By David Owen
August 23 – Football has emerged with the gold medal in the Twitter Olympics, with Neymar Junior’s decisive spot-kick in the penalty shoot-out against Germany generating more Tweets per minute than any other piece of Rio 2016 sporting action.
The home side’s talisman also took the bronze medal in this particular contest via the free kick that put his team 1-0 up in the same match.
According to Twitter Data, only sprinter Usain Bolt could compete with the Brazilian captain, the Jamaican’s third-straight gold in the 100 metres taking second place in the social media platform’s classification.
Neymar could only manage third spot in the list of most mentioned athletes on Twitter, behind Bolt and record-breaking US swimmer Michael Phelps, who secured first place.
Football was the second most-discussed sport of Rio 2016 on Twitter, behind swimming but ahead of athletics.
All told, Twitter said 187 million Tweets were sent about #rio2016, generating 75 billion impressions.
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