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The British Olympic Team’s Avengers: Endgame Video is the Perfect Primer for TikTok

A video of seven lithe athletes leaping out of the water has gone viral. For all the old people Googling this: welcome to TikTok

Chris Stokel-Walker
FFWD
5 min readOct 7, 2019

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Image: Chris Stokel-Walker

The video is a powerfully effective one: on a sunkissed dock in Turkey, British Olympic diver Jack Laugher and six of his fellow professional divers seem to flip out of the water and adopt the poses of the superheroes who are part of The Avengers, the Marvel superhero series, brandishing plastic tennis rackets, water glistening from their abs.

It’s superhuman and incredible — little wonder it has captured the imagination of so many.

The 26-second video has gone super viral, with more than 700,000 people watching the video posted on Jack Laugher’s Twitter feed and the BBC mentioning it on their news channel bulletins as from “a new video sharing app”. That app is TikTok — which isn’t that new, but time moves slowly in the world of traditional media — and the clip, initially uploaded…

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Published in FFWD

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Chris Stokel-Walker
Chris Stokel-Walker

Written by Chris Stokel-Walker

UK-based freelancer for The Guardian, The Economist, BuzzFeed News, the BBC and more. Tell me your story, or get me to write for you: stokel@gmail.com

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