“Nobody’s done it three times in a row,” Mike tells me, shoving fistfuls of straw down his trousers.
We are standing on Dover’s Hill, just outside the Cotswold market town of Chipping Campden. “Well, apart from one bloke — Adam Miller,” he concedes. “Five-time champ. But no one in the modern era. I want to retire undefeated.”
Behind us, a plywood castle trembles in the breeze. Spectators pack the steep grassy bank. Welcome to the 413th Cotswold Olimpicks — one of Britain’s oldest and, certainly, strangest sporting events.
The games date back to 1612, when Robert Dover, a wealthy lawyer with a theatrical streak and grudge against the creeping Puritanism of the time, wanted to create an event that would entertain the local community. With royal approval from James I, he established a festival where, as the charter put it, “the people might not only try their strength and activity, but also recreate themselves”.
And so they came: farmers, labourers, wrestlers, drunks, dancers, fiddlers and fighters, pitching themselves against one another on this very hillside. The clergy tried repeatedly to shut it down. Shakespeare is rumoured to have made an appearance. Robert Dover himself was a regular, patrolling the field on horseback in hand-me-down robes from the King.
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