Miss USA Fail: Winner Forgets Her Own State Capital

Miss USA Nia Sanchez represented her supposed home state of Nevada when she won the national crown — but she couldn’t even name her state’s capital!

In a radio interview with The Todd Show, the 24 year-old was asked to name Nevada’s capital (which, for the record, is Carson City) — and she drew a blank. Check out the video to see the awkward on-air moment!

Perhaps Nia was just a little nervous, or as one radio host suggested, maybe she hadn’t had her coffee yet that morning.

Some critics think that Nia isn’t truly a resident of Nevada, and that she only created a bare-bones paper trail of living there so that she’d be eligible to represent Nevada in the pageant rather than California, the state where she mostly grew up. (California is likely a more competitive place to be a beauty queen, since it’s so populous.)

Nia says that she has lived all sorts of places; she was born in Sacramento and lived between there and Washington before moving to Europe to be a nanny. During her travels, she traveled to the Middle East, Austria and Switzerland. She claims she’s lived in Nevada since 2012.

Maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on the full-time model when it comes to facts about Nevada — do you think her flub was a big deal?

Check it out and let us know: