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LONDON — Scottish tennis star Andy Murray is not only the first British winner of the Wimbledon men’s singles tournament, but he also managed to set a new U.K. Twitter record on Sunday.
Over a 12-hour period on the final day of the famous London tennis event, his final against Novak Djokovic was mentioned more than 3.4 million times on Twitter, the U.K. arm of the microblogging service said. Activity peaked at 120,000 tweets per minute as Murray hit the winning shots.
That exceeded the previous high set during the London Olympics closing ceremony last year when the Spice Girls made their long-awaited appearance.
Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham was among the celebrity tennis fans spotted in the Wimbledon stands during Sunday’s final.
Murray himself tweeted “Can’t believe what’s just happened!!!!!!!” after his victory. The message was retweeted and liked more than 77,000 times within an hour, according to Twitter U.K.
“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,” it said in a blog post. “At the point of his victory, eight of the U.K.’s 10 trending topics were Wimbledon-related.”
Murray also saw his follower numbers on Twitter shoot up during the Wimbledon tournament. He added more than 131,000 followers over the last day alone and got a 20 percent boost in followers over the course of the event.
E-mail: Georg.Szalai@THR.com
Twitter: @georgszalai
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