The 16-year-old swimming phenom stunned the world with her success at the Summer Olympic Games in Rio, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Penny Oleksiak was also the most mentioned Canadian athlete on Twitter.
Twitter Canada released a summary of events, sports and athletes that made chatter on the micro-blogging site spike during the Games.
The Top 10 most mentioned Team Canada athletes were:
- Penny Oleksiak, swimming
- Andre De Grasse, sprinting
- Brianne Theisen-Eaton, heptathlon
- Rosie MacLennan, trampoline
- Genie Bouchard, tennis
- Derek Drouin, high jump
- Erica Wiebe, wrestling
- Christine Sinclair, soccer
- Adam van Koeverden, kayaking
- Jen Kish, rugby
Oleksiak’s account grew by close to 50,000 followers over the course of the Olympics in Rio.
READ MORE: Rio 2016: Penny Oleksiak may stay for fun and flagbearing with swimming done
“When she started, when I checked, I think she was around 760 followers on Twitter and just see where she is now it’s just unbelievable,” Twitter Canada’s Christopher Doyle said. “All credit to her for the incredible performance and, I have to say, doing some incredible tweeting while she was down in Rio. She did a Twitter Q and A, she responded to some great questions. One of the questions was: ‘what are you going to tell your teacher you did for summer vacation?'”
Meanwhile, De Grasse saw about 45,000 new followers during the Games.
“We did see significant spikes for the major sprinting events: the 100 metre, globally, the 200 metre in Canada as well as for Penny’s races,” Doyle said.
“Definitely when you saw the early stages of the 200 metre qualifying, when it looked like De Grasse and Bolt were having this bromance – as people were calling it on Twitter – they were smiling and laughing afterwards and things kind of suddenly turned serious when we got to the final.”
READ MORE: Rio 2016: Usain Bolt and Andre De Grasse’s bromance is the best love story of the Olympics
The Top 10 most mentioned sports during the Games were:
- Swimming
- Track and Field
- Gymnastics
- Soccer
- Tennis
- Basketball
- Volleyball
- Badminton
- Wrestling
- Judo
“We saw that swimming was the most discussed, most mentioned sport on Twitter during the Games,” Doyle said, “I think in large part due to the incredible performance by our women’s swim team.”
He applauded another team for its activity on Twitter while in Rio.
READ MORE: Rio 2016: Canada scores historic soccer win over Germany
Doyle said Twitter has the ability to break down any barriers between athletes and their fans and connect them in a real way.
“Adam van Koeverden, he always tweets really, really thought-provoking commentary and I thought he had some really personal insights sometimes about the inner workings of the Games and also just his personal reflections on his career and he took to Twitter to share that,” Doyle said.
READ MORE: Rio 2016: Adam van Koeverden willing to ‘paddle through s***’ for Canada
“It’s almost kind of a personal diary for the athletes that of course is shared with the world and is completely public.”
Twitter Canada wanted to make sure the athletes could see just how much support they were getting from their country. So, the company set up a huge maple leaf in Canada House in Rio that lit up every time a positive tweet was sent out to Team Canada.
“It almost looked like this maple leaf, this heartbeat almost, because it was constantly going off with tweets from Canadians,” Doyle explained. “I think that they really feel the fans’ positivity and it connects them to their fans around the world.”
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