Miss America is waving goodbye to its swimsuit competition, scrapping one of its most iconic elements in an attempt to shift the annual ceremony’s emphasis away from its longtime focus on contestants’ physical beauty.
“We are no longer a pageant, we are a competition,” Gretchen Carlson, the chairwoman of Miss America’s board of directors, announced Tuesday on ABC’s Good Morning America. “We will no longer judge our candidates on their outward physical appearance. That’s huge.”