People Are Being Very Cruel To Ethiopia’s 100m Swimmer

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Ethiopia’s Olympic swimmer came last in the 100m heats, and people are being very cruel.

Robel Kiros Habte, from Ethiopia, was swimming in the Preliminary Men’s 100m Freestyle heats at the Olympic Aquatics Stadium.

Of the 59 competitors across the eight heats, the swimmer was ranked 59th with a time of 1 minute 4.95 seconds – around 17 seconds behind the winning swimmer, Australian Kyle Chalmers who finished in just 47.9 seconds, the Daily Mail reports.

And placing last and having a ‘dad bod’ has, unfortunately, made him the butt of a few cruel jokes.

As you can imagine, people have been ruthless on Twitter:

Sports journalist Jai Bednall even compared him to Eric the Eel – a notoriously slow swimmer competing on behalf of Equatorial Guinea in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

The Daily Mail has even gone so far as to give him the name ‘Robel the Whale’.

But he’s not just being body-shamed. Ethiopian sports pundits have a slightly more legitimate criticism of how he came to qualify for Rio in the first place.

Apparently, the president of the country’s swimming federation is Habte’s dad.

But none of this seems to be bothering Habte, who said he was just pleased to have taken part.

He said:

I am so happy because it is my first competition in the Olympics. So thanks for God.

I wanted to do something different for my country, that’s why I chose swimming.

Everybody, every day you wake up in Ethiopia, you run. Not swimming. But I didn’t want to run, I wanted to be a swimmer.

It didn’t matter where I finished.

Hey, when you’ve made it into the Olympics, who cares what people say about you? You’ve made it into the Olympics.

UNILAD