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No, dirty minded blokes, not like that. Stripped of her lucrative Jaguar sponsorship deal. Because of a badly made Twitter post in which she used the word “faggot”.

The multi medal-winning Australian swimmer, in a fit of excitement on watching the Wallabies win their second Tri-Nations test against the Springboks on Saturday, tweeted of her pleasure at seeing a final moment penalty kick sail over the bar to give her team the win. Sadly, her over exuberant choice of words left many of her Twitter followers with a really bad taste in their mouths.

Bye Bye Jag

Her “Suck on that faggots!” tweet used a lot less than the 140 characters allowed and yet managed to say a whole lot about her. Response to the faux pas was swift.

Openly gay former rugby league international Ian Roberts led condemnation of the remark, which Rice has since removed and apologised for, calling her and anyone who supported her an “idiot”.

Jaguar Australia announced today that it had scrapped its sponsorship deal with the 22-year-old and said she would have to give back her XF sports car, worth more than AUS$100,000.

“We have terminated our agreement with her,” Jaguar spokesman Mark Eedle told AFP. “The terms of the agreement remain confidential … Suffice to say she’s obviously been driving one of our cars and that benefit will no longer happen.” Eedle said Jaguar wished to distance itself from the Twitter comment. “It’s to do with how we want to associate our brand and unfortunately this… is not an association we want to have going forward,” he said.

Steph, a word of advice. Stick to swimming and posing sexily. Those two you do very well. The twitter thing, not so much. Besides, the only person who can utter stupid things about rugby at the moment is our Div.

KP Gets Confused by Twitter

Stephanie is the second international sports star in as many weeks who has been sanctioned over utterances they have sent to the world via their Twitter accounts. English cricketer Kevin Pietersen was fined an undisclosed amount yesterday after he tweeted a petty little rant about his being dropped from the England team for the one day series against Pakistan.

What KP felt the need to say to the world via his Twitter account was this: “Done for the rest of summer!! Man of the World Cup T20 and dropped from the T20 side too.. Its a fuck up!!” – here’s a link to a screenshot of the offending post: http://bit.ly/bZzpnt

And when he made his public apology? The former England captain apologised publicly last week, insisting on Surrey TV that his comments “had not been for the public domain.” Uh Kev… the stuff you post in your Twitter account is public domain. Twit. You want to say private stuff via Twitter use a Direct Message.

See what happens when you become an ex-Saffer KP? You get yourself into all sorts of kak. Oh, and I reckon it’s a real bit of poor form old chap to put your Twitter bio down as “proud english cricketer” and then put a profile pic up of with you in Cape Town with Table Mountain in the background. Really poor form.

TwitStars to the Rescue

Some people clearly should leave the twittering to their PR people. Maybe we should set up a global PR company for these folks, and other celebrities like them? We could charge them based on an intricate calculation using Number of Followers, Number of Tweets and number of Re-Tweets. And when we screw something up, they can just blame us.

I even have the name and the slogan sorted: TwitStars – Trusted Tweets for Super Stars. Internally of course it’ll be known as StarTwits – Letting us rip them off 140 characters at a time! *

* This potentially super-lucrative business idea remains the intellectual property of The BlaBla Blog and may not be used in any way, shape, form or reasonable facsimile thereof by anyone, anywhere, ever. Unless of course you want to pay us for it. If so, make us an offer we can’t refuse in 140 characters or less. Comments are open.

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