music festival in
Sydney, Australia Today, the wave is often seen during sports events, sometimes during a lull in the action on the field when the spectators want to amuse themselves. There is some controversy as to when the wave is appropriate to perform during a sporting event. Many fans feel that the wave should not be performed in important situations during the game. Prior to the redevelopment of the
Melbourne Cricket Ground between 2002 and 2006, spectators seated in the Members' Stand (reserved for members of the
Melbourne Cricket Club) would refuse to engage in the wave, and would be booed by other spectators at the ground, before the wave would resume on the other side of the stand. Sociologist John Carroll described the practice of "booing the Members" as dismissive of any claim to authority or superior social status on the members' part, although good-natured and based on the egalitarian nature of watching sports. (As a postscript to the "booing the Members" phenomenon, even when the Members stand was closed due to the reconstruction work, the crowd would still boo, despite the Members' stand being completely empty. When waves were banned (see below), large sections of the Members participated in the protest waves.) Such a feature is also observed at
Lord's, another cricket ground, where the Members in that arena also rarely participate and are booed by the crowd.
Cricket Australia formally banned the wave at home games in 2007 on the grounds that liquids and other objects thrown in the air during the wave posed a danger. The move was not well-received and in some cases served to increase the prevalence of the wave at those games. In one such example,
Adam Gilchrist, the Australian
wicketkeeper, participated in the banned wave from the playing field. The ban continues to be intermittently imposed and lifted by Cricket Australia and Australian police.
Metrics In 2002, Tamás Vicsek of the
Eötvös Loránd University,
Hungary along with his colleagues, analyzed videos of 14 waves at large Mexican football stadiums, developing a standard model of wave behavior (published in
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 , or about 22 seats per second. At any given time the wave is about 15 seats wide. These observations appear to be applicable across different cultures and sports, though details vary in individual cases.
Records During the 2010
Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, an event hosted by comedy TV show hosts
Jon Stewart and
Stephen Colbert, about 210,000 people participated in a wave led by
MythBusters hosts
Jamie Hyneman and
Adam Savage. On 23 June 2019, during the
Rocket League Championship Series (video game e-sports) Season 7 Finals at the
Prudential Center in
Newark, New Jersey, the audience set a new record for a longest continuous wave lasting for 28 minutes and 35 seconds. The previous record was 17 minutes and 14 seconds set by
Tube and their fans at a concert at the
Koshien Stadium in
Nishinomiya, Japan on 23 September 2015. ==See also==