Major sports stars know to not feed the trolls. England's Richard Kilty, the 2014 World Indoor 60-meter gold medalist, is still coming to grips with his emerging celebrity, most notably by engaging with Twitter accounts that ask rhetorical questions.
On Friday, Twitter user TheCarterFilez, which describes itself as #MileyCyrus, copy-and-pasted a Flotrack video asking who this Kilty is. As in, "This Guy Sprints, You Won't Believe What Happens Next":
That's all that happened. It's not even trolling, really. More aggregate, support-our-troops content.
That is not how Richard Kilty took it.
"He is your step dad, he's giving it to your mother," Kilty responded to TheCarterFilez.
TheCarterFilez tried to gently explain that it was just the article title and they didn't even write it, and that it was just copied—
"Come and say hi this weekend, come and meet your step dad son," Kilty said.
Well, TheCarterFilez took umbrage at that, and responded with a strongly-worded stream of hashtags that included #lacticinyouranus, which should immediately begin trending worldwide.
To which Kilty, a professional sprinter, replied:
"Your mam will have lactic in her anus when she gets it with the gold medal on her neck."
Kilty, who competes this evening at the IAAF World Relays in the Bahamas, suddenly sensed he had crossed some invisible boundary and quickly deleted his tweets. In true troll fashion, TheCarterFilez promptly tattled on him to British Athletics. Point, troll.
But though Kilty's tweets have disappeared, the full exchange lives on in our hearts. Also, here.