It was sad face as if she knew she wouldn't make it. After Miss India Shilpa Singh was called into the Top 16, the camera panned into the right side of the stage and on the audience's extreme left, Bodine Koehler stood there gallantly yet clearly dejected. With one more contestant to be called in, it seems Bodine raised the white flag right away. When USA was called as the last semifinalist, Bodine put a brave face. She was beaten but still proud of what she did. Later, she came out together with the rest of the contestants for the swimsuit competition where she looked fabulous as always and she bravely showed her best even if her campaign for the crown ended before it even started.

How Miss Puerto Rico Bodine Koehler was excluded from the Top 16 is simply inexplicable. Surely, the disgust and frustrations of the Boricuas couldn't be measured. Bodine came out strongly at the preliminaries both in swimsuit and gown. No one could dispute that. No one could beat her figure and her catwalk skills can't be matched by anyone. Days before heading down the finals night, no one in his or her right mind, will exclude Bodine from the predictions list.

So, how we do we explain all of this? Sash factor? Politics? Trends? Puerto Rico ranks 17th at the Big4 ranking because of its low scores at the other Big4 contest but is buoyed by its high marks at Miss Universe. With 5 Miss Universe titleholders, Puerto Rico would actually rank 5th at Miss Universe alone using the Big4 calculation. So sash factor will not be considered in our analysis.

What our beauty pageant experts see though is the overall trend of 2012. The stars seem to be not aligning properly for Puerto Rico this year. At Miss World, they failed to make it to the Top 15. At Miss International the country was also excluded from the semis and the same thing happened at Miss Earth! And true to the trend, the failure of Bodine at Miss Universe capped it all. 

At loss on how to explain the exclusion of Bodine, beauty experts simply relied on trends that are basically coincidental at best. Is 2012 really not a year for Puerto Rico? Perhaps. When one can't explain facts with facts, we tend to resort on something supernatural. Hence, let us just say that 2012 is a bad year for Puerto Rico in the world of pageantry.