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In a year when her public profile took a battering, Stephanie Rice copped more “negative buzz” than any other Australian athlete, according to a survey.
International research agency Millward Brown found that Rice, the darling of Australian swimming after her 2008 Olympic triple gold medal performance, topped its negative buzz ranking among Aussie athletes with 20 per cent ahead of cricket spin king Shane Warne (17 per cent).
The results were compiled from interviews conducted in Australia late last year with 2000 people about a list of 100 international celebrities, including current and former sports stars.
It highlighted how Rice’s star fell after her much-regretted Twitter posting in which she reacted to an Australian rugby victory over South Africa with: “Suck on that faggots!”
The fallout resulted in Rice’s name sitting alongside Tiger Woods, Ben Cousins and Sam Newman as personalities who generated the most negative discussion.
“I think the negative buzz reflects one silly slip with social media and I think it says a lot about how the world today is a lot smaller today than it was before,” said Millward Brown spokesman Daren Poole.
“We’re trying to measure how strong celebrities are across a number of dimensions, how famous and well liked they are, what sort of media attention they get, how much positive or negative buzz there is around them.
“Celebrities are a lot closer to the public and that can be both a good and a bad thing.
“And in her case, one `tweet’ was potentially quite damaging.”
As poorly as Rice rated it was nowhere near the lows of golf superstar Tiger Woods, whose sex scandal saw his stock plummet.
“To contextualise those stats you have Tiger Woods at 57 per cent (negative buzz),” Poole explained.
“He’s someone that was the top of our positive lists in the US a couple of years ago and he’s slipped quite some way down ever since (the scandal).”
Despite the negative talk from the tweet, Rice was still viewed as a positive role model by many survey respondents – although not quite as favourably as former fan favourites Pat Rafter and Glenn McGrath and comeback king Geoff Huegill.
At the other end of the spectrum, Woods, Newman and Ben Cousins held the top three positions on the survey’s perceived negative role model list.
“Stephanie Rice’s story is an interesting one, because she is seen as somebody with an awful lot of talent and she’s quite a positive role model as well,” Poole added.
“59 per cent of the people we surveyed still see her as a positive role model … so that’s still quite high.”
The study also showed Australia’s fascination with former sporting heroes, with McGrath (fifth), Rafter (ninth), Grant Hackett (23rd) and Adam Gilchrist (33rd) all featuring highly in the survey’s list of 100 most powerful celebrities.