CANADIAN CHASED CHEESE WHEEL DOWN A HILL AND WON, DESPITE BEING KNOCKED UNCONSCIOUS

LONDON (AP) — The big cheese of extreme U.K. sports events is back.

Hundreds of spectators gathered Monday to watch dozens of reckless racers chase a 7-pound (3 kilogram) wheel of Double Gloucester cheese down the near-vertical Cooper’s Hill, near Gloucester in southwest England.

The first racer to finish behind the fast-rolling cheese gets to keep it.

The cheese-rolling race has been held at Cooper’s Hill, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of London, since at least 1826, and the sport of cheese-rolling is believed to be much older.

The rough-and-tumble event often comes with safety concerns. Few competitors manage to stay on their feet all the way down the 200-yard (180 meter) hill, and this year several had to be helped, limping, from the course.

Canadian contestant Delaney Irving won the women’s race despite being briefly knocked unconscious.

The 19-year-old Canadian tourist apparently did not actually realize she had won the competition until she regained consciousness in a medical tent shortly after, Jennifer Hassan writes for The Washington Post.

“How are you? You took a hell of a tumble,” one British interviewer asked Irving, shortly after she regained consciousness after bumping her head, Washington Post reports. Irving replied: “Did I?” In comments to the BBC, she said the event was “good . . . now that I remember it.”

“I just remember hitting my head, and now I have the cheese,” said Irving, who comes from Nanaimo, British Columbia, Associated Press reports.

The teenager was one of hundreds of racers who chased a seven-pound full-fat hard cheese named “Double Gloucester.”

Matt Crolla, 28, from Manchester in northwestern England, won the first of several men’s races. Asked how he had prepared, he told reporters: “I don’t think you can train for it, can you? It’s just being an idiot.”

— With additional inputs from The Washington Post

2023-05-31T14:05:01Z dg43tfdfdgfd