About

#Quinning is a Twitter hashtag used to highlight photographs and stories in which various problems have been resolved through one's sheer physical strength. The slang term is named after the U.S. Olympic bobsledder Johnny Quinn who became internet famous for busting through a door to free himself after getting locked in a bathroom at the Sochi Olympic Village in February 2014.

Origin

On February 8th, 2014, U.S. Olympic bobsledder and former NFL player Johnny Quinn tweeted a photograph of a heavily damaged bathroom door, which he had destroyed in order to free himself from being locked inside.

Quinn's "bathroom door" photo, which arrived at the height of #SochiProblems, instantly went viral on Twitter and elsewhere, garnering more than 25,000 retweets within the first few hours.

Spread

That same day, Quinn's tweet was promptly picked up by the AFP^[6], NBC News^[2], USA Today^[3], The Huffington Post^[4] and Mashable^[5] as part of their round-up coverage of #SochiProblems. Then on February 10th, Quinn found himself locked behind doors once again, this time, along with his teammate Nick Cunningham and bobsled director David Cripps, in an elevator in their hotel building. Quinn's streak of bad luck was subsequently tweeted by both Cunningham^[7] and Cripps, which drew even more attention to the athlete's bathroom door incident from the night before. According to KHOU-TV, the three men were rescued shortly after tweeting the photos.

Shortly after the elevator photo began circulating online, Twitter user @GeorgeMag^[9] declared #Quinning a new trend.

Various Examples

In the following days, a handful of photos illustrating overly physical approaches to everyday problem-solving surfaced on the site with the hashtag #Quinning,^[10] such as opening plastic blister packs or clamshell packaging by puncturing a hole through the surface (shown below). While the build-up of its momentum on Twitter has been gradual at best, by February 16th, the hashtag had been declared "a new thing" by a number of news outlets, including BBC^[11], ABC News^[12] and The Economic Times,^[13] providing further boost to its social media profile.

Search Interest

External References