Fake Story of Olympics Medallist From Turkey Yusuf Dikeç’s Ex-Wife Viral as Real

The story about Turkish shooter Yusuf Dikeç and his supposed ex-wife originated as satire on Facebook.

After Turkish participants Yusuf Dikeç and Şevval İlayda Tarhan secured the second spot to win the silver medal for the 10m Air Pistol Mixed Team event at the 2024 Paris Olympics, a story about Dikeç's backstory went viral on social media.

The claim: The story accompanying Dikeç's photo claims that he took up shooting recently, after a "heated argument" with his former wife, Sharon, and "credits his success to his newfound passion for seeing his kids and a relentless drive to prove his ex wrong."

• It adds that the 52-year-old was a mechanic in Istanbul and first began shooting after a "frustrating divorce mediation."

• The claim also states that after winning, Dikeç stood "emotionless" on the Olympic podium and said, "Sharon, if you're watching this, i want my dog back."

At the time of writing this report, this post by Facebook user 'Assault Life' was shared over 2,500 times.

(Archives of more claims on social media can be seen here and here.)

Is it true?: While Dikeç's current or previous relationship status is unclear, most of the claims made in the post are false.

• Dikeç has been participating in the Olympics, as a shooter for Turkey, since 2001.

• Before his career as an athlete, he was a non-commissioned officer of Turkey's Gendarmerie General Command.

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How did we find out the truth?: We looked up Yusuf Dikeç's name on the Olympics' website, which carries information about every participating athlete.

• The top portion of Dikeç's page stated that he was born in Turkey's Gorsun, but resided in Mersin — NOT Istanbul, as claimed.

• Scrolling through this page gave us more details about the Turkish athlete's past.

• The 'bio' section of this page showed us the Dikiç has represented Turkey in shooting at every Olympics' games since the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

• It further mentioned that Dikiç is an athlete — not a mechanic — by profession, and "began competing in shooting in 2001."

• It quoted Dikiç's reason for picking up the sport, which was simply that he did it "after I started working as a non-commissioned officer for the Gendarmerie General Command."

More details on ISSF: Since Dikiç is an international competitive shooter, we looked for his profile on the website of the International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF).

• ISSF, too, mentioned that Dikiç had been shooting since 2001 and showed his marital status as 'single'.

Where did the claim come from?: While trying to verify the story, we came across a post shared by a Facebook page called 'The Sports Memery', which was the oldest instance of this claim.

In the caption of its post, the page clarified that it was a "satirical post" and that the page was clearly labeled as a "satire/parody page."

On 3 August, the page shared another post, making it very clear that the post was not Dikeç's real story.

"I thought I included enough outlandish details in my write-up to prompt people to check the page and examine the source before believing it as fact," the post read, "but it's clear I overestimated the internet's ability to distinguish between fact and fiction."

"So no, if you needed to hear it, this isn't a true story. It's satire from a page that goes to great lengths to label itself as such," the page stated.

The Quint has reached out to Turkey's Olympics Committee for Dikeç's inputs and will update this story with their response, as and when it is received.

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