Latest news with #daredevil
Daily Mail
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Footage reveals the fate of mystery daredevil whose backflips down cheese-rolling hill went viral
A daredevil cheese-rolling contestant whose backflips went viral on social media was 'reluctantly' led away by paramedics at the bottom of the hill, MailOnline can reveal. The man, who was dressed in a cloak and coined himself the 'Cheese Wizard', was seen doing flying somersaults down the steep descent in Gloucestershire on Bank Holiday Monday. Members of the crowd at the event - which sees racers pursue a wheel of 7lb Double Gloucester cheese - looked on in horror as he landed flat on his back. However a fellow contestant, who spoke to the 'Cheese Wizard' at the top of the hill, has now said he saw him trying to walk off on his own after the fall. It comes as new footage of the man, who reportedly escaped without breaking any bones, appears to show him being led away arm-in-arm by paramedics. An air ambulance was also seen landing in a field nearby and another contestant was rushed to hospital after being carried away on a stretcher. The witness, who wanted to remain anonymous told MailOnline: 'The videos of him are absolutely insane and his fall got an absolutely huge reaction from the crowd. 'The paramedics swarmed around him when he got to the bottom. His fall was the most spectacular I have ever seen at the event. A fellow contestant, who spoke to the 'Cheese Wizard' at the top of the hill, has said he saw him trying to walk off on his own after the fall 'I went last year too and I haven't seen anything quite as extreme. 'He tried to walk off straight away and I got the video of him being taken away by paramedics. He managed to walk off while being held by them.' The witness explained that he spoke to the man at the top of the hill and that he called himself the 'Cheese Wizard'. He said: 'I think the [backflips] were intentional. At the top he just seemed super amped up. 'He just seemed like a crazy guy. He was also telling me about how he crashed a wedding last week.' 'I didn't think he was local - he said he had come as he really liked cheese,' the contestant added. It comes as photos from this year's event show an air ambulance landing in a field nearby and another contestant being carried away on a stretcher. Organisers were also forced to call in rugby players to stop flying participants after the council banned the cheese-rolling event due to safety fears. One local posted on X: 'I'm 10 minutes from where this is. It's technically [been] an unofficial event for some time because the council banned it (safety). 'So they get lads from the local rugby teams to tackle those who come down the hill.' Will Matthews, 23, also spoke to the man who somersaulted down the hill before the start of the race. The gardener from Thornbury, Gloucestershire, said according to The Sun: 'He was dressed as a wizard and he said his name was Tye. 'Apparently he was trying to break the record for the fastest descent. 'I understand he was in the pub afterwards. There were a few people who had to go to hospital with injuries but he wasn't one of them.' Every year dozens of hardy racers hurtle down Cooper's Hill at Brockworth in pursuit of a 7lb Double Gloucester cheese. The renowned bank holiday tradition began as a small local event but now garners worldwide media attention. The official competition was cancelled back in 2010 due to health and safety fears - but rebel cheese rollers have been staging their own unofficial event. This year's race prompted a safety warning from the local ambulance, police and fire services, who said they could be overwhelmed if there were 'mass causalities'. But it went ahead as planned, with Tom Kopke, a 23-year-old YouTuber from Munich, retaining the title he won last year. After taking an early lead and seeing the win through, he told the BBC: 'I've never felt better in my life. 'This year I just gave it everything I had - I just dashed forward and tried to get the win, and then I just blacked out.' Mr Kopke, 23, added: 'It was crazy. This year was different. Last year the hill was muddy and this year it was dry and dangerous and people got injured. The second men's race was won by Luke Preece, from Gloucester, who flew down the hill race dressed in a Superman costume. He said afterwards: 'I am absolutely buzzed, amazing - the adrenaline. My dad did it. I can't believe it, it's amazing.' The women's race was won by Ava Sender Logan, 20, who was racing for the Refugee Community Kitchen, which supports displaced people in northern France and homeless people in London and Edinburgh. The university student from London said: 'This is my first time. I thought it was such a tradition, and I will probably feel it tomorrow. I can't believe it, I can't believe it. '"It felt quite long coming down and then I hit my head. I'm down, that's what matters. I'm fine".' During the event, competitors chase the cheese down the 180m-high hill, with many tripping and tumbling on their way. The first runners to catch the cheese, which can reach speeds of up to 70mph, are declared victors in various races across the event that dates back to the 1800s. But competing is not without its risks - in 1993, 15 people were injured in the racing, four of them seriously hurt, and officials have ramped up warnings in recent years. In 2009 and 2011 the race was cancelled over safety concerns but the event has continued unofficially, though the 2020 and 2021 versions were called off as a result of Covid-19 pandemic lockdown restrictions before a return in June 2022. Long-time cheese-maker Rod Smart, who has produced cheese for the chase for more than 25 years, once again provided the wheels for this year's event. Four cheeses weighing about 3kg each and three smaller ones, weighing about 1.5kg, are used.
