Australian beauty Angela MacKay has handed back her Miss Thailand crown just 10 days after winning it, saying her entirely unexpected triumph interfered with her modeling career. “I really went into the competition because I just wanted to learn how to speak Thai and I wanted to have a Thai experience,” said the 21-year-old from Perth with an Australian father and a Thai mother.”I wanted to just learn about Thai culture. I honestly didn’t expect to win at all. It was a very, very big surprise to me,” she said before heading back to New York late on Tuesday to go back to modeling.
MacKay said she had been persuaded to enter by relatives in Thailand when she came for a visit and hadn’t realized that the title required her to stay in the country for the coming year.
She returned the prize money of 1 million baht, a diamond crown worth 800,000 baht and a car.
Thailand will send second placed Sirinda Jensen to the Miss World contest in China in December. Jensen is half Thai and half Dutch.
Source: Reuters
UPDATE:
And the runner up is: Sirinda Jensen!
I don’t have anything to add. I think asiansweetheart said it allready in her comment.
And thanks for the photo’s!
Robin
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Okay, let’s look for photo’s of Sirinda Jensen! (Asiansweetheart should be able to help us on this one! ;-))
I saw plenty of the runner up Miss Jensen, but she’s not pretty, so I didn’t save them. I can dig them up. Unless you mean “unauthorized” photos, like the kind that are rumored about Angie. I haven’t heard of any like that.
How rude… how insulting to a whole country!
“Sorry, can’t stay. Your little country is just not important enough. Tah, Tah!”
She was probably less than impressed by the $45K (USD) purse. She treated this whole thing like her little game.
“Oh, wouldn’t it be cute to go to Thailand.”
What? She couldn’t model in Asia for one (ONLY ONE!!!) year?
Typical western women’s selfish attitude.
Ugg… The kingdom should only allow citizens to compete!
She should be (publicly) banned from ever competing again anywhere!
_
Did she even offer a public apology?
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Very nice picture, but where is the picture nude miss ? I can’t find them. Tell me where is it !
Thanks.
Redy Susilo
We don’t know! (yet)
But are you sure you want to see her naked??
as if they couldn’t find real thai women…of course they just didn’t want to.
Man, an Aussie girl wins Miss Thailand and I don’t know about it? As an Aussie myself, I can fully sympathise with why she wouldn’t want to leave here for Thailand – a nice place to visit, but everybody knows Australia’s the best place in the world to live! 😉
On a more serious note, I think this whole fiasco shows how ridiculous the Miss Thailand pageant is – none of these girls look Thai, or even Asian. And I agree Sirinda isn’t pretty at all.
It’s very sad. The pageant officials are so enamored with “luuk khrung” (literally “half children, meaning mixed Thai and western) and emphasize English fluency so much that few Thai ladies in the Kingdom have a chance to win. So they pick unattractive, and in this case, uninterested ladies for the winners.
This is a partial result of one of Thailand’s big handicaps, the very low English fluency rate. A recent study showed Thais were the 5th worst in SE Asia, below even some of its far less developed neighbors.
But on the flip side there are certain advantage for those living here that can bridge the language gap. Its all the gorgeous Thai ladies who don’t speak English well but who are drawn to the cachet of hearing Thai spoken with an English accent. They are putty in the hands of those who can.
And that’s why Thailand is the best place in the world to live (Lee 😉
Lee, why is Australia the best place in the world to live? I always thought it was Amsterdam! (But that was before I went to Vietnam ;-))
How about being surronded by plenty of gorgeous – and very friendly 😉 – Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese girls (with a few gorgeous Thai, Filipina, Korean and Malaysian thrown in)? And in a rich, completely democratic country, with unspolit beaches and bushland everywhere, and almost perpetually warm weather? Need I say more? 😉