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10th Aug 2016

Olympic swimmer slams Piers Morgan after he insults medal winners on Twitter

Jog on...

Simon Lloyd

Piers Morgan’s tweets rubbing people up the wrong way – whoever would have thought it?

The Rio Olympics are only a matter of days old, yet the 51-year old’s tweets have already got peoples’ backs up.

First of all, there was his response to Ginny Thrasher winning America’s first gold medal of the Games…

And, now he’s had a pop at more or less every Olympian that doesn’t win a gold.

In the small hours of Wednesday morning, swimmer Siobhan Marie O’Connor set a British record as she won the silver medal in the Women’s 200m individual medley, finishing just three tenths of a second behind Hungary’s Katinka Hosszu.

Swimming - Olympics: Day 4

Although the majority of those watching from these shores would’ve been happy enough to see another medal in the bag for Team GB, Morgan wasn’t too impressed – tweeting that a gold medal was ‘all that matters’.

Many took exception with the tweet, one of those being Siobhan’s boyfriend and fellow Olympic swimmer, Chris Walker-Hebborn, who sent the following reply:

Not that it was ever going to make Piers tone it down.

Walker-Hebborn failed to make the final of the men’s 100m backstrokein Rio after he was knocked out in the semis.

The 26-year-old finished sixth in his heat with a time of 53.75 seconds. With only eight spots in total available for tomorrow morning’s final, this wasn’t enough and he finished 11th out of the 16 semi-finalists.