Vietnamese contestant Nguyen Dieu Hoa competes in Mrs World 2008 in Russia. Mrs Vietnam 2009 will be the only national beauty contest approved by the Department of Performance Arts this year.

A new regulation limiting Vietnam to only one national beauty contest a year could stymie the country’s chances of crowning an international beauty queen.

As Mrs Vietnam, a competition for successful married women, will be the only national pageant allowed by a new regulation this year, industry insiders worry that its winners will not be able to compete against the younger beauties vying for international crowns.

“The regulation is ridiculous,” local newswire VnExpress quoted former editor-in-chief of Tien Phong (Pioneer) newspaper Duong Xuan Nam as saying.

Tien Phong has organized the Miss Vietnam pageant since 1988.

“It’ll be a great disadvantage for young beauty queens if only Mrs Vietnam is held this year,” Nam said, adding that women without families and successful careers would lose their chance to compete internationally while the representatives selected from Mrs Vietnam would be at a disadvantage against younger global competition.

By allowing only one national competition per year, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s Performing Arts Department said it hoped to increase the quality of national contests to give Vietnamese winners a better competitive edge at international beauty pageants.

“Vietnam doesn’t need to hold so many competitions while most of them are unprofessionally organized,” said Le Ngoc Cuong, head of the Performing Arts Department. “And not all international contests require contestants to be the winners of the national events.”

But many in the industry do not have the same point of view.

Chi Bao, deputy general director of Miss Universe Vietnam organizers Universe Shareholding Co., was quoted by VnExpress as saying that Miss Universe does not accept contestants that have not competed in national pageants.

He criticized the department’s decision to make Mrs Vietnam this year’s national event as it makes Vietnam’s only eligible Miss World and Miss Universe participants significantly older than the global competition.

Cuong defended the decision to choose Mrs Vietnam for eligibility by saying it was the only competition that had applied for approval since the new rules were announced last year.

“We haven’t received any plans from Miss Vietnam… we’re not favoring contests on a first-come-first-serve basis,” Cuong said, “We’ve simply chosen the only contest that applied.”

Experts say the department should only approve more traditional contests for national status, noting that the Mrs World criteria were very open and that Vietnam had sent contestants to the event without an official national contest in the category.

But the more traditional Miss Vietnam and Miss World have more rigid requirements that can only be fulfilled at official national competitions.

Big players bow out

While Bao has said his company would follow the regulation and not hold Miss Universe Vietnam this year, perhaps a bigger absence will be that of Elite Vietnam, an agency that liaises between Vietnamese competitions and international pageants.

Shortly after debate on the regulation was sparked, the agency announced a halt to its role as middleman in favor of focusing on training.

“Elite Vietnam won’t work to send contestants to global competitions this year due to a lack of funding and sponsorship,” said Thuy Hanh, the company’s professional director.

“We’ve spent a lot of money sending women to several global pageants, but they haven’t achieved the desired results. We think we should spend more time discovering and training talent rather than hastily sending under-qualified contestants to global competitions.

“After 10 years working in Vietnam, the company wants to develop and expand the local modeling industry by organizing training tours to countries where Elite subsidiaries are based,” Hanh said, adding that the difficulties posed by the new regulation in sending qualified contestants to Miss Universe and Miss World had deterred the company.

Reported by Do Tuan