Just ignore crackpot tweets

THERE is a sad truth about speed skating. Nobody cares. Not really. Chances are, you don’t know anyone who does it, or even where you can do it. Yet Great Britain has one of the best speed skaters in the world, Elise Christie, a brilliant multiple world champion. Placed in the Sports Personality of

the Year shortlist, however, she came last of 12 candidates, with just 6,504 votes. If she wins a gold medal in the upcoming Winter Olympics, she will briefly become very famous, as happened to our gold medal skeleton sliders, Lizzy Yarnold and Amy Williams. And then things will go back to normal, because that’s winter sports for you. Every four years, they matter. Yet last week, Christie (right) was recalling the 2014 Olympics when she tangled on the ice with some South Korean skaters, and subsequently received death threats. ‘I thought people did actually want to kill me,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t sleep. I was worried.’ And that is what it can be like, social media, for sports people. In the eye of that storm, a person can think the whole world is talking about them. Actually, few are. One per cent of Twitter users account for a fifth of all tweets, and 15 per cent generate 85 per cent of total traffic. A quarter of verified accounts belong to journalists. It’s a bubble. Yet, on Friday, when Alan Shearer said Liverpool’s penalty should not have been given, he quickly felt under siege from the negative reaction. Shearer was particularly upset that his wife and family were mentioned in the abuse. This is where we are now. Extremes of opinion, extreme reactions — fans at the ground who think Jake Livermore’s dead son is fair game, fans at keyboards who wish horrible circumstances on a man’s family, just because he disagrees about a penalty call. In reality, most good people are far too busy to pay attention. Eddie Izzard realised this, on coming out as transvestite. ‘Eighty per cent of the country don’t give a monkey’s,’ he said. ‘They just go, “I’m cooking eggs, I don’t really care”.’ It’s the same with social media. The sensible ones aren’t bothered enough to issue death threats or insult families, and the ones that do aren’t worth entertaining in the first place.