IOC has no regrets on ‘Twitter Games’ despite abuse

THE International Olympic Committee (IOC) has no regrets about embracing social media for what some are calling the first “Twitter Games”, despite two athletes having been expelled for tweets and others being abused online.

Swiss soccer player Michel Morganella was sent home from the Olympics on Monday for an offensive tweet aimed at South Korea, while triple jumper Paraskevi Papachristou was thrown out of the Greek team last week for a racist comment.

Yesterday, UK police arrested a man after offensive tweets were sent to British diver Tom Daley when he failed to win a medal in his first event.

Despite these incidents, IOC spokesman Mark Adams said it would continue to encourage the use of social media around the Games and was probably powerless to stop it if it wanted to.

“The IOC, the Olympics, we have about 15-million social media fans and I think (local organisers) are doing something similar,” Adams told a news conference yesterday. “To be frank, it’d be a little bit like King Canute even if we said these aren’t social media Games, because everyone’s decided they are anyway.

“We want to help people have a good time in social media.”

Twitter was in its infancy when the past Games took place and was not a major factor in Beijing, where inappropriate blogging was the main concern.

The IOC, keen to attract a strong following among the world’s youth for the Games, issued guidelines for the use of social media in London in June last year. It encouraged athletes to “post, blog and tweet their experiences” as long as it was not done for commercial or political purposes. Anyone breaching the rules faces having their accreditation removed.

A group of US athletes chose Twitter to launch a campaign

If an athlete makes a comment which contravenes those rules, as has happened, we will take action

against Olympic restrictions on the promotion of personal sponsors at the Games on Monday.

Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter protects the major sponsors of the Games, both local and international, from “ambush marketing” by limiting what athletes, and others, can promote within the environs of the Olympics.

Adams said the existence of Twitter had not altered the rules, just the application of them.

“I don’t think we have any major concerns. As you know, those rules, such as rule 40, have been around for a long time before social media. Social media’s only been round for six or seven years,” he said.

“Clearly, issues are raised more quickly but they’re still the same issues that we have to deal with, and if an athlete makes a comment which contravenes those rules, as has happened, we will take action.

“Used in the right way, we embrace social media.”

Adams would not comment on the suspension of the Twitter account of a journalist for tweeting the e-mail address of a senior NBC executive after criticism of the coverage of the Olympic opening ceremony in the US.

“That’s between NBC and Twitter,” he said.

British Olympics team leaders, meanwhile, said they intervened with Twitter to delete offensive messages sent to Daley. British Olympic Association (BOA) spokesman Darryl Seibel said “highly offensive and altogether unacceptable tweets” were sent to the diver after he missed out on a medal in the 10m synchronised platform competition on Monday with team-mate Pete Waterfield.

Seibel said the team “immediately” contacted Twitter’s management, which removed the messages “very, very quickly”. He said Twitter’s “responsiveness to our reaching out was something we appreciated.” BOA CE Andy Hunt said 18-year-old Daley “was not affected” by the tweets.

British gymnast Louis Smith tweeted yesterday afternoon that he was having a few problems in the trouser department because of something few of us will ever have to worry about: the weight of his new bronze Olympic medal.

“Hahaha you know this Olympic medal is heavy when you gotta tie ya draw strings up on my joggers,” he tweeted.

The athlete finished by saying that the subsequent effect was — how to say this a bit more delicately than the tweet? — to reveal his backside.

Smith was part of the five-man British squad that won the home nation’s first Olympic team gymnastics medal in a century on Monday night. Reuters, Sapa-AP