Sport Aid
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sport Aid (also known as Sports Aid) was a charitable event held on May 25, 1986, raising millions of pounds to support famine relief in Africa, and is the sporting event with the most participants in history.
The event was organised by Bob Geldof, also the driving force behind Band Aid (1984) and Live Aid (1985), and took place in 78 countries simultaneously. At 15:00 GMT on Sunday May 25, 1986, tens of millions of participants around the world ran, jogged or walked 10 kilometres with sponsorships or donations given to support African famine relief charities.
274 cities held official events to allow over 20 million participants to follow designated courses with television coverage shown worldwide. London saw 200,000 runners complete the course, and Barcelona hosted 50,000. In addition countless millions of further runners set out at the same time to run around their local village or park, or simply to take part in this global event. Only in the United States was the event a comparative failure, due in part to its clash with the better-publicized Hands Across America, and only 4,000 took part in the New York event.
Two charity singles were released in the United Kingdom to publicize and raise money for the event: the Tears for Fears song "Everybody wants to rule the world" was re-recorded as "Everybody wants to run the world" in 1986, and Status Quo recorded "Running All Over the World" in 1988.
[edit] References
- Sport Aid Details about the Sport Aid events.
