  Professional sports enhance interaction among athletes through training
groups, sponsored events and competitions. Among these, the Olympic Games
represent the largest competition with a global impact, providing the
participants with a unique opportunity for interaction. We studied the
following patterns among highly successful athletes to understand the structure
of their interactions. We used the list of Olympic medallists in the Tokyo 2020
Games to extract their follower-followee network in Twitter, finding 7,326
connections among 964 athletes. The network displayed frequent connections to
similar peers in terms of their features including sex, country and sport. We
quantified the influence of these features in the followees choice through a
gravity approach capturing the number of connections between homogeneous
groups. Our research remarks the importance of datasets built from public
exposure of professional athletes, serving as a proxy to investigate
interesting aspects of many complex socio-cultural systems at different scales.
