There might have been a teeny bit of tension. Following her dramatic victory on Sunday, December 20, Miss Philippines Pia Wurtzbach admitted in an interview that she and Miss Colombia Ariadna Gutierrez have not yet spoken after host Steve Harvey flubbed announcing the correct winner.
“I was confused. I wasn’t sure what was going on,” Wurtzbach told Entertainment Tonight in a backstage interview on Sunday night. “I didn’t expect that to happen at all.”
Wurtzbach said she second-guessed her win, which Harvey originally gave to Gutierrez before realizing his mistake. “I had to ask my [manager] many times like, ‘Did I really win? Am I really Miss Universe? Are you going to take the crown from me now?'” she recalled to ET. “And they [said], ‘No, no, you’re really the winner.'”
However, the runner-up was devastated. A video posted to the Miss Universe Facebook page showed Miss Colombia wiping away tears and trying to be positive about the outcome. Wurtzbach said in the interview that she wanted to console her, but the timing just felt off.
“She was crying and then there was a crowd around her, the girls who were comforting her,” she recalled of the backstage sequence of events following the live broadcast. “I was actually very close to her already, but I decided that maybe it was bad timing to do it now — to apologize to her for what happened. So maybe I’ll do that in the future.”
Meanwhile, Miss Colombia has received the support of her fellow countrymen, her president, family members and 2016 U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump.
“I’d tell you what I think I’d do: I’d make them a co-winner,” former Miss Universe owner Trump said on the Today show on Monday. “Because what happened to the girl from Colombia is devastating. To give it to her for a couple of minutes, and then to take it away. I think . . . you have a whole country.”
