PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics official logo with Olympic rings

2018 Winter Olympics

2018eventclassic

Published August 15, 2026

The 2018 Winter Olympics, held in Pyeongchang, South Korea from February 9 to 25, 2018, spun off a run of Twitter-native meme moments during broadcast coverage, including a Korean toddler licking an NBC camera and a deadpan spectator captioned 'This South Korean gentleman just won the entire Olympics.'

olympics memes accidental fame memes child virality memes twitter memes 2018 memes

Overview

The 2018 Winter Olympics, also called the Pyeongchang Olympics, was the 23rd Winter Games, held in South Korea from February 9 to 25, 20182. The program ran 102 events across 15 sports and added four new disciplines including big air snowboarding and mixed doubles curling2. As an internet moment, the games are remembered less for medals than for a handful of viral clips pulled from broadcast coverage, from a Korean toddler licking an NBC camera to a stone-faced South Korean spectator who briefly became a reaction image3.

Loading tweet...

Off the ice, the most-shared trivia was the contraceptive count. Organizers handed out 110,000 condoms to the roughly 2,925 athletes at the Olympic Village, working out to about 37 per competitor for a two-week event1. That set a Winter Olympics record, though the all-time mark still belonged to the 2016 Rio Summer Games at 450,0001.

Origin & Background

Platform
Real-world event / Twitter (viral spread)
Date
2018

Pyeongchang was announced as host on July 6, 2011, after beating Munich and Annecy in the first round of IOC voting2. The meme cycle around the games really kicked off on February 8, 2018, when a young Korean child leaned into an NBC broadcast camera and licked the lens on live coverage. Twitter user @jbillison posted the GIF and it was picked up by outlets including Select All3.

How It Spread

The camera-licking clip went viral within hours and stayed near the top of Olympics coverage into the opening weekend3. A separate recurring meme was a shot of a bundled-up older South Korean spectator sitting deadpan in the stands, shared with the caption 'This South Korean gentleman just won the entire Olympics' during the first week of competition4. Both clips fit a pattern where secondary crowd footage from Pyeongchang got more Twitter engagement than most of the actual sporting events.

Political storylines fed the meme cycle too. The IOC suspended the Russian Olympic Committee in December 2017 over state-sponsored doping and banned Russia from competing as a nation, though 28 cleared Russian athletes competed under the Olympic flag as 'Olympic Athletes from Russia'3. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un used his January 1 address to signal cooperation, which led to a joint Korean women's ice hockey team and a unified march at the opening ceremony under the Korean Unification Flag3.

Frequently Asked Questions