07. Kelle Jacobs
If we consider all the last minutes changes I did in this final ranking, Kelle probably made the most significant jump in my list. And for very specific reasons.
Kelle probably is one of the most poorly treated contestant in the history of the show. All the judges basically bullied her from the beginning to her elimination with a rare intensity. They always adressed her unnecessary rude comments, that wouldn’t be helpful at all for her to make any progress. They wanted her to be the running joke of this cycle (along with Ann) and depicted her as the weak, emotionnaly fragile and uncompetent model. But we all know that they purposely picked her worst photos at panel in order to give us this impression (oh well, it reminds me a bit of a girl named Jeana from the current cycle).
I initially wanted to place her 10th or 11th of this list, because even if her abilities weren’t represented well on the show, her worst photos still were quite bad, and we couldn’t have an idea of how good she would be without all the sabotage. Well, I finaly decided to take a look to all those moments where they showed her film on screen, just to have an idea of her true skills. And the fact is, about 90% of what we could see on their computer during the photoshoots showed lots of promise from Kelle. For the first four photoshoots, much better photos could have been picked in panel, some even being great, and that should have make her avoid the bottom 2 pretty much each time (her Nivea beauty shot performance especially was promising). It led me to think that Kelle might be one of the stronger models out there, but we never got a chance to see her talent because of the massive sabotage she suffered of.
Kelle also was a good runway walker. Not the strongest, but her walk was solid. And I found her very eloquent in her speech, so she might be great at doing commercial, which made her an all arround competent model with lots of potential. I even think she could have been part of the overseas group, had we saw her real performance. But the 6 girls above Kelle had really strong performances, and had shining moments throughout the show, so I rank her 7th, as I still think she belongs to the upper half of this cycle’s ranking.