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Leslie Jones's Rio 2106 tweets are sending her to the Olympic Games

Elahe Izadi
Tuesday 09 August 2016 10:04 BST
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(Getty Images)

Your Olympic tweets are probably not as good as Leslie Jones’s. Hers were so good that they earned her a ticket to Rio (working for an NBC series probably doesn’t hurt, either).

The “Saturday Night Live” comedian has been live-tweeting everything from rowing to gymnastics, spreading her infectious enthusiasm of athletic feats and love of country. Basically, she’s Team USA and she is thoroughly here for this:

Her feed got a boost early Sunday morning when Olympics producer Jim Bell tweeted that she was officially invited. That came following the suggestion of Mike Shoemaker, former SNL producer and current producer of “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” who tweeted that producers should “give her a microphone,” for more gold medals and increased ratings. On Monday afternoon, Jones announced she was headed to the Games:

Jones’s commentary, including on swimmers’ pre-competition routines and the intensity of Olympic ping-pong matches, comes amid a couple of controversies from Olympic commentators. On Monday, an NBC analyst apologized after he defended on-air comments about gymnast Simone Biles’s adoptive parents by tweeting, “they may be mom and dad but they are NOT her parents.” And while Jones isn’t going to give you the backstories for the more obscure athletes, she certainly has an eye for key moments:

Copyright: The Washington Post

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