Rey John Paul Sabado: The King Nobody Saw Coming
He finished Top 10 with no title in October. By January, he’d won a first-ever crown for the Philippines. Rey John Paul Sabado on the long way around.
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He finished Top 10 with no title in October. By January, he’d won a first-ever crown for the Philippines. Rey John Paul Sabado on the long way around.
He’s the first Filipino Mister National Universe. He’s also 22, a breadwinner, and just graduated — turns out a crown doesn’t skip you past adulting.
At 32, Kristzan Delos Santos had already decided that pageantry was behind him. It had given him what it was going to give him: two international runner-up finishes, one in 2022, one in 2023, both close enough to sting and neither one his. Then he went back to work. His life moved on. The pageants, he assumed, were someone else’s story now. Then, in 2025, he happened to watch a male national pageant. That same day — not a week later, not after he’d slept on it — a screening poster for Misters of Filipinas, the annual national competition that sends Filipino male titleholders to a slate of international pageants, showed up on his feed. “Something about the timing felt like a sign,” Kristzan tells ELYSPLANET. “It sparked something in me again and made me think, ‘Maybe I’m not done yet.’” Apparently, he wasn’t. On Sept. 13, Kristzan flies to Istanbul, Türkiye, carrying the Philippine sash into the Top Model of Universe finals. He’ll also be carrying a considerable amount of luggage — the unavoidable …
On September 19, in Đà Lạt, Vietnam, Mister Fitness Supermodel World crowns a winner — an annual international men’s pageant now in its fourth year. Three times, a Filipino has walked away with the second-best finish possible. Michael Angelo Toledo took third runner-up in 2023. Godfrey Nikolai Murillo was first runner-up in 2024. Denver Argana finished second runner-up last year. No Filipino has ever won it. Jacob Kier Gomez, a 20-year-old Nursing student from Tarlac, is the Philippines’ fourth attempt — and he’s no stranger to falling just short before breaking through. “I don’t look at it as pressure, but for me, it’s a privilege,” he tells ELYSPLANET. “I know that the Philippines is still searching for its first win in this franchise, and my focus is only on preparing as hard as I can and performing my best.” That comfort with almost is not new. Gomez lost his first pageant before he ever won one. What he’s carrying to Vietnam isn’t just a national drought — it’s a personal track record of turning near-misses …
Marck Marasigan had six days. That’s how much notice the Batangueño model and pageant titleholder got when the Philippines’ slot at Mister Celebrity International 2025 — an annual pageant for public figures and content creators held under the broader Mister and Miss Celebrity International banner — opened up. The original designate, Alei Del Rosario, who won the crown at Misters of Filipinas 2024, had to withdraw after an unexpected injury; the slot was then offered to Juan Carlos “Jaycee” Lopez, who turned it down as not yet ready. Six days to sort a wardrobe, book a photoshoot, and mentally reset for an international stage he hadn’t planned on standing on that year. “I only had six days to prepare for the competition, including the photoshoot, preparing my wardrobe, and taking care of all the other things I needed to do,” Marasigan told ELYSPLANET. “I’m just so happy that everything went according to plan within those six days, and that there were a lot of people who were willing to help and support me.” On December …
On Tuesday, August 11, Bea Millan-Windorski sat for a soft-focus interview about self-care, on a stage built for someone else’s brand. It’s not the version of her that matters most. Months earlier, in late November 2025, she was standing in the crowd at Luneta Park, not on any stage, calling out government officials by name over illegal mining and deforestation she said were being allowed to slide — and that’s the story most coverage of her never got around to. The Aug. 11 event put her briefly across from Catriona Gray, the last Filipina to win Miss Universe, back in 2018 — a pairing pageant-watch accounts have been building toward for months, tracking every overlap between the two since Millan-Windorski first spoke publicly about meeting Gray and addressed the comparisons head-on rather than deflecting them. There isn’t much fresh Gray coverage to work with beyond that — she’s kept a low public profile since her own reign ended — which is part of why the pairing landed as news at all. But it’s a footnote …
Elijah Canlas keeps getting cast as the ones who fought back — a martyred activist, a revolutionary’s brother, a survivor chasing justice. Off-screen, he’s doing the same thing.
BINI and SB19 are now official Philippine tourism ambassadors. The DOT hasn’t confirmed Alex Eala yet — but after her DC Open win, that might not last.
A 13-second knockout in Bangkok just turned into a $100,000 contract — but for the first Filipina Muay Thai world champion, the real story started years before that punch landed.
A Threads fight over whether Leylah Fernandez “counts” as Filipino reveals a pattern bigger than tennis — who gets rewarded, and who gets dragged, for how they handle a Filipino last name.