The Most Tweeted Olympic Sports in 2012
The Summer Olympic Games is the world's major sporting event, though does not include all the major sports of the world. Also, the due to the large interest in the event, some otherwise relatively little followed sports are thrust into the limelight. The most popular world sport as measured by other methods is soccer, which is also very popular at the Olympics, though swimming and athletics reach their peak in popularity at the Olympics and give soccer some competition.
These do not necessarily represent the world's most popular sports, as there are a couple of popular sports from around the world that do not participate at the Olympics, such as Cricket and American Football, and the wide range of winter sports are also not included.
Based on Twitter Mentions
After the 2012 Olympic Games in London, there was an analysis of the sports and athlete mentions on Twitter. There was a lot of data - twitter users sent more than 150 million Summer Games tweets. According to Twitter, the sport which saw the most Twitter conversation was football / fútbol / soccer with well over 5 million Tweets.
| rank | sport |
|---|---|
| 1 | football / fútbol / soccer |
| 2 | swimming |
| 3 | track & field (athletics) |
| 4 | gymnastics |
| 5 | volleyball |
The most discussed athlete of the Games was not surprisingly sprinter Usain Bolt, with nine other Olympians gathering more than 1 million Tweets each.
| rank | athlete | sport |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Usain Bolt (@UsainBolt) | athletics (sprinting) |
| 2 | Michael Phelps (@MichaelPhelps) | swimming |
| 3 | Tom Daley (@TomDaley1994) | diving |
| 4 | Ryan Lochte (@ryanlochte) | swimming |
| 5 | Gabby Douglas (@gabrielledoug) | gymnastics |
| 6 | Andy Murray (@andy_murray) | tennis |
| 7 | Kobe Bryant (#GetKobeOnTwitter) | basketball |
| 8 | Yohan Blake (@YohanBlake) | athletics (sprinting) |
| 9 | Lee Chong Wei (@Lee_C_Wei) | badminton |
| 10 | LeBron James (@KingJames) | basketball |
The biggest moments of competition, as measured by Tweets per minute.
| rank | athlete / team | notes | tweets / minute |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Usain Bolt (@UsainBolt) | the Jamaican wins gold in the 200m sprint | 80,000+ |
| 2 | Usain Bolt (@UsainBolt) | wins gold in the 100m | 74,000+ |
| 3 | Andy Murray (@andy_murray) | the Great Britain athelete wins gold in the men's tennis singles | 57,000+ |
| 4 | Jamaica | wins gold and sets the world record in the men's 4x100 relay | 52,000+ |
| 5 | Team USA | beats Spain to win gold in men's basketball | 41,000+ |
Related Pages
- Discussion about the most popular Olympic sports
- The most popular sports pages on Topend Sports
- Other top 10 lists of the world's most popular sports
- Topendsports on Twitter (X)
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