Falling in love with Olympic Fu fighter

Anyone who says that their success in the swimming pool was because “I used all of my mystic energy” is already high on my list of Olympic heroes.

Sorry, Team GB - You’re doing brilliantly at the 2016 Olympic Games , with a bumper crop of medals and lofty position in the standings, but you aren’t a 20 year old Chinese competitor called Fu.

The swimmer has tasted success twice in Rio, with 2 bronze medals, in the Women’s 100 metres backstroke, and as part of the Women’s 4x100m medley relay team. Fu Yuanhani has also become an internet sensation via her displays at the games, but not entirely because of her achievements.

With The Huffington Post, Guardian, Daily Mail and many other publications featuring her, Fu has won the hearts of millions in her home country and around the world due to her being a charming combination of down to earth, normal, geeky, nerdy, and providing the internet with some genuinely heart-warming and funny moments.

With her follower count on Weibo (China’s main social media platform) leaping from half a million pre-Rio to well over 4 million in a matter of days, she clearly has gone viral – and not just from the infamous green water in the swimming pools.

She’s definitely worth a search on the web if you’ve got a moment. Watch out particularly for the post-swim interview where she grabbed a medal, but thinks she hasn’t until informed otherwise by the interviewer. I haven’t experienced shock and delight so charmingly mashed together since I tried pea and mint sorbet.

Then there’s the moment where adjusting the shoulder strap of her swimming costume results in a nasty twang against wet skin, eliciting one of the funniest pained expressions I’ve witnessed at a sporting event.

In fact, the list is seemingly endless – pulling happy, crazy, faces and doing a little dance after receiving the team medals, whilst her compatriots did their sensible smiles; waving like a mad thing at the TV cameras; crying with delight – she can’t help but raise a smile from viewers.

For a while, I struggled to work out exactly what it was that makes her so adorable. It was only when I saw other athletes smiling politely, looking pleased, answering questions thoughtfully, or crying but remembering to thank everyone who helped them, that I realised – Fu doesn’t have an inner control that restrains her from being... just herself.

If there was a memo about how to behave ‘correctly’, she clearly dropped it in the pool. She also increased her down-to-earth appeal by explaining that her performance had been poor in one event because she was tired and on her period – a taboo subject rarely discussed in the sporting world.

So thank you, Fu. Where others were trying to be professional, you were just delightfully you – a slightly kooky human being. The friend we’ve all had who’s pulling a face in the formal wedding photos.

We should all be a bit more Fu.

This post first appeared as my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 19th of August 2016. The paper retitled it as 'Olympics offer Fu for thought'.

Thanks, internet - I wouldn't have know a thing about the fabulous Fu if it hadn't been for the web. The good news is, it enabled me to find all these rather brilliant gifs, which will probably get removed by the over-zealous olympic copyright police, hell-bent on protecting their brand. Because this devalues the olympics, obviously.

Nice footnote to last week's column about my work chums - when I arrived back in the office after a couple of days off, they knew all about it. 

Bizarrely, one of them had received a complimentary copy of the paper through their door. First time ever, it happened to be the Friday edition, and it was the one week I wrote about them. Spooky, or what?

(CD A-Z: Again suspended, for a new compilation - "Twelve Inch Eighties - You Spin Me Round". Ah, the 12" mix... happy days.)