Social media giant Twitter has released the most popular hashtag trends in the country in 2016. And sports have dominated the Twitter talk yet again. It does not come as a surprise that #Rio2016 was the most popular hashtag used in India in the calendar year. The Olympic Games are the biggest sporting event in the world and proper promotion had garnered a lot of interest among the Indians.
Although the overall performance of the Indians at Rio was not overwhelming, people followed the Games with utmost interest. PV Sindhu, who won the silver medal also saw her hashtag, #PVSindhu, featured in the top 10 biggest hashtags of 2016.
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Cricket is the most popular sport in the country. And a match involving arch-nemesis Pakistan and that too in a World Cup fixture is huge. Any contest between the two neighbouring countries on the field of cricket is one of the most keenly followed sporting events in the world.
And the story was no different when India faced Pakistan in the ICC World T20 Championships. The analytics released by Twitter revealed that as many as 11 million tweets were posted using the hashtag #INDvPAK, thus making it the second most popular hashtag in the country in 2016.
Out of the top trending hashtags, seven were related to sports. Two of them were related to the Rio Olympics and five to the ICC World T20. That the T20 World Cup was hosted by India was one of the main reasons. India reaching the semi-finals before losing to the eventual champions West Indies also helped the cause.
Twitter also released the biggest moments of 2016 in India. While demonetisation took the first place, Women in Rio 2016 and India vs Pakistan match at the T20 World Cup were positioned second and third.
Both the medals that India won at the Rio Olympics were won by female sportspersons. Sindhu, of course, won the silver medal in women’s singles badminton while Sakshi Malik claimed the bronze medal in wrestling. Dipa Karmakar also scripted history by becoming the first Indian female gymnast to qualify for the Olympics. However, she missed out on a medal by a whisker coming fourth in her event.
