This NC State grad got on a roll — a cheesy one — in England. She survived and won!
To read how N.C. State graduate Abby Lampe did in at the 2024 Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling, see this story.
For years, North Carolina’s Abby Lampe dreamed of getting crowned cheese-rolling champion, notching the fastest time in the annual tumble down a bumpy English hillside, where the object is to bounce after a rolling wheel of double Gloucester without ending up in traction.
Wearing her Wolfpack sweatshirt, she stood at the top of the 200-yard drop, which slopes as dramatically as a ski slope, pondering her strategy: head-first or barrel roll?
But in a race so absurdly violent, alongside competition with such superhuman pain tolerance, there can be no strategy other than reckless disregard for personal safety.
So she flung herself down in full cheese pursuit, enduring one involuntary somersault after another until she finished in a heap, her head spinning but otherwise unscathed.
“I looked up and asked, ‘Did I win?’ “ she recalled Monday. “I was still a little dizzy.”
Hazardous and ridiculous
Lampe, who graduated from N.C. State University in May, took first place in the women’s race at the annual Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling — an event so hazardous and ridiculous that ambulances wait to cart off injured contestants.
Thought to date back six centuries, the British jubilee outside Gloucester may be a holdover from pagan ceremonies that involve rolling objects downhill.
Or it may be connected to requirements over grazing rights on the grassy knolls.
Regardless, the competitors must follow a 7- to 9-pound chunk of hard cheese on its perilous descent of a 200-yard hill that slopes roughly 50 degrees.
“I came prepared,” Lampe said. “I packed my volleyball pads and my basketball pads.”
Despite its reputation for casualties, and its competitors’ reputation for hardiness, the cheese roll was forced to take a two-year pandemic hiatus. So Lampe, who discovered the event through Internet videos, was forced to wait.
Meanwhile, she practiced, rolling down the steepest sledding hills at Dorothea Dix Park, and she repeated her mantra: Be the cheese.
“I was thinking to myself, ‘This is going to be a very painful experience,’ “ she said. “But it’s going to be a very painful experience for 15 seconds.“
‘She’s a cheese roller!’
On the way down, she first sensed trouble when the treeline changed its angle in her field of vision, meaning the horizon was no longer in its normal place. But she surrendered to gravity, much like a barrel-rider on Niagara Falls, and waited for the buffeting to subside.
“She’s a cheese roller!” shouted a spectator caught on her Instagram video.
As she basked in cheesy triumph, she wondered how to ship her 9-pound dairy product prize home to her parents in Clayton, a four-hour process she found trickier than navigating the hillside.
But as she waited to fly home to Raleigh, Lampe wandered into a Gloucester pub, passed around her trophy and enjoyed the hospitality afforded only to cheese medalists.
“Let’s just say,” she said, “I got about six drinks bought for me.”
This story is part of our regular “On the Bright Side” feature. Got a suggestion for a story that will bring a smile to our readers? E-mail Josh Shaffer at jshaffer@newsobserver.com.
This story was originally published June 6, 2022 at 11:39 AM.