Stephanie's anti-gay tweet has ripped her imagine for the last 24 hours, not to mention costing her a high-profile endorsement with Jaguar. While her friends and Olympic swimming peers know she is not homophobic, they are quick to add that it was an unfortunate lapse of judgement with catastrophic consequences.
With the biographical addition in Wikipedia, it's already a part of "Rice history":
Twitter controversy
In September 2010, Rice came under fire for tweeting an allegedly homophobic slur in response to the Wallabies defeat of the Springboks. Consequently one of her sponsors, Jaguar has ceased all association with the athlete.[13]
Social media has been a boon to Olympians who rarely reach their audience outside of National Championship, World Championship and Olympic competitions. To date, this is the first case I've witnessed where its misuse has cost an Olympian an endorsement. If there are other cases of misuse, I would be curious to see the examples. Please comment or email me directly.
GOLD MEDAL MEDIA
Cricket has had a few such issues in the past few weeks, but none of them have had significant sponsorship problems:
9/4 - England's Dimitri Mascarenhas tweets that the chairman of selectors is a p**** - http://www.cricinfo.com/england/content/current/story/475980.html
8/30 - England's Kevin Pietersen is dropped from the team and tweets that it's a "f*** up"; gets fined - http://www.cricinfo.com/countycricket2010/content/story/475495.html
July - England's Azeem Rafiq gets suspended from all cricket for a month after a twitter tirade: http://hamariweb.com/enews/azeem-rafiq-launches-twitter-tirade_nid294317.aspx
Last year - England's Tim Bresnan tweets profanity at a fan who called him fat, and then apologizes: http://www.cricketwithballs.com/2009/09/30/twittering-tim-loses-it/
Last year - Australia's Phil Hughes accidentally tweets that he was dropped from the national team before the cricket board has made it public: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/theashes/5940738/The-Ashes-Phillip-Hughes-manager-takes-the-blame-for-Twitter-gaffe.html
Posted by: Manu | September 08, 2010 at 12:42 AM
Interesting. Thanks, Sammy. I'll checkout the link.
Posted by: GMM | September 07, 2010 at 09:58 AM
There was a huge thing recently with Evan Lysacek (the 2010 gold medalist figure skater) about comments he made referring to Johnny Weir's gender. But he's claiming his twitter was hacked despite overwhelming evidence it wasn't. There's apparently been no endorsement fall-out for him so far. Here's a link to the entire drama with the "proof," his various responses, and debate over the issues. http://gendertestthis.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/olympic-gold-medalist-shows-his-true-colors/
Posted by: Sammy | September 07, 2010 at 09:46 AM