“The game is a brutal exhibition, without a single redeeming feature, and it is a disgrace to any civilized community that it should be tolerated.” – The New York Evening Post commenting about football in 1878.
—
It’s called Cheese Rolling and the premise is fairly simple: to chase an 8 lb. roll of Gloucester cheese down a steep incline. To do this you’ll be joined by dozens of other cheese chasers although, in reality, you’re really not chasing the cheese, you’re doing everything you can to be the first one to the bottom of the hill. Then you get the cheese.
Of course this isn’t just any hill. Cooper’s Hill is not a gently undulating slope, but rather a steep plunge that risks serious injury. The hill’s description is enough to make one think twice about participating in this bizarre, yet mesmerizing, annual event.
The 250-yard [230 meter] racecourse is a short, sharp drop full of dips, bulges and any number of perils, seen or unseen: long, ankle-twisting grass, patches of slick decomposing leaves; gravel outcrops lurking under the turf; tufted islands jutting up unexpectedly; eroded foot-traps masked by grass; not to mention big, fat Roman snails and the odd duck’s nest.
Rather than a gradual incline, the hill drops away at a near seventy-degree angle, then quickly shifts to fifty-degrees, then plunges again, then levels out, then falls one last time before abruptly flattening out – leaving runners only a few scant yards to stop before crashing into a cottage fence at the bottom of the hill.
In short, it’s a natural obstacle course containing just about every impediment Mother Nature could come up with, making it difficult to walk down, let alone run.
Despite the imminent peril of Cooper’s Hill, cheese rolling is now an international event drawing elite athletes from all over the globe. This year’s feature race pitted Chris Anderson – the local legend and 23-time winner – against Tom Kopke, the 24-year-old German YouTuber who has won the previous two years. Anderson came out of retirement specifically to face him, but Kopke ended up winning his third consecutive title.
The other races were won by competitors from the Netherlands, France and the United States. The Dutch winner is the son and brother of world-champion speed skaters.
To see this event is to understand its grotesque appeal. It’s a sport made for the YouTube generation. A veritable cornucopia of physical mayhem with the vast majority of the competitors seen spinning and tumbling wildly out of control.
Most of the infinite tumbles are involuntarily but there are some who use the chaos as part of the strategy. And rest assured, there is a strategy.
Chris Anderson says control is more important than maximum speed. Dutch winner Niels Wennemars says remaining upright is the key. Abby Lampe’s championship method was essentially controlled rolling and there are now parkour athletes studying every inch of the terrain for clues on how to solve it..
That people are now studying the athletic mastery needed to conquer Copper’s Hill says a lot about cheese rolling and its potential place in the sporting pantheon. The moment a sport appears that has competitors disagreeing about technique, training specifically for the event and transferring knowledge from other disciplines, this so-called “stupid activity” suddenly becomes real, as in, a real sport.
“To the uninitiated, a football match appears to be nothing but a chaotic, brutal scramble for physical supremacy… Yet beneath this rough exterior, there is a developing science. If the physical danger can be mitigated by strict laws, it may yet prove to be a worthy test of tactical intelligence and discipline.” – The Princetonian 1885
A sport, at its core, is nothing more than a shared absurdity which means there are no inherently serious sports, only established games where the absurdity has been normalized through repetition and familiarity.
All sports, in their infancy, look utterly ridiculous. A man throwing a ball at another man holding a stick is infinitely odd, but the oddity begins to disappear the more we repeat the absurdity. This is why cheese rolling looks bizarre at this point in its lifespan when compared to an established game like baseball.
The actions in both sports are inherently arbitrary. It’s just that one of them has had more time to ripen. As the absurdity becomes normalized the actions become formalized and once we have a baseline this odd human pursuit suddenly becomes what we’d call a recognized sport. Time and repetition set the standard.
All sports follow the same pathway as they grow. In the beginning, play begins where immediate necessity ends. As philosopher Bernard Suits puts it:“Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”
We play because we can, not because we need to.
Sport is a voluntary difficulty. We invent a physical objective and then deliberately prohibit the easiest way of accomplishing it. In soccer, using your hands would be a much more efficient way to put the ball into the net but we choose to make it harder for ourselves because we want the challenge. Without a steep hill to climb the task becomes too easy and too accessible.
The task also has no inherent meaning. A ball passing through a hoop is ridiculously pointless until we make it worth two points. Then it has a purpose. And when these points – these hoop throws – accumulate, you suddenly have a competition.
Any meaning in sport is purely invented which makes the results simultaneously real and unreal. Winning a championship essentially changes nothing in nature but it starts to matter when people agree that mastering this particular unnecessary problem deserves some recognition. In the end we reward a trophy for this absurd, but now recognized, action.
This continuous repetition turns the acts in this absurdity into skills. Someone tries something. Someone else discovers a better method of doing it and, before long, technique emerges, performance improves and comparison between them becomes possible.
We then mandate rules. Rules that make the achievement legible and fair to all who compete. These rules allow everyone to understand what’s difficult, what’s permitted, who’s succeeded, and why the result counts.
As the formalization of the sport continues the ridiculousness of the original absurdity is buried under formalities like uniforms, terminology, records, stadiums and traditions. This once-arbitrary activity now is becoming a serious venture.
Cheese rolling has entered this stage. It’s beyond fringe but nowhere near “legitimate” although it’s certainly moving in that direction. Netflix had already devoted the opening episode of We Are the Champions to cheese rolling in 2020 and with its increased exposure and participation the sport is starting to reach critical mass.
“Only those who have seen a game ended in friendly mud, blood and bruises can understand the strong hold that football is taking on the fancies of the public. It is an imported infection whose germs have been carefully propagated.” – The Overland Monthly in 1894
Whether cheese rolling becomes a “real” sport we don’t know yet. The better cheese rolling becomes as an athletic discipline, the worse it may become as accidental comedy.
First, it’s an absurdity but once the absurdity is normalized it becomes legitimate. And once the absurdity becomes legitimate it becomes a sport – an agreement amongst the masses to fixate on this absurdity, as if it really matters.
As if an armour-clad athlete wearing an arbitrary number while crossing an arbitrary painted line while clutching an air-filled bladder actually means something. And it does for those who not only accept the absurdity but thoroughly enjoy it.
Familiarity divides sports into false categories where established sports occupy the “worthy” pile while newer activities remain visibly ridiculous because their cultural camouflage is incomplete because they simply haven’t been at it long enough.
If a football player can be cheered on by 80,000 spectators inside a $2-billion stadium, who’s to say that a sport where a man dressed in a Dutch flag, chasing dairy down a steep hill in the English countryside can’t be The Next Big Thing?