The Paris 2024 Olympics has brought together some of the world’s greatest athletes to do fancy sports things like defy gravity with flips and swim super fast. These feats can be enough to make any regular person’s jaw drop. But this year’s athletes are also known for something else: Funny memes. For example, Olympic shooting events have inspired a wave of memes and fan art on platforms like X — and now people are reimagining the athletes as anime characters.
Olympic shooting events come in all shapes and sizes depending on the guns used and the distance from the target. To maximize their performance, some competitors in the shooting events wear tiny glasses and other accessories that look like futuristic tech from a cyberpunk world. That, paired with some unique posture while aiming, piqued the interest of fans online.
The Korean competitor Kim Yeji stunned fans with her stone-cold gaze, little glasses, and confident power pose as she shot. Daehan Choe — also from Korea — inspired loads of jokes because he arched his back while aiming, making him look like a character straight out of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Turkish shooter Yusuf Dikec became an overnight viral sensation purely because he looked like a regular old guy from an office — he competed wearing a plain shirt, pants, and his normal glasses and still won silver in his event.
As people watched the shooting events, they took to the internet to meme the competitors — people created reaction images and exploitable meme formats — but the best so far has been all the art reimagining the competitors as anime characters. Below you can see Kim, Dikec, and more reimagined as anime characters.
Some fans have flipped the joke, and created fan art that reimagines anime characters as Olympians. Below, you can see Osamu Dazai from Bungo Stray Dogs drawn as an Olympian.
Feel free to scroll on for more Olympics anime and video game shooting goofs.
With the obsession over athletes like “pommel horse guy” Stephen Nedoroscik and the Olympic Village chocolate muffins, the competition for a top Olympics meme this year is tough. Thanks to people online, though, every moment — including a Turkish dude aiming a shot — can be spun into viral entertainment. So even if all the shooting competitions have concluded, we can continue to enjoy them after the fact.