Telegraph
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Why Buster Keaton – not Tom Cruise – is cinema's greatest daredevil
It's a miracle that Tom Cruise is still alive. During a four-decade-long career, he's dangled from a flying Airbus A400M, sprinted down the world's tallest building, corkscrew-turned a helicopter past a mountain and driven a motorbike off the side of a cliff. The trailer for the new Mission: Impossible film shows Cruise trapped in a flooding submarine and clinging onto the wing of a careering biplane. Surely he's now the greatest daredevil in the history of cinema? Well, not quite. That title should go to Buster Keaton, the doe-eyed, stoney-faced maverick of the silent film era, whose extraordinary stunts make Tom Cruise look risk-averse. The two stars have a lot in common. They were both obsessed with cinema as the supreme medium for telling stories; both transcended their positions as actors to become the presiding maestros of their films; and both were absolutely committed to performing their own wild, ridiculous stunts – often badly injuring themselves in the process. But while Cruise exploits his stunts for maximum emotional impact, Keaton was studiously undemonstrative, retaining his deadpan expression however surreal his surroundings. Whereas Cruise embeds his action sequences in complicated plots about the end of the world, Keaton contrived action sequences from everyday life. Cruise takes pride in having a superbly athletic body well into his 60s – Keaton just wanted his wiry, diminutive frame (two inches shorter even than Cruise's) to be as damage-proof as possible. It needed to be. Keaton put his body through more than almost any other actor in the history of cinema – only Jackie Chan bears comparison. He launched it through windows and walls, tossed it down waterfalls and between rooftops, raced it away from armies of marauding cattle and furious boulders, attached it to the front of out-of-control motorbikes and steam trains, and pinned it to the back of trams, vans and cars which yanked him along so quickly that his feet left the floor. He was born in 1895 to vaudevillian parents who almost immediately incorporated their son into their act. In fact, baby Keaton once pre-empted their intentions and crawled on-stage to interrupt his parents' performance. His first billing was at 11 months old, and his preternatural talent meant that he was soon listed above his parents on posters for their family's show. But the work itself was (literally) bruising, to say the least. 'My father used to carry me on stage and drop me,' Keaton recalled. 'After explaining to the audience that I liked it, he would pick me up and throw me at a piece of scenery.' Sometimes he would be thrown into the startled audience; once he thumped into a brick wall behind the staging. On another occasion, he flew as far as thirty feet. A popular incarnation of the Keaton family show dubbed Buster 'the human mop' and saw his father literally wipe the stage floor with his son (think Anton du Beke with Ann Widdecombe). Keaton was a vaudevillian by trade but his aspirations lay in Hollywood. A friend put him in contact with Rosco 'Fatty' Arbuckle, a famous silent film actor and impresario, and by the 1920s Keaton was starring in short comedies. 'From the first day on I hadn't a doubt that I was going to love working in the movies… I'd fallen in love with the cameras, with the rushes, the action, the slam-bang – with all of it,' he said. That quote could come from Tom Cruise, who reportedly watches a film every day and fights a one-man war against releasing movies onto streaming services without giving them a proper showing in cinemas first. Making films, says Cruise, 'is not what I do. It's who I am.' Keaton's stunts, like Cruises, were distinctively cinematic. They were of a scale and ingenuity that simply wasn't possible on stage. Look at his wild ride on a driver-less motorbike in Sherlock Jr., or his stroll through a hurricane in Steamboat Bill, Jr., as houses fly into his path and shatter in front of him. Although these sequences were impossible in vaudeville, Keaton retained that tradition's commitment to doing things for real. Cinema gave performers more opportunity for baroque trickery – as when Keaton steps out of the movie screen and goes on an adventure through different film reels in Sherlock Jr. – but it also allowed viewers to see miraculous set-pieces being done with real objects. As Keaton put it: 'The camera allowed you to show your audience the real thing, real trains, horses and wagons, snowstorms, floods.' And so when Keaton appears to crash out of a window, that really is him doing exactly that. 