Andy Murray secures a '˜bronze' on Twitter during Olympics

He made history collecting gold in Rio but Andy Murray's Olympic success also earned him another, albeit smaller, plaudit - in the world of social media.
By The Newsroom
Published 25th Aug 2016, 10:28 BST
Updated 25th Aug 2016, 11:29 BST

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Andy Murray's historic performance at Rio 2016 made him the third most talked about athlete on Twitter during the sporting extravaganza. Photo credit Owen Humphreys/PA Wire.Andy Murray's historic performance at Rio 2016 made him the third most talked about athlete on Twitter during the sporting extravaganza. Photo credit Owen Humphreys/PA Wire.
Andy Murray's historic performance at Rio 2016 made him the third most talked about athlete on Twitter during the sporting extravaganza. Photo credit Owen Humphreys/PA Wire.

Murray became the third most popular Olympian in the world on the microblogging site Twitter, coming behind only US swimmer Michael Phelps and Jamaican running star Usain Bolt in an analysis of more than 8m tweets posted during Rio 2016.

The Dunblane-born star, a keen user of Twitter with 3.68m followers, was also named the most talked about member of the Team GB squad.

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Murray’s startling road to Rio gold made him the first male tennis player to claim two Olympic singles titles on beating Argentina’s Juan Martin del Potro.

His performance earned him 40,485 tweets during the Olympics and was mentioned in 0.47 per cent of all tweets with the hashtag #rio2016.

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Swimmer Phelps, who took five gold medals and a silver at Rio, stole the social media show with 149,611 tweets - or 1.72 per cent of the total posted over the duration of the games.

Just under 144,000 tweets were posted about Usain Bolt (1.72 per cent).

Murray beat GB teammates Mo Farah and track cyclist Jason Kenny in a separate analysis of Team GB’s traction on Twitter.

Farah, who won the 10,000 metres in Rio, was mentioned in 19,102 tweets with Kenny racking up 13,690 mentions on the microblogging site.

Other GB athletes in the top-tweeted team include swimmer Adam Peaty (8,337), gymnast Max Whitlock (7,744) and diver Tom Daley (7,297).

The analysis was based 8.7m tweets hashtagged #rio2016 between August 5 and August 21 and did not include retweets.

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Research, conducted by DigitasLBI, found that more tweets were generated by people from Brazil than anywhere else, with the host nation accounting for 15.5 per cent of Olympic-themed posts during the period.

Brazil was closely followed by USA (15.2 per cent) with those from UK generating 8.3 per cent of tweets about the Rio games.

Other Twitter activity came from Mexico (5.6 per cent), India (4.8 per cent), Spain (4.7 per cent) and France (4.4 per cent).

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Related topics:Andy MurrayTwitterMo Farah