Going back to sports crowds, the Alpe D’Huez is a climb which is featured every few years in the Tour de France. It’s 13.8 km (8.6 mi) long and somewhat of a natural amphitheater.
Yes, that does say A million spectators were claimed for 1997. The same claim was made more recently - 2013 if I remember correctly.
Were there really a million people on the climb? Who knows, nobody is selling tickets. But several hundred thousand seems like a reasonably safe bet.
j
If the Tour de France could sell tickets, it would be the most profitable sports event in the world. A whole nation (sometimes several) watches.
I was just about to ETA this to my previous post. The second photo, Dutch Corner, gives a good impression of the crowds (and the chaos).
j
Interesting fact I learned recently: when untrained people are asked to guess what a chimp gesture might mean, they have twice the likelihood of guessing right than average.
The meaning of the gestures have been determined by careful study of what follows them. And untrained people are given 4 choices and, on average, have a 50% chance of guessing right. I tried two of them and got them both right.
I wish they had tried this on fluent signers. But you know how people without a common language will start gesturing to each other.
Is there some online test for it you’ve got a link for?
Try this:
Napkin math: Adding 100 meters at either end, assuming that it is darn difficult to get a person to occupy less than a square meter, stacking them 4 deep on either side of the road, I get 112,000 or so. A million seems maybe possible (nevermind the logistics of that many people getting there and then going home). I am going to say that I doubt it.
Thanks!
If he had lost, he could have beaten the spectator to death; no court would have convicted him. 
TIL there was a reservoir in South Carolina called Alcohol and Drug Abuse Lake. Today it’s called Village Lake according to Wikipedia.
Fair, and motor sports are one of the few sports I have very little knowledge of. I should have said that from the start.
Someone needs to tell those guys on Dutch Corner that they have one square meter each, and no more than 4 deep.
And that’s when there isn’t even a race going past (!)
But seriously, @eschereal, good starting point - thanks for doing the heavy lifting. And for much of the roadside, the assumptions might be reasonably close to the truth. However, there are certain parts of the route - like Dutch Corner - where the crowds are insanely dense (actually, DC is known more for it’s madness than for being particularly crowded). Plus - and this is probably more significant - Alpe D’Huez consists of 21 hairpins. If you stand away from the road, you can watch (and see!) the race on the road below you. It may well be the case that only a minority of the crowd is actually by the roadside. This video gives a good impression of how the road winds and, at 0.55, you can see the large crowds away from the road.
So if we take your estimate and - ehhh - triple it? - can we agree that sounds plausible?
j
My number was like an average. The corners have large, dense crowds, but the crowds along the stretches tend, I suspect, to be somewhat sparser. And, of course, my figure was conservative. But it is still a long reach, even tripled, to a million.
Yeah, I think “a million” is part of the mythology of the Alpe - nice story but that’s about it. But you can see just in the video still above, there are vast areas away from the road where spectators can (and do) stand and watch. If someone swore blind half a million, I would let it go.
BTW, expect to camp out if you want to watch the race there. There are parts of the logistics of it all that I just don’t want to think about…
j
The local media got hyped up here over parade crowds saying “over half a million” attended along a 2 km long route. Assuming the 1 sq m per person rule, you could fit 2,000 people on each side of the street. To get half a million, you would need crowds over 100 deep. (there’s room for maybe 6 or 7 deep on the sidewalk)…
When I pointed this out to a radio station, future newscasts stated “tens of thousands” attended.
Baseball - the top home run hitter of the 1960’s wasn’t Mickey Mantle (256). It wasn’t Hank Aaron (375). It wasn’t Willie Mays (350). It wasn’t Willie McCovey (300).
It was Harmon Killebrew (393), who played several season with the worst team in MLB at the time - the Washington Senators (before they moved to Minnesota). He’s 12th on the all-time career home run hitters.
TIL that young men in some of the US were required to swim almost naked (they did wear caps if that counts) in high school. NPR article here thankfully since I wasn’t sure how to Google it:Naked in High School: Bad Dreams Do Come True : NPR
Curiously, this has come up more than once before on this Board.
Interesting. We didn’t have a pool at my high school and since our town had beaches on two bodies of salt water, everyone learned to swim in grade school.
@panache45 has written about his experience with this in high school. I’m pretty certain they did this at my high school, too, before I attended.