Largest Snowball Fights
On January 22, 2010, 5,387 people in Taebaek, Republic of Korea, set the world record for most people engaged in a snowball fight.
However, historical studies of snowball fights point to Leuven, Belgium as the actual snowball capital of the world. A recent snowball fight there (on October 14, 2009) broke the world record for the largest snowball fight ever recorded in history. Students from the University of Pennsylvania helped create and fund this fight which reached 5,768 participants, the largest yet recorded.
On February 6, 2010, some 2,000 people met at Dupont Circle in Washington D.C.. for a snowball fight organized over the internet after over two feet of snow fell in the region during The North American blizzard of 2010. The event was promoted via Facebook and Twitter. At least a half-dozen D.C. and U.S. Park police cars were positioned around Dupont Circle throughout the snowball fight. Minor injuries were reported.
On December 9, 2009, an estimated crowd of over 4,000 students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison participated in a snowball fight on Bascom Hill. There were reports of several injuries, mainly broken noses, and a few incidences of vandalism, mainly stolen lunch trays from Memorial Union. The snowball fight was scheduled weeks in advance, and was helped by the fact that the University canceled all classes due to 12-16 inches of snow that fell the night before. However, this snowball fight failed to break the record set in October of the same year in Leuven.
During the American Civil War, on January 29, 1863, the largest military snow exchange occurred in the Rappahannock Valley in Northern Virginia. What began as a few hundred men from Texas plotting a friendly fight against their Arkansas camp mates soon escalated into a brawl that involved 9,000 soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia.
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