USA TODAY International Edition
MEDALISTS SHARED SOCIAL MEDIA PODIUM
Bathroom door, strays, commentators were stars
SOCHI The biggest winners of the 2014 Winter Olympics weren’t found just on the medal stand.
Whether they were tweeting about wolf hoaxes, #sochiproblems and bacon gold medals or just posting selfies on Instagram from all over the Olympic venues, a bunch of athletes became even bigger stars on social media.
“I knew when I posted that photo I’d probably get a couple of retweets, a couple of funny comments,” U. S. bobsledder Johnny Quinn said. “But nothing to the extent of what has happened.”
One day after the opening ceremony, Quinn tweeted out a photo of his broken hotel bathroom door, which he had to smash a hole in after he became locked inside. The tweet ended up receiving over 29,000 retweets. It also got him an invitation to join a police SWAT team in Denton, Texas, as well as an Internet meme where people tweeted photos of themselves breaking through various objects.
While Quinn was trying to extricate himself, Sage Kotsenburg was winning the gold medal in snowboarding slopestyle. That performance was certainly impressive, but his Twitter feed the two weeks afterward might have been even more stellar.
Besides introducing the word “spoice” into the public realm, Kotsenburg tweeted out his desire to get a medal made out of bacon ( and then the photo of the result he was delivered during his appearance on Conan), retweets of congratulations from Kobe Bryant, Metallica and visits to The Tonight Show and “Andy Coops” on CNN. If Fast Times at
Ridgemont High’s Jeff Spicoli had been a snowboarder instead of a surfer, this Twitter feed would’ve been his ultimate dream sequence.
Kotsenburg wasn’t the only snowboarder stealing hearts on social media. Russian snowboarder Alexey Sobolev received more than 2,000 texts after putting his phone number on the back of his helmet during qualifying rounds, some of which included attachments of some rather racy photos.
“It’s really boring in the Olympic Village, you know?” Sobolev said at the time.
But the athlete who really made followers swoon was ski slopestyle silver medalist Gus Kenworthy, who posted a photo taken of himself sleeping with both his medals and one of the Sochi stray puppies he’s adopting draped on his chest, after tweeting with Miley Cyrus days earlier, of course.
Kenworthy’s dogs weren’t the only canines causing a ruckus on Twitter. American luger Kate Hansen caused a stir when she tweeted out a video of a “wolf in my hall” last week. After the clip went viral, Hansen admitted it was part of a prank she pulled with late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. U. S. Luge officials were not as amused.
“There was a little more backlash than I thought there would be,” Hansen told Kimmel on the show via Skype. “But it was all worth it in the end.”
Even pro athletes who had a strong pre- existing social media presence saw their performance at the Games improve their Klout scores significantly. St. Louis Blues center T. J. Oshie received 130,000 new followers in the hour after his four- goal shootout performance lifted the U. S. men’s hockey team to a win against Russia.
And if their stellar reviews as ice skating commentators didn’t get NBC execs thinking about hiring Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir to host a daytime talk show, perhaps the duo’s outstanding Instagram feed might. The account, @taraandjohnny, featured regular videos and photos of the former Olympians announcing their outfits, spooning in their hotel room and even engaging in a passionate duet of Bonnie Tyler’s
Total Eclipse of the Heart.
By the end of the Olympics, they’d picked up over 16,000 followers in just over three weeks.