Cheese Rolling at Cooper’s Hill Is as Dangerous as It Sounds, and People Still Do It Every Year

Once a year, a crowd gathers at the top of a hill in Gloucestershire, England. Someone rolls a wheel of cheese down it. Dozens of people immediately throw themselves after it. Nobody can actually catch the cheese. That’s not the point. People do this on purpose, every single year, and have for centuries.

The Hill Is the Real Villain Here

Cooper’s Hill is 180 meters long and brutally steep. It’s the kind of gradient that makes people gasp out loud just looking at it. The grass hides muddy crevasses and loose rocks. Add stinging nettles for good measure. The cheese itself is a wheel of Double Gloucester, wrapped in a protective wooden rim. It gets a short head start, then rockets downhill at speeds up to 80 miles an hour. Nobody’s catching that. The actual winner is just whoever reaches the bottom first, cheese or no cheese.

Here’s the thing nobody quite prepares you for. Almost no competitor stays on their feet. Most people don’t so much run down the hill as fall down it, repeatedly, on purpose, at high speed. Tumbling, rolling, and cartwheeling isn’t a mistake here. It’s basically the strategy.

Somebody Has to Catch You at the Bottom

Since falling is the default outcome, local rugby club members station themselves at the base of the hill. Their job is to physically stop out-of-control competitors before they slam into the crowd. Their job title is, genuinely, “catchers.” It’s a real, necessary safety role, not a joke.

It doesn’t always work. Injuries happen constantly. Broken bones, sprains, dislocations, one competitor reportedly even got struck by lightning. In 1997, 33 people were hurt badly enough that organizers canceled the whole event the following year. It got canceled again in 2010 over safety concerns, which sparked genuine outrage and an actual “Save the Cheese Rolling” campaign. Loyal fans ran an unofficial version anyway. Thousands of people showed up to watch regardless.

There’s Genuinely a Whole Ceremony Around This

Despite the chaos, the event actually has real pageantry built in. A Master of Ceremonies presides over the whole thing in a white jacket and top hat. The hat is wrapped in ribbon to match the decorated cheese. He carries a wooden pole as part of the ceremony. There are seven separate races across the day, four downhill and three uphill, split between men’s, women’s, and children’s categories. Somehow, all that formality sits right next to dozens of adults tumbling headfirst down a hillside chasing dairy.

Nobody’s Actually in Charge of This

Here’s the part that makes the whole thing feel even more unhinged. Cheese Rolling has no official organizing body. Nobody runs it. There’s no sanctioning group to sue if you get hurt, because technically nobody’s responsible. Everyone competes entirely at their own risk. For years, official medical coverage came from St John Ambulance. That stopped in 2012, once nobody was officially managing the event anymore. The woman who supplied the actual cheese for decades once got a personal warning from a police inspector. She could be held liable for injuries, he told her. In 2013, organizers tried using a foam replica cheese instead of a real one to cut down on injuries. People still fell down the hill exactly the same way.

Nobody’s Entirely Sure Why This Started

Nobody actually knows how old this tradition really is. Some say at least 600 years. Others trace it back to the Romans, who once had a fort on the same hill. They may have been the first people to roll something down it, for reasons lost to history. Theories about why it started range from ancient fertility rituals to something far less mystical: maintaining local grazing rights on the land.

Whatever the real reason was, it clearly doesn’t matter anymore. The event has gone properly viral more than once. It’s racked up tens of millions of views online and even landed its own Netflix segment. A German competitor has now won the men’s race three years running. One past champion admitted, on record, that he doesn’t even really like cheese. He still shows up. He still throws himself down the hill. Every year, somebody always does.