OLYMPIANS took over the internet at the 2024 Summer in Paris, France in fashion as they spent the better part of July and the first few days of the global sport event posting videos of themselves unboxing their sponsored kits and gear by sports and fashion brands on their social media.
Unboxing videos are relatively common but this year’s Olympics are seeing athletes do it en masse for the first time as brands and their marketing departments have surely been scrambling for months to push their brand identity and capitalise on the global reach of the international event.
The athletes are also utilising their social media accounts to give fans and followers rare looks into their journey and life in the Olympic Village, repurposed residential complexes serving as their living quarters.
Comparing the videos with those during the 2020 and 2022 Olympics, this year’s videos are seemingly more “intimate”, particularly on TikTok.
Launched in 2016, the app’s popularity in video-form content slowly made its way into the Olympics, beginning with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and is in full swing with Olympians this year, particularly with content creation from the athletes themselves.
However, the trend has not caught on with Malaysia’s Olympic contingent.
Out of the 26 athletes competing in Paris, only seven seem to be actively posting on their personal social media accounts, whether it is revealing their sponsored gear or providing a small window into their life in the Olympic Village.
Most of the athletes (six of them) primarily posted Olympic-related content on Instagram while only four leveraged on TikTok’s long-form videos to do the same.
On Instagram, the haul videos, a social media trend in which someone usually shows off their recent purchases, were mainly dominated by athletes sponsored kits from Oakley.
The cycling division’s road cyclist Nur Aisyah Mohamad Zubir, along with track cyclists Azizulhasni Awang and Muhammad Shah Firdaus Sahrom each had unboxing videos of a sponsored kit by Oakley while Olympic diver Bertrand Rhodict had a post showing off his Oakley eyewear.
The lone outlier is Olympic shooter Johnathan Wong, who posted pictures featuring the various goodies he received from the Olympic Council of Malaysia, with items ranging from Samsonite to Skechers.
For TikTok, the most active out of the entire contingent is Rhodict. Posting on Instagram and TikTok, Rhodict’s videos captured his (and fellow diver Nur Dhabitah Sabri) arrival in the country and he even featured a short clip of unboxing the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 Olympic Edition phone.
Similarly, Olympic sailor Khairulnizam Afendy uploaded several videos of him moving into the Olympic Village, along with clips of him setting up liveries and doing boat work while Azizulhasni has videos flashing off his Omega Speedmaster to be used during the competition along with speedwork training.
Bearing an entirely different vibe, Olympic badminton player Goh Jin Wei uploaded a video on Instagram, in which she had to manually set up a mobile air-conditioning unit in her Olympic Village room.
This was due to the organisers for the Paris 2024 Olympics not installing air-conditioning for the athletes’ quarters in the village, in line with Paris “going green” for the Olympics while the city is in the middle of a heat wave with temperatures ranging from 36–41°C.
Attracting support in the comments, Goh’s video has the highest engagement compared with any of her Malaysian Olympic peers on Instagram. On TikTok, Rhodict has the highest engagement with his first Olympic video receiving almost half a million views and 38,000 likes, along with countless comments asking for unboxing videos.
It is certainly a curious affair when Olympians from other nations are far more active in meeting the social media hunger for sports-content compared with their Malaysian counterparts.
