When I was a kid, television occasionally devoted itself to highlighting the astonishing things human beings were willing to do—and the equally astonishing number of people willing to gather around and watch them do it.
This was the Golden Age of stuntmen, before CGI allowed superheroes to leap between buildings without anyone actually shattering a pelvis. Back then, if someone launched himself over fourteen buses on a motorcycle, there was a real human being inside the sparkly jumpsuit. He had bones. He had internal organs. Presumably, he also had a mother somewhere asking why he couldn’t have become an accountant.
Evel Knievel was the undisputed king of this particular kingdom. He jumped motorcycles over cars, buses and fountains. He strapped himself into a steam-powered rocket and attempted to launch across Idaho’s Snake River Canyon, because apparently motorcycles were no longer providing enough opportunities for catastrophe.
The rocket’s parachute deployed too early, and the whole thing drifted down into the canyon instead of sailing heroically across it. Naturally, it was televised. This was 1974. America had three major television networks and absolutely no TikTok. If a man planned to fire himself across a canyon in a rocket, we all watched together.
Knievel became almost as famous for crashing as he was for jumping. The widely repeated total is 433 broken bones over the course of his career, although that number has been disputed—even by his own son. Still, “a substantial but administratively uncertain number of fractures” does not look nearly as good on a lunchbox.
As a side note, when Tim was little, he used to tell people Evel Knievel was his dad.
I don’t know how this improves the story, but it remains one of my favorite pieces of Tim-related folklore. I picture six-year-old Tim surrounded by Evel Knievel toys, proudly claiming kinship with America’s most crash-prone man while attempting to recreate the Snake River Canyon launch from the furniture. This may explain things about my husband. It may explain nothing. Either way, it is adorable.
So how does a childhood memory involving motorcycles, rocket launches and Tim’s imaginary stuntman father bring us to a hillside in Gloucestershire, England?
Spectacle.
Beautiful, ridiculous, medically inadvisable spectacle.
I have always been fascinated by those moments when human beings look at a perfectly ordinary object, ignore its intended purpose and ask, “But could we use it to endanger ourselves in front of several thousand people?” Evel Knievel had a motorcycle. The people of Gloucestershire have cheese.
Specifically, they have the Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake.
Yes. Cheese rolling.
Down a hill.
A hill that appears to have been designed by gravity after gravity had been drinking.
The tradition has been documented since at least 1826, although it may be considerably older. Every year, a seven-to-nine-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese is sent down the roughly 200-yard slope. It receives a one-second head start and can reach speeds of around 70 to 80 miles per hour.
The competitors then chase it.
“Chase” may be too generous a word. Chasing suggests an activity in which the legs remain beneath the body and continue participating in an organized fashion. What generally happens at Cooper’s Hill is that competitors take three ambitious steps, lose all contractual agreements with the ground and spend the remainder of the race discovering how many directions the human body can face during a single descent.
The cheese is almost impossible to catch, because it is a compact dairy missile traveling at highway speed. The winner is therefore the first person to cross the finish line at the bottom—running, rolling, bouncing or arriving as a loose collection of formerly coordinated limbs. The prize is the cheese itself, which seems fair. If you have somersaulted down a near-vertical English hillside and still remember your own name, you have earned a snack.
Local rugby players wait at the bottom to catch the tumbling competitors. This is presented as a safety measure, although “we have stationed rugby players downhill to intercept the incoming bodies” feels less like a safety plan and more like the final scene of an action movie.
People are injured. Collarbones are broken. Ankles are twisted. Concussions happen. In 2023, Canadian competitor Delaney Irving won the women’s race despite being knocked unconscious and discovered that she had won only after waking up in the medical enclosure.
That is commitment. I have abandoned household chores because I sat down too close to the couch.
Naturally, I want to go.
Not as a competitor. Let us be very clear about that.
I possess the balance and spatial awareness of a tranquilized giraffe. I have tripped over flat floors, walked into objects that had been stationary for years and injured myself while doing things that would not ordinarily qualify as movement. I do not need a steep hill, loose dirt, dozens of falling strangers and a wheel of Double Gloucester traveling faster than I drive through school zones.
I would make it one step.
Possibly two, if there were a helpful breeze.
Then I would become airborne for reasons unrelated to skill, rotate like an improperly packed suitcase and arrive at the bottom before several parts of my body. The cheese would win. Gravity would win. The British medical system would receive an exciting new case study.
I merely want to watch.
That sounds safe until you encounter an old, unconfirmed tale about a spectator named Billy who was supposedly killed by a runaway cheese while walking up the hill. I can’t find reliable evidence that Billy existed, which means this is almost certainly cheese-rolling folklore.
Almost certainly.
But if anyone could travel all the way to England, wisely decline to throw herself down the hill and then be flattened by the cheese anyway, it would be me. Tim would turn around for five seconds, hear a commotion and discover that his wife had been taken out by lunch.
There is something wonderfully human about Cooper’s Hill. It makes no practical sense. It is dangerous, chaotic and impossible to watch without gasping, laughing and wondering whether everyone involved has signed the appropriate forms. Yet people come from all over the world to race, and thousands more gather to witness it.
Maybe we have not changed much since the days when Evel Knievel climbed onto a motorcycle and America leaned toward its television sets. We still want to see someone challenge gravity. We still admire the courage required to attempt something spectacularly ill-advised. We still remember the crashes better than the landings.
The equipment has simply become more British.
Evel Knievel had a rocket. Cooper’s Hill has a wheel of cheese. Both require courage, questionable judgment and a complete lack of respect for the orthopedic consequences.
And someday, I hope to stand at Cooper’s Hill and watch it happen in person—from a carefully selected location well outside the path of the competitors, the rugby players and any high-velocity dairy products.
I may not be brave enough to chase the cheese. But I am absolutely foolish enough to fly to England to watch somebody else do it.
FIELD REPORT
Glouchester
England • Someday
THE OFFICIAL KIM TRAVEL REPORT
✈️ Likelihood I still want to go: Disturbingly high
🧀 Cheese deployed: One wheel of Double Gloucester per race
🏔️ Hill length: Roughly 200 yards of immediate regret
💨 Possible cheese speed: Up to 70–80 mph
🩹 Kim’s estimated survival odds as a competitor: Statistically impolite
YOUR TURN
Would you chase the cheese, watch from what you hoped was a safe distance, or stay at the pub and wait for the survivors?
WHERE SHOULD KIM GO NEXT?
Do you know about another strange festival, ridiculous competition or delightfully questionable tradition I need to witness?
(preferably somewhere the local cheese remains stationary.)
KEEP WONDERING
Somewhere is always next.
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