The Stadium Wave Was Started in 1981 by a Cheerleader Named Krazy George

George Henderson, who has spent five decades as a professional crowd-leader under the name Krazy George, points to October 15, 1981. The Oakland Athletics were hosting the New York Yankees in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series. The crowd was restless. Henderson tried something he had been working up at minor-league hockey games in San Jose: he cued one section to stand and yell, then the next, then the next, around the bowl. After three failed attempts, the wave caught and went all the way around. ABC's broadcast captured it. Henderson has the tape.

There is a counter-claim. Robb Weller and Dave Hunter, two University of Washington students, ran a similar effect at a Husky football game on October 31, 1981 — sixteen days later. Their version moved vertically through the bleachers before going around. Both groups insist their wave was independent. The Oakland date is on film; the Husky version went on to be more famous in college football.

The move spread to soccer at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, where Mexican fans, having no English shorthand, simply called it 'la ola' — the wave. International television carried it to crowds who had never seen one before. Within a few years it had become a global stadium reflex, performed at cricket matches, NBA games, the Olympics. Croatia's pre-game ritual at Euro 2024 still includes a synchronized clockwise wave, and the Wimbledon Championships have to ask audiences to stop trying it during play.

A 2002 paper in Nature, by Tamás Vicsek and colleagues at Eötvös Loránd University, modeled stadium waves as wave fronts in excitable media — the same math used for cardiac tissue. They found a stadium wave moves at about 12 meters per second and is almost always clockwise.