Say cheese: 21-year-old American wins UK cheese rolling contest

Abby Lampe is the winner of the 2022 Cooper’s Hill Cheese Roll, a centuries-long tradition in Gloucestershire that is a self-billed extreme sport.

Lampe, who learned about the cheese roll through social media and a Netflix show, is the first American female to win the annual event in England. A recent graduate of NC State, she’s spending the summer in Europe before beginning work in October and told Sports Illustrated that she “100 percent prepared for it.”

“I actually watched hours of film in the week leading up to the cheese race,” she said. “Because I wanted to understand their strategies and where they started from and how they rolled.”

As the winner, Lampe got to keep an eight-pound block of Double Gloucester cheese. She intends to do an unveiling of the cheese with her family when she gets back to the States in August.