Taking a giant leap, ex-athlete making history as first black Miss Universe GB
SHE grew up wanting to represent Britain at the Olympics. But when injury cut short her athletics career, Dee-Ann Kentish-Rogers took on a new challenge.
She began competing in beauty pageants and has now achieved a new personal best – by being crowned Miss Universe Great Britain. The 25-yearold is the first black woman to win the title in the competition’s 66-year history.
Her victory means she will represent Britain in the Miss Universe contest in the Philippines in December.
‘It’s really humbling and I think it’s also a privilege for me to become the first black woman who is crowned Miss Universe Great Britain,’ she said. ‘I believe that this is the direction that the pageant has been going in for the last couple of years because Britain is a diverse nation, we are a multicultural society and it is time that diversity is seen on a stage where other young black girls and girls of all ethnicities can see that this is something for everybody.’
Miss Kentish-Rogers is from Anguilla, a British overseas territory in the Caribbean. She lives in Birmingham and is about to become a barrister after passing her bar exams at the University of Birmingham’s law school. She represented Anguilla at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in the heptathlon, and had hoped to compete for Britain at the Olympics but a knee injury forced her to quit the sport.
She told BBC Newsbeat: ‘My dream kind of re-invented itself. Miss Universe Great Britain was the pageant equivalent of becoming an Olympic athlete for Great Britain.’
Of her triumph in Newport, South Wales, at the weekend, when she beat 31 other women from the UK and British overseas territories, she said: ‘Although I’ve been preparing for this pageant for a long time, I’ve just been preparing as Dee-Ann. Now I’ve come to the realisation that I’ve not only won the pageant as Dee-Ann, but as a black woman.
‘Pageantry has been getting a lot of backlash because of people thinking it’s very archaic, but [it] has given me a platform, a voice, the opportunity to empower myself.’