Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington outs Twitter abuser

London, June 4 (ANI): Olympic champion swimmer Rebecca Adlington has outed an Internet troll who sent her an abusive message - days after complaining about being subjected to vile taunts.

The double gold medal winner highlighted a message sent to her on the social networking service that described her as a "whale" with a "shark fin nose".

It appeared to have been written by a 19 year-old student who is himself a keen sportsman, but he blamed one of his friends for writing it on a night out.

Miss Adlington said it was the "perfect example" of why she has decided to avoid Twitter during the London games this summer because she received so many "nasty" comments about her appearance.

On Sunday, the day after winning gold in an 800m race in Barcelona, she took to the social networking service to highlight a recent example of the abuse she receives.

"I had a perfect example of what has been said in the papers this week tweeted to me this morning. I apologise for the swearing when I RT [retweet] it!" the Telegraph quoted her as tweeting.

The swimmer then retweeted the offending message so her 50,000 followers could see it, asking "how lovely is this person".

The tweet, sent from a BlackBerry phone at 11pm on Saturday night, read: "you shark fin nosed derkhead, you belong in that pool you f---ing whale".

It was sent from the account of Callum Aspley, who describes himself as a lord and an "international playboy DJ" who lives in "the hood" on his Twitter profile.

The 19 year-old is a student at Leeds Met University where he plays rugby, and previously played rugby and cricket for King Edward VI school in Lichfield.

Contacted by The Daily Telegraph, he insisted he had not sent the tweet to Miss Adlington but declined to name the true author.

"I didn't send the tweet myself, I was out with my mates and one of them got hold of my phone and so he must have sent it, it wasn't me," he said.

"I don't use Twitter a lot and I don't know how to delete a tweet.

"Obviously I don't agree with what was said, I wouldn't say that kind of thing.

"I'm definitely going to find out how to delete the tweet and get rid as soon as I can.

"If you look on my profile you'll see I've only tweeted a couple of times, I don't really understand Twitter, I use Facebook really," he added. (ANI)