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A ‘messy’ Super Bowl pick. Fiona the hippo loses her lunch. Should the Chiefs be worried?

Cincinnati’s most famous hippopotamus might have made her highly anticipated Super Bowl pick.

The jury is still out on which team, Fiona, the 3-year-old nile hippo, picked, but she at least made a clear statement about how she feels about one of the teams after the Cincinnati Zoo posted a video of her vomiting on a Kansas City Chiefs logo.

The half-ton local celebrity was supposed to make her pick by pushing her nose against one of two enrichment items—each bearing the logo of the two Super Bowl contenders.

But after nuzzling the Kansas City logo, Fiona lost her lunch.

Her pick has left many football and animal lovers scratching their heads. For the zoo, it’s at least clear that she isn’t a Chiefs fan.

Commenters on Facebook and Twitter had differing opinions. Most seem to think it’s a clear decision for the 49ers, while one woman wrote that Fiona predicted a “messy” victory for the Chiefs.

The San Antonio Zoo’s Timothy the Hippo, Fiona’s long-distance admirer, responded on Twitter with a gif of a heaving Jim Carrey.

Fiona couldn’t be reached to clarify her pick.

Fiona reached celebrity status three years ago after she was born six weeks premature and weighed only 29 pounds. A team of zoo caretakers and some occasional help from the Cincinnati Children’s hospital nursed Fiona to health. She celebrated her third birthday last week.

This is Fiona’s third Super Bowl pick, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. She’s 1-1 after she picked the winning Philadelphia Eagles in 2018 and the losing Los Angeles Rams last year.

Fiona the miracle baby hippo debuts in her own show on the Facebook Watch platform on Tuesday.
Fiona the miracle baby hippo debuts in her own show on the Facebook Watch platform on Tuesday. Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden Instagram

This story was originally published January 31, 2020 at 1:05 PM.

Rick Childress
Lexington Herald-Leader
Rick Childress covers Eastern Kentucky for the Herald-Leader. The Lexington native and University of Kentucky graduate first joined the paper in 2016 as an agate desk clerk in the sports section and in 2020 covered higher education during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. He spent much of 2021 covering news and sports for the Klamath Falls Herald and News in rural southern Oregon before returning to Kentucky in 2022.
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