To find out which sports were the most popular, we looked at search volumes for all sports featured at the Games, from August 2017 to July 2021. This gave us a pretty good idea of the search trends and interests related to each type of sport.
The Olympic disciplines that showed the highest peaks of interest
While it is not easy to attribute a search volume directly related to the Games, some sports have allowed us to connect them.
We found the disciplines that saw a spike in search volume in July 2021. The data refers to searches conducted in Spain. We also added monthly search interest changes (June 2021 vs. July 2021) to the mix, with the aim of seeing which sports potentially owe their growing popularity to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. You can check them out below:
Olympic discipline
Search volume in August 2021
Monthly search volume evolution (August 2021 vs. June 2021)
modern pentathlon 27,100 +2610.0%
water polo 60,500 +646.9%
artistic swimming 5,400 +513.6%
open water swimming 2,900 +391.5%
sport climbing 6,600 +312.5%
As for the sports that have been added to the Olympic Games this summer (skateboarding, karate, and climbing), they also had their highest month in terms of public interest in July 2021.
Olympic disciplines that have shown a downward trend during the Olympics
With many high-profile sporting events taking place in June, such as Euro 2020, Roland Garros and part of the Wimbledon series, some sports such as football, tennis and boxing saw lower numbers of interest during the Olympics. All three disciplines saw their search volumes decrease by 18% on a month-on-month basis.
Which athletes managed to grab all the attention and get the most traction online?
Although tennis as a discipline did not show any peak during the Games, the same cannot be said of the players.
Below you can see a list of the 20 most searched gold and silver medalists globally. We also looked at their Twitter and Facebook audiences during the Games, all to see if gold medals could directly translate into more followers.
Viewership of the social media accounts of the 20 Olympic gold medalists (stats for July-August 2021)
We noticed that Olympic medalists with a belarus phone number database gold medal have at least three times as many viewers compared to those with a silver medal. But do gold medals necessarily imply greater social media coverage?
When we look at the most tweeted tweet about athletes from Tokyo 2020, the list of the most popular ones does not only include the gold or silver medallists.
The most mentioned athletes of Tokyo 2020 on Twitter (data from June-August 2021)
Alexander Zverev
20,000
Andy Murray
20,000
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