Unusual Olympic Athlete Names

Submission 16,898

Part of a series on 2016 Summer Olympics. [View Related Entries]

About

Unusual Olympic Athlete Names refers to the myriad athletes who appear at the Olympics and have names whose pronunciations sound like English puns.

Origin

While the advent of the internet allowed people to share funny Olympic athlete names with each other, it wasn't until 2008, when NBC began to stream the Olympics online^[2] and thus allow online viewers to screencap the coverage and save pictures of athletes with unusual names, that the phenomenon of "Unusual Olympic Athlete Names" began to start spreading. Until then, blogs cataloguing funny names in sports had included Olympians alongside American sports players, such as when the blog List of the Day^[1] published an article called "The Ten Dirtiest Names in Sports," which included Olympic basketball player Gregor Fucka and Olympic swimmer Misty Hyman.

Spread

The cataloguing of unusual Olympic names began in earnest during the 2012 Olympics in London, as dozens of sites including Funny or Die,^[3] TheBertShow,^[4] TotalProSports,^[5] Buzzfeed,^[6] and more published roundups of strange or humorous Olympian names, like Kim Yoo Suk (pole vault), Dong Dong (trampoline), Destinee Hooker (volleyball), etc.

The trend returned for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, as Buzzfeed^[7] and TotalProSports^[8] again published lists of unusual names. Twitter user @JimboLoony^[9] lampooned the trend by photoshopping Olympic ski jumper Andreas Wank's name to read "Cunty Spunkfuckshitpiss." Some users believed him, causing the Daily Dot^[10] to publish an article assuring readers that there was no athlete named Cunty Spunkfuckshitpiss.

The trend has grown less popular for the 2016 Summer Olympics, with the most high-profile coverage coming from The Sun.^[11] However, Dong Dong returned with an image macro where his name is used as the punchline of a Law and Order joke.