, Philippines — Newly-crowned Miss Universe Philippines 2023 Michelle Dee and Miss Supranational Philippines 2023 Pauline Amelinckx shared what they felt when a technical glitch happened during the pageant, causing a jumble in the announcement of the Top 10 and Top 5 finalists.
One of the pageant's hosts, Xian Lim, announced that the organization decided to bring back the Top 18 candidates to participate in the evening gown portion because of "technical difficulties."
"Due to technical issues, we resulted to manual tallying, which means our Top 18 candidates will go through evening gown and compete for the Top 5," he said.
In an interview with the media last Sunday during their visit at Smilee Apparel headquarters, Pauline said that she thought that the “odds have been shuffled.”
“I wasn’t really sure what was happening or what went wrong. All we knew that we were already in our gowns and the Top 10 has already been announced and the Top 18 would go back out on stage. So in my head, if I can be perfectly honest, I thought to myself, ‘oh goodness, the odds have been shuffled',” she said.
For Michelle, the fight wasn't finished for some of the candidates.
“We have to hold our breaths for however long it took. But yeah, I just remember that. We were all rushing because we have an eight-minute change time to sit down. So we were all kind of like just trying to make sure that we were ready, especially me because I would be the first one to come up because I was first to be the Top 10. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, my major hair changes is a bit stressful',” she said.
“But of course then, all the girls kind of just like huddled together and they were like, 'Girls, come in they have announcement something happened.' It’s like how is the audience going to react, how are the girls are going to react, but as they say, anything that happened on (a) pageant will make history. If it's destiny, it’s destiny,” she added.
Michelle also said that the Miss Universe Philippines Organization did a good job.
“I actually applaud the organization for doing the right thing because they could have stayed silent. But they believe whoever really deserves to be there,” she said.
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