Murray wins Wimbledon

Sunday, 7 July 2013

There hadn’t been a British winner of the Wimbledon men’s title for 77 years. The last time a Briton won a single’s title was back in ‘77. But on 7/7, Andy Murray (@Andy_Murray) finally did it.

It took less than one hour to get 77,000 retweets and faves on his celebration tweet, sent little over an hour after his Centre Court victory.

Murray’s was a Tweet that captured a unique moment that the nation had waited three quarters of a century for. Here’s a chart created by Twitter’s data editor Simon Rogers showing how Twitter users reacted to his message:

In a Wimbledon championship that played out on Twitter, it was fitting that tennis fans from across the globe came together on the platform to celebrate Murray’s success. At the point of his victory, eight of the UK’s 10 trending topics were Wimbledon-related.

Over the last 12 hours alone, the Wimbledon final has been mentioned more than 3.4 million times on Twitter. The peak in mentions of the match came at its climax at 17.25 BST with 120,000 Tweets per minute. That outstripped the 116,000 Tweets per minute that happened during the Spice Girls’ performance at last summer’s Olympics, a moment that saw the largest spike in Tweets per minute of the London 2012 Games.

And one of the Spice Girls, Victoria Beckham (@VictoriaBeckham) was cheering Murray on from Centre Court - even sharing a pic of her vantage point with her own 6 million Twitter followers.

Murray didn’t just take the Wimbledon title — he also outstripped rival Novak Djokovic (@DjokerNole) when it came to mentions on Twitter, as this chart shows:

He also saw his follower numbers sky rocket, adding more than 131,000 followers over the last day, and seeing a 20% increase in follower numbers over the course of the championships:

One of the most amazing things about Twitter is watching celebrities talk to other celebrities, and Murray was congratulated in Tweets by fans from all walks of life:

Many are speculating that Murray will figure large in the 2013 BBC SPOTY, although whether Lennox gets called up again, remains to be seen.

In fact December could be a big month for Andy, with some already tipping him for a knighthood in the Queen’s Honours. The former US tennis star Andy Roddick (@andyroddick) has already suggested a change of Twitter name …