Miss America 2024 is first active duty military personnel to win contest title
Jan. 15 (UPI) -- Madison Marsh, the first active duty service member to ever win the annual Miss America title, has taken the crown in Orlando, Fla., while representing the state of Colorado.
The 22-year-old U.S. Air Force second lieutenant won the 2024 event on Sunday just months after graduating from the Air Force Academy with a physics degree, according to her Miss Colorado website.
The last Miss America winner hailing from Colorado was Rebecca King 50 years ago in 1974.
"Pageants are changing and one of the ways is in what being physically fit means to women," Marsh said in a Nov. 2023 Air Force Institute of Technology article. "For me, it's great because I need to stay physically fit and in the gym for the military, so it already coincides with pageant training."
Marsh has raised over $250,000 for pancreatic cancer research since 2018 through events like 5K and 10K runs for the Whitney Marsh Foundation, the organization Marsh founded with her father and sister in honor of her mother who died from pancreatic cancer.
The new Miss America -- a pageant established in 1921 -- has claimed that she cannot sing or dance well and is "not conventionally talented." An Arkansas native, Marsh is pursuing a Master's Degree in Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School on a national scholarship.
"Towards the end of my time at USAFA, I started to realize that my bigger passions were in policy making and cancer research so that's why I ended up at the Kennedy School," Marsh stated.
She said she wants to learn about the "inner workings and the difficulties of what policy really looks like. Issues like economic environments and other social pressures that might be inhibiting our ability to implement cancer policies that can affect all Americans."
