Troy Rawhiti-Forbes: Why Mark Todd is the new Chuck Norris

Mark Todd with his horse Campino. Photo / Brett Phibbs

When I tell people what I do for a living, they tend to understand straight away. For most of us of a certain age, social media started with the emergence of MySpace, then Facebook, and Twitter.

If you go back a little, you had blogging, internet forums, and instant messaging. Wander further back in time to the late 1990s, when I first boarded the social media train, and you'd find chatrooms, digital newsgroups, and those long-lost forum prototypes known as guestbooks.

I'm completely comfortable in this environment, but I've always been mindful of how social media can be explained to people of a different age or culture, like my parents, for instance.

I've found challenges in explaining social media, and in particular the interest in "what they're saying online" to people who haven't grown up in digital communities.

The greatest challenge, to date, has been telling Mark Todd that he's the new Chuck Norris.

This was trickier than I'd anticipated. First I had to explain to the gracious, but slightly bemused, London 2012 bronze medallist who Chuck Norris is. I thought I might have had to at least explain the internet meme (the nerdy name for an idea that quickly spreads among web users) but I'd naively thought every person in western civilisation knew who Chuck Norris was, as if he was the Michael Jackson of roundhouse kicks.

No. So I explained to a very patient Todd who the action star was, how he had gained 21st century fame as an internet hero of mythic proportions with impossibly superhuman feats attributed to him, and how Kiwis had applied it to their own achievers. The first was Willie Apiata VC. Piri Weepu followed at the Rugby World Cup.

"And now it's me?"

Yes, sir. Now it's you.

I read him some of the #MarkTodd tweets, including a claim by comedian Ben Hurley (@benhurleycomedy) that Todd once won the Badminton horse trials "while actually playing badminton".

And this one from @GeraldUrquhart: "They say 'On ya Marks' before 'get set, go!' to congratulate Mark Todd for finishing the race before it has even begun."

With each tweet read, the rider laughed a little louder.

At 56 years of age, being New Zealand's second-oldest Olympian ever, Mark Todd is our latest action hero. He might not have understood the medium, but he certainly got the message.

TWEET OF THE DAY

Bear Grylls is a character based on #MarkTodd

@firuss