In most sports, you have audience members cheering, supporting their team, yelling, and more! The closest thing to memory competitions is chess, but you don’t see the audience in chess do anything except sit there quietly.
This is the same atmosphere and actions from the audience during memory competitions. When you are memorizing, you need to be 100% focused and even the smallest distraction can ruin the whole memorization trial.
I believe memory athletes need to be training for distractions so if they fail because they got distracted by something, it is their fault they failed. The only exception would be spoken numbers since you need to hear the numbers clearly.
I feel the audience members should be involved more in the competition by letting them cheer, react, have signs, and other things along these lines. But something unique to memory could be the audience deciding which events or style of events should be played.
Of course this involves innovation in competitions themselves, but having the audience vote on the next event they want to see and the style would make it so much more fun for the audience.
I think having an engaging audience would make memory competitions more popular since people would want to go since they can do things instead of just watching people stare at a screen or piece of paper.
What do you think the audience should be allow to do? How can they engage more in the actual competition?
