Worst sporting disaster

The worst sporting disaster occurred in Fidenae, near Rome, Italy, in 27 CE. According to accounts written by the Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, a wooden amphitheatre – built as a commercial venture by a freedman named Atilius – collapsed during a gladiatorial contest. In Tacitus's Annals, he states that 50,000 people were killed or seriously injured, while Suetonius, in his The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, gives a death toll of 20,000.

The dead and injured included both people who were inside the stadium and others who were in the arcade of shops and stalls that lined that exterior. Tacitus gives the cause of the collapse as poor foundations and a badly jointed timber frame; he also mentions that the stadium may have been overcrowded. While exact figures are impossible to determine, Tacitus' harrowing descriptions of the long search and rescue operation that followed, and the many disputes regarding the identification of the dead, imply that the death toll was very high, and so can be said to be broadly consistent with Suetonius's account.

In ancient times, another terrible stadium disaster occurred in the Circus Maximus resulting in the death of 1,112 people in 140 AD. The incident is mentioned in the Historia Augusta but as with the Fidenae disaster, and most incidents in the ancient era, sources are scant.

In more recent times, tragedies have occurred as a result of the stadium collapsing (more than 600 died at the Happy Valley Racecourse in Hong Kong on 26 February 1918 after a terrace collapsed and started a large fire), of riots triggered by events on the pitch (320 killed were killed in Lima, Peru, in 1964 after a pitch invasion and police retaliation resulted in a stampede), and adverse weather (in 1986, a freak hailstorm during a soccer match in Kathmandu caused a panic that killed 39).

The worst sporting disaster where the deaths were caused directly by the sport itself was during the 24 Hours of Le Mans motor race at Circuit de la Sarthe in Le Mans in 1955. A total of 83 onlookers and driver Pierre Levegh were killed and another 120 injured after an automobile collision resulted in Pierre Levegh's Mercedes-Benz 300SLR being launched into the spectator area at 125 mph.