Sporting Pilgrimages That Have Nothing to Do With the Sport Itself

Some of the best reasons to travel for a sporting event have almost nothing to do with the sport itself. These are two of them.

Monza's tifosi, and a wait that lasted nine years

Ferrari's home crowd doesn't behave like a normal race-day audience. At Monza, the grandstands turn into a genuine sea of red, red-white-green smoke flares mark every Ferrari highlight — qualifying, the start, a podium — and when a Ferrari finishes on the podium, the circuit opens its gates and lets fans flood the track to stand beneath it. It's officially recognized as one of the sport's most celebrated recurring traditions, not a spontaneous one-off.

That tradition means the most in years when Ferrari has something worth celebrating, and 2019 was one of those years. Charles Leclerc's win at Monza that September ended a nine-year home drought for the team — Ferrari's last Italian Grand Prix victory before that had been Fernando Alonso's, back in 2010. When the gates opened after Leclerc's win, the invasion wasn't just tradition playing out. It was nine years of waiting finally landing somewhere.

You don't need to be a Ferrari fan to feel that. You need to be standing in the crowd when it happens.

The Wimbledon Queue, which is basically its own small city for a night

Wimbledon reserves a real block of tickets every single day of the Championships for anyone willing to simply turn up and wait — no ballot, no hospitality package, just The Queue. Fans camp overnight in Wimbledon Park with tents (two-person maximum), and the setup is more organized than "sleeping outside" makes it sound: bottle stations, toilets, first aid tents, and food stalls are all part of the infrastructure, with quiet hours enforced after 10pm.

Stewards wake campers around 6am to pack up — overnight gear goes to a left-luggage facility for a small fee — and the queue tightens into formation to let early-morning arrivals join behind. Tickets go on sale at 9:45am, grounds open at 10am, and if you want a real shot at Centre Court or No.1 Court, conventional wisdom says you need to be in line before midday the day before.

It's a genuinely strange thing to do on purpose — camp in a park overnight for the right to buy a ticket — and it's also one of the only remaining ways an ordinary fan can walk up and get into one of sport's most exclusive events without a connection or a five-figure hospitality budget. The tennis is the reason people eventually go inside. The Queue itself is why so many of them talk about it afterward.