Ready, Set, Cheese Roll!

This annual cheese rolling race in England has racers bumping and rolling for a chance at victory.

Competitors tumble to the finish line during the 2025 Cooper’s Hill cheese rolling competition. Germany’s Tom Kopke (center) won the race.

Each year at the end of May, about 5,000 people gather to watch an event that’s about as dangerous as it is silly: the Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling race. This fascinating spectacle has people running, rolling, and bumping down a steep hill in pursuit of a runaway wheel of cheese. The first person to cross the line at the bottom of the hill wins the race, glory, and the cheese.

The Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling race has been a local event in Gloucestershire, England, for at least 200 years but now has a devoted global following. The racers hurl themselves down a 50 percent grade slope for about 650 feet (200 meters), trying to catch a 7-pound (3-kilogram) wheel of Double Gloucester cheese. Strategies to win the race include sideways rolling or running until an eventual fall. Falls and injuries are nearly a guarantee for this event.

(left) Tom Kopke of Germany and (right) Alix Heugas of France won this year’s race and a wheel of cheese each. Kopke is holding up three fingers because this was his third victory.

This year’s event took place on May 25 and had a total of four downhill races and some less-dangerous uphill races. Alix Heugas, from France, started the women’s race running and upright but slipped almost immediately. At that point, Heugas said, she just “armadillo rolled” her way down and balled herself up as she tumbled to a first-place finish.

“It was way bumpier than I thought it’d be,” she told the BBC in a postrace interview while holding her victory wheel of Gloucester.

German YouTuber Tom Kopke took home the cheese in the first men’s downhill race of the day, making him a three-time Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling winner. The other 2026 downhill race winners were Niels Wennemars from the Netherlands and Otto Linkogle from the United States.

Did You Know?

The world’s biggest food fight is an annual festival! Thousands of people throw more than 100 tons of tomatoes at each other during La Tomatina, an event in Buñol, Spain.

Off the Beaten Path: Weird Races Around the World

England isn’t the only country with a weird local race! Here are some other fun (and funny) races that draw competitors from around the world:

Japan’s Office Chair Street Racing

An exhausted competitor takes part in an office chair race in Japan.

Office workers need helmets and knee pads for office chair racing, a growing sport in Japan. Teams of racers take turns scooting backward on rolling office chairs as they race around the course. The winning team completes the most laps around the course within the two-hour time limit. Office chair racing started in 2010 in Kyoto, but other cities have now set up their own races. Prizes include food staples like rice and tuna.

Dutch Headwind Cycling

Competitors take part in the Dutch Headwind Cycling Championship in 2022.

How do you make a challenging bike race in a country that has no mountains? The answer is to race into a storm! The Dutch Headwind Cycling Championship takes place on an incredibly windy day in the Netherlands, a relatively flat country known for its strong cycling culture. The racers must ride an old-fashioned bike (no gears and only pedal brakes) for 5.5 miles (9 kilometers) directly into gale-force winds blowing about 40 miles per hour. Now there is a race that can blow you away!

Finnish Wife-Carrying Competition

Joseph Prezioso—AFP/Getty Images

Competitors take part in the 23rd North American Wife Carrying Championship in Newry, Maine, in 2022.

Despite its funny name, Finland’s Wife-Carrying Competition is for any pair of racers, regardless of gender or relationship status. However, there is one rule that is nonnegotiable: someone must be carried. A racer carries their “wife” on their back or shoulders as they run through a course of hills, obstacles, and sometimes pools of water. The race may have originated with Herkko “Robber” Ronkainen, a man who ran a bandit group that tested men’s strength by their ability to carry large sacks of grain on their backs. Today the race is gaining international fandom and has spread from Finland to the United States and the United Kingdom.

What Is Birling?

Sarah Hadley watches as Elie Davenport hits the water during a pair log rolling competition in the U.S. state of Minnesota.

Don’t worry if you have not heard about birling—many haven’t! But maybe you have heard of logrolling, which is the same thing. Birling is a competition that requires balance and fast feet to try to stay on a floating tree trunk without falling into the water.

Learn more about this interesting contest at Britannica.

WORD OF THE WEEK

outlandish

PART OF SPEECH:

adjective

Definition:

: very strange or unusual : extremely different from what is normal or expected

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Word Flower

How many words can you make from the letters in the flower? All words must use the letter in the center.

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“In the News: Ready, Set, Cheese Roll!” Britannica School, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 21 June 2026. https://news.eb.com/level2/ready-set-cheese-roll Accessed 22 June 2026 [Replace this date with today’s date.]