The cost of attending Penn Relays

Based on a tweet by my colleague and predecessor David Gurian-Peck last Saturday, I decided to do a little analysis of just how much the 54,310 track fans were paying to see the Fastest Man in the World, Usain Bolt, run at the Relays.

David tweeted: "Part of me regrets missing Bolt. But at $40/8.79 = $4.50 per second, that has to be the most expensive sporting event in America."

So I threw together a little spreadsheet calculating the average cost per minute of attending various professional sporting events, as well as more marquee events such as the World Series, Super Bowl, and my favorite, a Penn Basketball game in the Palestra with a $7 Red and Blue Crew ticket.

For the Relays I did three calculations, one (rather ridiculous) implies that the ticket holder only watched Bolt's leg of the race. the next assumes the ticket holder watched only that 4x100 race, and the third assumes a fan stayed from 7a.m. until 6p.m. when the Relays closed. As you can see, the Bolt-only price blows the competition out of the water. Only the Super Bowl eclipsed the 39.9 second 4x100 relay race.

Interestingly, an MLB game and a seat in the Penn student section came out at the bottom of the list (disregarding anyone who actually stayed at the Relays for 11 hours...). However, given the dwindling numbers of student fans actually attending games in the Red and Blue Crew this year, I think a price cut may be in order before we see the Palestra nearly as close to capacity as was Franklin Field Saturday for Usain Bolt.

Disclaimer: This is in no way scientific — I got most of the avg. ticket prices off of the internet, but they seem accurate enough, and I think it paints an interesting picture. It also does not factor in the entire length of the sporting event (except baseball), but instead accounts for only regulation time, as this was easier for me to do without finding some obscure numbers.