The New York Ticker-Tape Parade is now part of the US Women's Football Team

A parade of moving strips in Lower Manhattan is pretty much the return par excellence for American heroes. It is therefore normal for the conquering US women's football team, which won the World Cup on Sunday, to play its second parade in four years in the "Canyon of Heroes" in New York on Wednesday morning. It's an appropriate honor after one of the most dominant performances we've ever seen in the history of sport.

The current shows in NYC are geared almost exclusively to teams like the one that Megan Rapinoe led to the glory of the championship. Including the last two parades won by the footballers, the sporting heroes have won 11 of the last 12 parades in New York in 25 years. (The only exception was in 1998, when 77-year-old John Glenn and the rest of the Discovery crew had been honored.) But that was not always the case. Although nearly 18% of 196 parades in the New York database in the Wikipedia database have commemorated sports achievements over the years, it ranks far behind the parades of important heads of state (38). %) and military personalities (20%). Before the sport took its recent form, it accounted for only 13% of the parades, about the same share of famous (non-astronaut) adventurers such as pilot Amelia Earhart and the Explorer Richard Byrd.

Here is an overview of the 196 New York ribbons parades listed in our dataset, sorted by year and type:

When we retrace the whole history of these parades, some points stand out:

• Sport is everything now. Athletes have always had some glory in the parade, but there have been as many sporting events in the last 25 years as in the past 40 years, even as the total number of shows has dropped dramatically. And even if you think maybe a championship parade in New York requires the victory of a New York-based team – which has not been done much since the end of the last Yankees dynasty in 2000 – the city is also famous for organizing a big party for the Olympians. , successful national teams like the USWNT and even individuals like Sammy Sosa (yes, really) after the Dominican-born championship player hit 66 homeruns and helped bring relief to the victims of the hurricane Georges in 1998
• They certainly loved their parades in the 1950s and 1960s. Almost half (48%) of all the parades on the list took place in the 1950s and 1960s alone. With the celebration of sport – New York's premier baseball, as well as great individual athletes such as Althea Gibson and Ben Hogan – it was the perfect time for visiting dignitaries (50 heads of state had parades ) and war heroes (21 military parades) to be honored as a result of the Second World War. And then came the advent of the space program, which spawned many parades of astronauts after the achievements of the programs Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. The space race represented a peak for parades of moving strips; The astronauts would be celebrated eight times from 1962 to 1971, and the end of the Apollo program in 1972 coincided with a sharp decrease in the number of organized parades. (The bankruptcy of the city in 1975 did not solve the problem either.)
• The 1920s and 1930s were a privileged time for adventurers. The first major parade began in the early 1920s, shortly after the end of the First World War. Initially, the winners were what you expected: dignitaries from abroad, military leaders, heroic sea rescuers, etc. But by the middle of the decade, parades began to honor expeditions such as trips to the North Pole and transatlantic flights. From 1926 to 1938, more parades were devoted to adventurous achievements (19 in total) than all other reasons combined (18).
• There was some weird an apology for launching fashion shows over the years. If you browse the list of shows, you are guaranteed to have at least a moment of "Wait, why?". Among our strange favorite commemorations included … Loved Tschiffely, the Swiss-Argentine professor who embarked on a solo horse ride from Buenos Aires to New York; Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan, a pilot who accidentally traveled to Ireland (instead of California) from New York; the 48 European journalists who participated in an "American discovery" flight around the United States in 1949; the Order of the Knights of Pythias, a secret society that had its own parade in 1955; pianist Van Cliburn, who won the Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow in 1958; separate parades, two weeks apart, for the first woman to swim in the Channel and the first mother to swim in the English Channel; The Marquis Jacques de Dampierre, who attended a parade of 1930 because his ancestor, long deceased, was the hero of the war of independence, Lafayette; and Connie Mack, who was honored in New York for leading a Philadelphia cream baseball team for 50 years. If you'd like to learn more about NYC's history with useless parades, David Matthews of Splinter wrote on the subject before the USWNT show four years ago.
• These things are rare now. If you are in the New York area on Wednesday and you have a chance to watch the US women's team parade, you should probably take a look at it. These massive celebrations were held several times a year, but we are lucky if we have one every three or four years. And if anyone on this list deserves praise, it is this American team. In a call for equal pay, this is only the 12th Canyon of Heroes parade dedicated entirely to women. Before the 2015 USWNT parade, it was 55 years since the woman was the only subject of the parade. Now, American women have won each of the last two. This is a remarkable feat – and an event worth celebrating in Lower Manhattan.