Kuala Lumpur: Tai Tzu Ying’s Facebook post thanking everyone for their support after she lost her women’s singles final in Tokyo Olympics, received more than 1.36 million Facebook likes, the most for any Olympians over the course of the 2020 Tokyo Games.
Ranked second was a Facebook post written by Taiwanese men’s doubles badminton star Wang Chi-lin, which received 1.04 million likes. Wang expressed his feeling about winning the gold medal with his partner Lee Yang at the 2020 Tokyo Games.
At the end of the Tokyo Olympics, a data collection company put together some statistical numbers they gathered on the internet, and Tai Tzu Ying was ranked third overall in terms of popularity on the internet during the Tokyo Games.
The data collection company relied on 5 main factors, including Wikipedia’s views, new Instagram followers, article title that mentioned the athlete’s name, mentioning of the player’s name inside the article, and athletes with the most emoji with a cheerful expression on Facebook as the benchmark for developing their popularity index.
Among them, Tai Tzu Ying’s Wikipedia views were 3.71 million, ranking second only to Simone Biles’ 5.43 million views (Simone Biles is an artistic gymnast from the USA). Tai Tzu Ying’s Instagram followers were at 971,786 during the Games and she was ranked ninth in this category. The number of articles that mentioned Tai Tzu Ying’s name during the Tokyo Games was 3780, and she ranked eighth in this section. The number of articles mentioning Tai Tzu Ying was 7.136 million times, ranking third. Lastly, she received 132,069 emojis with a cheerful expression on Facebook which made her ranked 13th in this category.
Tai ranked third overall as she scored 70 points in the final tally for all five categories, behind Simone Biles’s 97 points and Tom Daley’s (a British diver) 77 points.
Tai also saw an increase of Instagram’s 614,000 fans right after the 2020 Tokyo Games. Currently, Tai has 1.4 million fans who follow her on Instagram.
