As the London Olympics draw to a close, Twitter ticks along faster than Usain Bolt

This year during the London Olympics Twitter has seen some incredible traffic and the traffic kept creeping up till it hit a worthy crescendo as the London games drew to a close last night. Twitter on its official blog has posted some staggering statistics, and it reported that there were over a 150 million tweets during the last 16 days. As always, Jamaican lightning bolt, Usain Bolt gathered the most attention. According to the twitter blog post, there were over 80,000 tweets per minute (TPM) when Bolt secured the gold in 200m sprint. Bolt also became the most discussed athlete of the games.
That said, British local hero Andy Murray and the most prolific Olympian of all-time, Michael Phelps were not far behind. When Murray defeated reigning world number 1, Roger Federer for Gold at the Center Court, the TPM counter rose in excess of 57,000 TPMs and Michael Phelps became the second most talked about athlete after Bolt on Twitter during the games.
Twitter notes that there were nine athletes that garnered in excess of 1 million tweets led by (Chronologically) Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Tom Daley, Ryan Lochte, Gabby Douglas, Andy Murray, Kobe Bryant, Yohan Blake, Lee Chong Wei, and LeBron James.
The most prolific Tweet moment however came during the group stage basketball clash between the USA and Spain which include the last minute Kobe Bryant dunk and Hope Sole’s land diving save in woman’s soccer match between USA and Japan.
Additionally, 5 million tweets came from the soccer events alone and the closing ceremony provided an epic crescendo when the Spice Girls took stage and the tweet counter skyrocketed to 116,000 TPM.