[WATCH] Mexico City Attempted To Break The World Record For The Largest Human Wave
Ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, thousands of Mexicans dressed in the national team's iconic green gathered along the Paseo de la Reforma, one of the most famous boulevards in the world, and attempted to break the Guinness World Record for the largest human wave ever performed, surpassing the previous record of 157,574 people set at a NASCAR event in Tennessee back in 2008. The Paseo de la Reforma was chosen deliberately: its long straight length makes it ideal for a visible, continuous wave, and it sits in a city with deep personal ties to the phenomenon itself, since it was at the 1986 FIFA World Cup held in Mexico that the wave was first broadcast to a truly global audience, cementing its association with the country in the minds of billions of viewers. Guinness World Records officials are now analyzing evidence from the attempt to determine whether the record has been officially broken. Mexico City is holding its breath.
What many people do not know, however, is that the wave may not have been invented in Mexico at all. An American cheerleader and performer known as Krazy George Henderson claims to have initiated and directed the first ever crowd wave at a baseball game in Oakland, California in 1981, where after two failed attempts he managed to get a wave to travel around the entire stadium on his third try and sustain it on his fourth, describing the reaction as the place going completely crazy. The wave went unnoticed globally until it was broadcast during the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, which is where it earned the name the Mexican Wave in most countries outside North America. Scientists have since studied it seriously: a 2002 paper published in Nature found that a typical human wave travels clockwise at roughly 12 meters per second and requires as few as 25 to 35 people to initiate in a large stadium. The math behind it turns out to be identical to the equations that describe the spread of a forest fire or the propagation of an electrical signal through heart tissue, making the most joyful thing people do in stadium stands also, quietly, one of the most elegant collective phenomena in physics.
