YouTube stardom to the Olympics? Singer Cody Simpson’s unlikely bid to compete at Games

Teenybopper poster boy Cody Simpson will be among Australia’s top swimmers at next month’s national championships as he hones his 100m butterfly before June’s Olympic trials.

The junior swimmer turned international singer has taken another key step in his quest to make it in the pool by entering the Australian titles on the Gold Coast, where he will attempt to shave whole seconds from his personal best in his unlikely bid to qualify for the Tokyo Games.

Simpson, who counts Michael Phelps and Ian Thorpe as mentors, dated Miley Cyrus for 12 months and is friends with Justin Bieber. The Gold Coast-born 24-year-old’s path to fame is not dissimilar to Bieber’s, having been discovered on YouTube in 2009 and since toured globally on the back on three solo studio albums titled Paradise, Surfers Paradise, and Free.

But his 6.9m Twitter followers and 3.9m Instagram followers have only recently been made aware that he was a junior Queensland state champion.

Read The Guardian