‘I love social media, but some people talk utter s**t on there’
Our man loves social media, but some keyboard clowns take it too far
Ilove social media; I’m never off it. It’s certainly given me something to do over the past year while I’ve been injured. It’s a good way to interact with fans. I like answering questions and chatting away, it’s good that you can do that.
You get some really nice messages, but there’s some real s**t too; stuff that hurts. I guess it’s easy to stand behind your iPhone and say whatever you want about a person without thinking about the consequences.
‘YOU SHOULD RETIRE, THINK ABOUT YOUR KIDS AND YOUR FAMILY’
I haven’t had a lot of it, but I’ve seen others who have. I get a lot of: ‘You’ve nothing left to prove John, you should retire, think about your kids and your family.’ And while everyone is entitled to their opinion, that cuts pretty deep for me. Are they suggesting that I don’t think about my kids and family already? I think about them all the time. I do worry about where we’ll be in five or ten years so those sorts of tweets hurt me a lot. Tapping the keyboard for five or six seconds can go really deep into someone’s emotions. I read an absolutely savage tweet last week to Ryan Farquhar. It was so horrible I won’t tell you what it said. What are these people thinking they will achieve? You can’t attack a sportsman like that, especially in a dangerous sport like road racing, especially after everything that has happened recently. It’s not on. In 2015 I got a lot of s**t on social media, saying I was finished, that Dunlop was going to smoke me and stuff like that. That motivated me like mad to go out and win to stick two fingers up to the keyboard b **** rds. You get 1000 positive comments but sometimes it’s the one negative one you dwell on.