Murray's moment watched and followed by millions
Andy Murray's victory in the men's singles at Wimbledon yielded the highest domestic viewing figures since the 2012 Olympics and created a similar level of buzz in other mediums.
The final registered a five-minute peak of 17.3 million viewers on the BBC, an increase on last year's final peak of 16.9million. The official Wimbledon website, Wimbledon.com, also registered 19.6 million unique users through the course of The Championships, a Grand Slam record.
While there were touching on 30 million global interactions about Wimbledon on Facebook, according to official Twitter analysis by IBM, technology partner to The Championships, Murray was also the most popular player of The Championships.
Murray received more than 1.9 million mentions on the social media site during The Championships, ranking him significantly ahead of Novak Djokovic and Sabine Lisicki who took second and third place with over 1 million and 300,000 tweets respectively. On Men's Final day alone, Murray secured a phenomenal 1.3 million mentions on the site as fans voiced their support around the tense final, which saw him become the first man to take home the singles' title in 77 years.
What’s more, Murray’s tweets were overwhelmingly supportive – securing a higher percentage of positive tweets on Men's Final day than any other player apart from fellow Brit, Laura Robson. Some 96% of tweets for Murray were considered supportive, a number rising to an astonishing 98% for Robson who shone as one of the breakthrough players of this year’s tournament.
As emotions ran high support at SW19 was strong, with cheers on Murray Mound reaching 114 decibels – the same volume as a loud rock concert – at the peak of Sunday's final game. Meanwhile fans across the world flocked to Twitter posting more than 400 tweets posted per second during the final throws of the match.
Photo gallery: Murray's post-Championships media blitz
As always, it wasn’t just the players commanding the attention though and familiar faces in the Wimbledon crowds causes a significant buzz online.
The most popular non-participating celebrities across the fortnight were James Corden with more than 5,500 tweets and former tennis star Virginia Wade, who tallied some 4,280 mentions after appearing in the Royal Box today. Elsewhere, Sir Alex Ferguson drew in nearly 2,000 mentions, while Jude Law secured more than 1,200 tweets.
Similarly, some famous faces also took to Twitter to give their support.
Comedian Jimmy Carr said “Andy Murray winning Wimbledon is my 1966 World Cup moment. What an incredible thing to witness”, while singer Ed Sheeran was more concise in his approach, simply tweeting “Murray you uber lad.”
In all, more than 6.6 million Wimbledon related tweets were posted and analysed during The Championships – more than double the 2.5 million tweets from last year.
