“It’s fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A!“. Especially when you’re in El Paso. Nearly 20 years ago, the Sun City broke a world record involving both the Village People & their hit song “YMCA”.
El Paso broke the record for “Largest YMCA Dance” during a Sun Bowl game
That probably sounds like one of the most random sentences you’ve heard all day but it’s true. On New Years Eve in 2008, during the halftime show for the 2008 Sun Bowl game between Oregon State & Pitt, the Village People took centerfield and when they started performing “YMCA”, the crowd got into it…REALLY into it.
Over 40,000 people (40,148 participants to be exact) danced to the YMCA dance. If you don’t believe me, here’s the official Guinness World Record link that proves it.
So is there footage of the crowd dancing? Well it’s a little hard to find; if you watched the game when it broadcasted on tv back in 2008, you would have. There are videos that talk about the game on YouTube; most of the sports experts would say it wasn’t exactly the best Sun Bowl game. ESPN even joked about it in 2023 saying “I went to see ‘YMCA’ and a football game broke out”.
However there IS some footage of the dance online; there’s also this Youtube video by a user named “sunshineelpaso” that shows a commercial that called for people to come to the Sun Bowl game in hopes to break the record. (Which obviously it worked!)…