Audience wave
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The "audience wave" (also called a Mexican wave, or simply "the wave") is a phenomenon that commonly occurs in the audiences of sporting events, and sometimes in other large crowds. A wave is a coordinated sequence of actions taken by the audience members in which a group of spectators lying along a radial line extending outward from the sport field all stand up and raise their arms, then return to a normal seated posture again as the neighboring group of spectators takes their turn to stand up.
The result is a "wave" of standing audience members that travels rapidly through the audience, even though individual audience members never move from their seats (thus, the wave could be said to be a transverse wave). In many large arenas the audience is seated in a circular arrangement all the way around the sport field, and so the wave is able to travel continuously around the arena; in non-circular seating arrangements, the wave can instead reflect back and forth through the audience. When the gap in seating is narrow, the wave can sometimes pass through it. Usually only one wave crest will be present at any given time in an arena. Simultaneous, counter-rotating waves have been produced.
The exact origin of the wave is disputed. It first gained popularity in the United States in the early 1980s, with the Oakland Athletics baseball team reporting that the first appearance of the wave at a Major League Baseball game was led by professional cheerleader Krazy George Henderson in Oakland, California on October 15, 1981, in an American League Championship Series game against the New York Yankees.[1]
Others claim that the first wave originated in Seattle at the University of Washington's Husky Stadium on October 31, 1981,[2][3] at the prompting of Robb Weller (later Entertainment Tonight co-host). Weller, a 1972 Washington graduate, was the guest yell-king during the Huskies' homecoming football game against the Stanford University Cardinal (led by junior quarterback John Elway). Weller's initial concept for the wave was for it to travel vertically, from the bottom of the stands to the top, within the UW student section. When that was met with limited interest, Weller then came up with the idea to move the wave horizontally. After a few attempts, the wave quickly spread around the entire stadium, and then was repeated ad nauseam throughout the rest of the game and the season. Longtime UW band director Bill Bissell also claimed co-creator credit with Weller, suggesting that the wave was devised by both of them prior to the game. It is not clear if the vertical or horizontal wave resulted from the reported collaboration. Very soon after, the wave appeared at Seattle Seahawks professional football games in the Seattle Kingdome.
A third report claims "The Wave" originated as a challenge between the Seattle Sounders fans and the Vancouver Whitecaps fans in 1975 at Memorial stadium in Seattle, during an NASL soccer game. "Bill the beer man" challenged the two sides of the stadium to out yell each other. As the two sides would rise to there feet and yell,"Go Sounders" or "Go Whitecaps" it would give the appearance of waves. As they added seating at the end of the field it went in "the round", ging the all around the stadium "Wave". When the Sounders moved into the Kingdome it was a tradition that any time the Sounders had a free kick at the opponents end of the pitch, "Bill the beer man" and "Pete the peanut guy" would fire up the crowd.
The wave was launched into the soccer community and to the world at the World Cup in Mexico in 1986, from which the name "Mexican wave" derives. In Brazil, Germany, Italy and other countries it's called "la ola" (or simply ola) (Spanish for "The wave"). During the opening ceremony of the 1988 Winter Olympics the audience made the wave during the athletes' parade.
The largest recorded wave was at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 where 110,000 people made an inverse Mexican wave and two simultaneous opposite direction waves.
In 2002, Tamás Vicsek of the Eötvös University, Hungary along with his colleagues analyzed videos of 14 waves at large Mexican soccer stadiums, developing a standard model of audience wave behavior (published in the September 12 issue of Nature). He found that it takes only the actions of a few dozen fans to trigger a wave. Once started, it usually rolls in a clockwise direction at a rate of about 40 ft/s (12 m/s), or about 22 seats per second. At any given time an audience wave is about 15 seats wide. These observations appear to be applicable across different cultures and sports, though details vary in individual cases.