This has fascinated me for decades. Every year dozens of people sign up to throw themselves down a steep-ass hill in the UK to be the first to catch a wheel of double gloucester cheese that was just rolled down the hill in front of them. Winner keeps the cheese. It’s like a pack of wolves with absolutely no coordination running down a rabbit. There are injuries every year, but amazingly there aren’t many and people seem to generally walk away unbroken – though absolutely roughed up and bone-rattled. This year the most infamous competitor didn’t even win the cheese, but they did win best footage – “Flying Man” caught some serious air, and seemed to fold in on himself after making contact with the ground again. In one of the angles captured he appears to fall out of view and straight into oblivion, prompting many viewers to wonder if he was still amongst the living. There were two people who did travel to hospital during the event, but Flying Man was reportedly treated at the scene and came out fairly unscathed.
What we do know for sure is that there is going to be an uptick in people visiting local physiotherapists around the Cooper’s Hill area. Would you ever try something this brutal and absurd?
The video below isn’t from this year, but it has some of the wildest super-slow-mo footage of the annual event as The Slow Mo Guys set up to catch the chaos from 2024’s races.
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