Olympic victories spark Belarusians’ interest in athletes, Yandex says

Belarusian users of the search engine Yandex made over 215,000 queries about medal winners of the Belarusian Olympic team during one week from 10 to 16 February. After the success in Sochi the number of queries about the Olympians went up over 30 times, BelTA learnt from Yandex’s press service.

The Olympic theme was also popular among Russians. From 10 to 16 February Russian users made over 140,000 queries about Darya Domracheva on Yandex. About 20,000 queries from Russia pertained to other medalists from Team Belarus.

It should be noted that interest in the future medalists was not high prior to the first Olympic victories. From 3 to 9 February Belarusian users asked Yandex about Darya Domracheva less than 6,000 times. A considerable part of the queries was about Darya Domracheva and Norway’s Ole Bjoerndalen, after an Italian newspaper published a story alleging the two biathletes are romantically involved. Yandex registered even fewer queries about Nadezhda Skardino, Alla Tsuper and Anton Kushnir.

After the triumph of the biathlon team the most popular query among Belarusians was the medal ceremony (about 20% of all queries) and Alexander Lukashenko’s congratulation (5%). Roughly 10% of queries about the freestyle skiers related to the videos of jumps which brought them victories, including Alla Tsuper’s final jump and Anton Kushnir’s performance.

Predictably, fans were interested in the athletes’ bios and personal life. However, there were some unusual queries. For example, users searched for photos of Darya Domracheva wearing make-up and asked what car she drives.