Mo Farah becomes the latest internet meme star

Olympic Games are always a source of inspiring and iconic images of athletic feats, defining moments of sporting drama and raw human emotion, and London 2012 was no different, from Sir Chris Hoy shedding a tear on the podium to gymnasts straining every sinew on the parallel bars.

But thanks to the imagination and Photoshop skills of some bloggers, a few choice images have become the butt of the joke in a very new kind of comedy: the internet meme.

Once a staple of the more nerdish corners of the world wide web, the use of Facebook and Twitter has driven memes into the mainstream.

It’s difficult to pin down a satisfactory definition for this recent cultural phenomenon, but memes are usually news events or photos which quickly go viral, inspiring internet users to devise their own spin-offs, whether it’s a remix, copycat video, parody, mashup or retouched image.

There has been Crasher Squirrel (a scene-stealing mammal which pops up in the most surprising places), the Kanye West Interruption (based on the rapper’s intervention during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 Video Music Awards) and Hitler’s Downfall (where the Nazi leader’s last moments in the film are subtitled to depict any number of disastrous news stories).

In the sporting world, John Terry’s celebration of Chelsea’s triumph in the Champions League this year (despite the fact he was suspended for the final) spawned a series of images of the controversial defender celebrating at various historical triumphs, including the first Moon Landing.

And the London 2012 Games have been a ripe source for the meme generators. First there was McKayla Is Not Impressed, where the American gymnast McKayla Maroney’s unfortunate scowl on the podium as she is awarded a silver medal is grafted on to a litany of impressive (and some just daft) settings, including the battle scene from Braveheart and Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper.

Now British Olympic hero Mo Farah has become the star of his own meme, Mo Farah Running Away From Things. The expression on the double gold medallist’s face fits aptly with a range of chase scenes, such as the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona and the rampaging Tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park.

It remains to be seen which sporting hero will next be immortalised by web users with too much time on their hands, or whether Farah will just keep running away from more and more things.