'For a real effect and to convince people that it's on the level, do it on the level.' That's Keaton talking but, again, it may as well be Cruise. When once asked why he insisted on doing his own stunt work, Cruise replied: 'No one asked Gene Kelly 'Why do you do your own dancing?'' Neither star could imagine doing things differently, no matter the cost to their bodies, which looked something like this: Cruise: Broken foot while rock-climbing up an inverted cliff face; broken ankle while jumping between buildings. Keaton: Broken ankle after tumbling down an escalator; sprained ankle after jumping between buildings and rolling down the side of a wall; hugely painful and prolonged inflammation of his elbow after falling from the top of a barn; multiple instances of nearly drowning while filming outrageous water stunts; broken neck after being bombarded with water (nobody even noticed for this particular injury 30 years, during which time Keaton had continued performing uncomplainingly). All this bodily commitment gave both stars unusual influence over their productions. By the mid-1920s Keaton was directing his films as well as acting in them – the critic Roger Ebert called Keaton 'the greatest actor-director in the history of movies'. Meanwhile, Cruise is a hugely involved producer with massive leverage in Hollywood and exceptional authority on set (memorably displayed when he ordered most of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning's crew to leave so that he could swearily berate two members who'd broken Covid restrictions). Keaton's authority was ultimately short-lived. He lost control of his own films to producer extraordinaire Irving Thalberg when he joined MGM and, besides, the coming of the 'talkies' meant that this most silent of silent comedians – who shunned even using intertitles – had a dim future after the introduction of sound. He began to drink heavily and struggled to receive work or recognition towards the end of his life, although he eventually found cinephile admirers in France. He died in 1966, aged 70. Yet Keaton's work has aged extraordinarily well. Its wordless simplicity gives it a direct power that doesn't date – shunning old-timey, 'I say, mister!' intertitles was ultimately a shrewd move – and those ultra-clippable stunts now appear precision-engineered for the TikTok age. (A montage of Keaton's best bits on TikTok has nearly 500,000 likes.) Almost 60 years after his death, we can safely say that the 'human mop' done good. But head-to-head, stunt v stunt, is he really more impressive than Tom Cruise? Cruise versus Keaton: Their best stunts head-to-head Leaps of faith Tom Cruise's rooftop chase scene (Mission: Impossible – Fallout) While filming this leap between buildings near St Paul's in London for Mission Impossible: Fallout, Cruise missed his landing and slammed his up-turned foot against the wall. He 'knew instantly it was broken' and the foot was still healing during the film's press tour. Buster Keaton's building jump (Three Ages, 1923) This jump from Three Ages was also botched – Keaton was originally meant to reach the second building but missed the ledge and fell down the side of the wall. Although there was a safety net to catch him, he bruised himself enough to delay filming. When the shoot re-started, Keaton built the rest of this elaborate sequence around his mistake. Winner: Keaton Swing time Tom Cruise climbs the world's tallest building (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) In Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Cruise's Ethan Hunt sprints down the side of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, before swinging around its sides, and then leaping towards an open window. That's really Cruise 130 floors up in the air, carried only by a single wire. It's stomach-turningly vertiginous cinema, and Cruise's most famous set-piece for a reason. Buster Keaton As the finale of Our Hospitality, Keaton swings to the rescue to grab his girlfriend as she plummets down a waterfall. The waterfall was built as a gigantic set on the Paramount lot, and the girl Keaton catches is a dummy (perhaps obviously, to modern eyes). But Keaton did the stunt for real, getting the final shot on the third take after swallowing a dangerous amount of gushing water on the first two. Winner: Cruise Motorbike madness The biggest stunt in cinema history (Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning) The marketing for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning billed this as 'the biggest stunt in cinema history'. Cruise drives a motorbike over the edge of a cliff, before free-falling through the air and parachuting towards a steam train. An extraordinary moment, slightly undermined by excessive promotion that reduced its impact in cinemas, and the odd CGI ridge that Cruise speeds up before flying into the air. Buster Keaton The hero of Sherlock Jr, Keaton's masterpiece, ends up perched on the front of a motorbike without a driver, as it speeds through an incredible series of hair-rasing near-misses. Highlights include crossing an unfinished bridge by gliding over a pair of vans that momentarily fill the gap, dodging an incoming train by an inch and – in a potentially jarring tonal shift that Keaton somehow pulls off – flying through the air to kick a sex pest through the wall