A Paraguayan swimmer sent packing from the Olympic village after a run-in with team chiefs has denied that she was thrown out of the Paris Games.
Luana Alonso, a 20-year-old influencer based in Texas, was excluded from the Paraguayan team after tearfully announcing her retirement from the sport from the poolside at Paris when she was dumped out of the heats of the women’s 100m butterfly.
Team chiefs were already less than impressed by Alonso’s constant social media posts and pouty Instagram clips from the French capital, but the blonde-haired, green-eyed swimmer decided to enjoy the the rest of her Paris holiday anyway, and continued to turn up in the athletes’ village.
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After a standoff lasting several days, which gave Alonso enough time for a trip to Disneyland Paris, she finally left Paris for Texas, where she is a political science major at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
She appears to have taken offense, however, at media depiction of the battle between angry team chiefs and the Olympic hottie who just wanted to party.
In an Instagram update on Monday, Alonso insisted that reporters had got it wrong. “I just wanted to make it clear that I was never removed or expelled from anywhere, stop spreading false information,” she wrote on her Story. “I don’t want to give any statement but I’m not going to let lies affect me either.”
Newspapers in Paraguay had in fact carried the text of an email sent to Alonso by Paraguay’s chef de mission in Paris, Larissa Schaerer, asking her to leave the Olympic village because her activities were “creating an inappropriate atmosphere at the heart of Team Paraguay.”
Paraguay’s Hoy newspaper reported that Alonso had told her fans in a livestream well before the Paris Olympics that she didn't really want to represent Paraguay at all. “I want to represent the United States more,” she said.
It said tensions with the team arose from the fact that Alonso only qualified for Paris under IOC “universality” rules that give extra places to teams whose athletes have not met Olympic qualifying standards. Alonso insisted she could have qualified by herself.
But the row seems to have done her no harm in her other career—as a social media influencer. As of Tuesday, Alonso had more than 700,000 followers on her Instagram account, up by around 250,000 in a week.
