Ashley Wagner's Angry Face

About

Ashley Wagner’s Angry Face is an emerging photoshop meme based on a photograph of U.S. Olympic figure skater Ashley Wagner wearing an outraged expression after being handed a disappointing score for her short program routine performance at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games.

Origin

On February 8th, 2014, American figure skater Ashley Wagner made her Olympics debut in the short program for team figure skating event. Wagner’s performance was praised by the U.S. commentators as promising, and the 22-year-old skater herself seemed optimistic as she came off the ice, especially in following Japanese figure skater Mao Asada’s tumble during her routine.

But upon seeing a score of 63.10, which put in the fourth place, Wagner was seen on camera shaking her head in disbelief before muttering “that’s bullshit.”^[3] Nonetheless, Wagner’s score advanced the U.S. team to the medal round.

Spread

Throughout the day, GIFs of Wagner’s disappointed reaction to her score began circulating on Twitter^[4], Tumblr^[3] and Reddit^[2], where she was promptly declared the next Mckayla Maroney, an American gymnast whose visible frown in disappointment of having missed the gold medal became the subject of a photoshop meme during the 2012 London Summer Olympics.

According to Topsy’s social analytics data, the figure skater’s name was mentioned on Twitter more than 10,000 times on February 8th, in comparison to just a few dozens of mentions per day in the week leading up to the event. On February 9th, the single topic blog Ashley is Not Impressed^[2] was launched on Tumblr.

News Media Coverage

Soon, Ashley Wagner’s reaction GIF was subsequently picked up by Deadspin, The Wire, The Daily Dot, Mashable The Wire and BuzzFeed, among others, with many declaring it the first meme of The Sochi Olympics.