of a barn. Winner: Keaton Water shows Tom Cruises's explosive fishtank (Mission: Impossible) In the first Mission: Impossible film, Cruise's character smashes the glass of a huge aquarium and then leaps into the street as 16 gallons of water and glass cascade around him. Director Brian De Palma had set the standard for the rest of the franchise, but it says a lot about Cruise's work since that this is far from his most impressive stunt. Buster Keaton In Sherlock Jr., Keaton races across train carriages before grabbing a water spout to lower himself to the ground. In doing so he unleashes a torrent of water onto his head and almost drowns himself. This was the stunt that broke Keaton's neck – not that he noticed until three decades later. Winner: Keaton By a hair's breadth Mission: Impossible's wire heist The defining image of the Mission: Impossible series came in its first instalment. Cruise's character has to infiltrate a CIA vault by dangling from the ceiling – at one point dropping to within millimetres of the ground. 'I kept going down to the floor and bam, I kept hitting my face,' Cruise recalled. But the effort was worth it – the sequence is still the most nail-biting of the franchise. A house falls on Buster Keaton In Steamboat Bill, Jr., the facade of a hurricane-battered house falls onto our protagonist, who has the cosmic good luck to be standing in the perfect spot for an open window to save him. Had Keaton been standing two inches out of place in any direction then the collapsing scenery would likely have killed him. He later recalled that when the wall fell 'two extra women on the sidelines fainted and the cameramen turned their backs as they ground out the film'. One of the most memorable moments in silent cinema and Keaton's apotheosis.
South China Morning Post
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
China couple dice with death on mountain cliff side to beat long tourist queues
Millions of people in China have been shocked by a daredevil couple who got into potentially deadly trouble after taking a short cut down a cliff on a famous mountain in eastern China. Advertisement Video footage of the incident on May 4 went viral and attracted eight million views on a social media platform. In the video filmed by a tourist from a distance, the pair, who were stuck in a queue of tourists, attempted to bypass the staircases and take a short cut directly down a cliffside on Mount Tai in Shandong province. However, as they tried to climb over an artificial wall to join the line ahead of them, the man slipped while carrying the woman on his shoulders to help her over the wall. The couple, circled, climbed over a wall in an effort to beat big crowds on a mountain path. Photo: They fell off the cliff together.
BBC News
08-05-2025
- Health
- BBC News
Gran, 80, with rare cancer to abseil from landmark
Gran, 80, with rare cancer to abseil from landmark 13 minutes ago Share Save Share Save Catriona Tremlett Former light aircraft pilot Catriona was diagnosed with retroperitoneal leiomyosarcoma An 80-year-old grandmother undergoing treatment for a rare cancer is planning to abseil from a 170-metre high landmark for charity. Catriona Tremlett, from Haslemere, was diagnosed with retroperitoneal leiomyosarcoma just after Christmas in 2020 and had her left kidney removed along with the 4.5kg tumour. Last year, she was given chemotherapy as a "last resort" after being told her illness was terminal and held a party to say goodbye to her husband, four children and 14 grandchildren. But the "daredevil" gran is now due to descend from the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth on Saturday to raise funds for the Sarcoma UK charity. "The chemotherapy gave me a little more time," she said. "I arranged a big party with all my family and gave a farewell speech... but here I still am." There is an average of 525 cases of leiomyosarcoma diagnosed every year in England. 'Extraordinary courage' Although the chemotherapy caused Catriona heart failure, her current condition remains stable. She added: "I wasn't fighting cancer. I always accepted the fact I had cancer and made the best of it. There was no point in becoming angry. "I wanted to do something challenging like a skydive or a wing walk but I was told I couldn't because of the heart condition. "Sarcoma is a rare cancer and Sarcoma UK is a small charity so I want to do something positive for them." It will not be her first challenge from a great height - 20 years ago she descended from the tower at Guildford Cathedral on a zip wire and as a young woman she piloted light aircraft. Sarcoma UK's director of fundraising and communications, Kerry Reeves-Kneip, praised Catriona's "extraordinary courage and determination". "Her fundraising efforts for the Spinnaker Tower abseil are really inspiring, especially considering her own health challenges," she added. Follow BBC Surrey on Facebook, on X and on Instagram. Send your story ideas to southeasttoday@ or WhatsApp us on 08081 002250.
