Watermelon Boy: 10-year-old finds fame by eating whole water

Inglês

If you want to get famous in 2016, you could try going down one of the traditional routes - say, work very hard, exploit your natural talents and hope to win public recognition for your achievements.

Or, alternatively, you could eat an entire watermelon in view of some TV cameras, and let Twitter do the rest.

That's what this boy, this #WatermelonBoy, did, and boy did it work.

Mitchell Schibeci, 10, was sat in the crowd at the Melbourne Cricket Ground 'Big Bash derby' on Saturday evening, when TV cameras zoomed in on him enjoying his snack of choice - a large watermelon, which he was muching on like an apple, rind and all.

As the cameras kept returning to Mitchell, viewers started tweeting about him, making #watermelonboy the number one trending topic in Australia, and number five worldwide.

So swift and widespread was Watermelon Boy's rise to fame that a number of press engagements were immediately arranged - and it became apparent that Mitchell, son of Australian sports reporter and broadcaster Tony Schibeci, might have had an eye on internet fame when he started eating the melon.

“I saw people do crazy things, like that mullet boy who got on television, so I thought I might try it too,” he told Channel Seven News.

“Halfway through it I felt sick, but at the end I felt good.”

However, in an interview with the BBC he claimed that he's a longstanding whole-melon-eater, saying: "I've been doing it for a long time - I just like the taste of it."

He was also keen to stress he hasn't let all the attention go to his head: "I'm not really a hero, I'm just a normal average kid."