Usain Bolt breaks tweets-per-minute record during 200M
As the Jamaican Olympian left his competitors in the dust, his fans whipped up into a tweeting frenzy -- breaking the Games' Twitter record with 80,000 tweets-per-minute.
Not only did Jamaican Olympian Usain Bolt tear across the finish line winning the 200-meter sprint today, he also triumphed on the Internet. Bolt fans tweeted a record 80,000 tweets-per-minute as the runner overtook his competitors in the race.
"Record alert!" Twitter announced in a tweet earlier today. "@usainbolt sets a new Olympic Games conversation record with over 80,000 TPM for his 200m victory."
Bolt, 25, finished the race in 19.32 seconds winning the gold and beating fellow Jamaicans Yohan Blake and Warren Weir, who came in second and third respectively, according to Huffington Post. This is Bolt's second gold in the 200-meter and he is the only man to have two Olympic titles in this event.
The Olympian has more than 1.3 million Twitter followers and has been tweeting throughout the summer games. "Thanks to all my real fans and people who believe in me," he tweeted after the race today. "I am now a living legend that's for sure."
The Olympics' opening ceremony saw 9.66 million mentions on Twitter in a single day, which is more than it saw during the whole duration of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
Olympics aside, the sports record for tweet mentions was during the April Champions League match between Barcelona and Chelsea when fans tweeted 13,684 tweets-per-second. Outside of sports, the total world record for tweets-per-second was set last December during the television broadcast of the Japanese anime movie "Castle in the Sky," with 25,088 tweets.