Why Do Indy 500 Winners Get a Big Bottle of Milk?

This year’s Indy 500, which starts Sunday at 6AM Eastern time, will be the 101st race. Not all of those races featured this weird tradition – which is really just that the winner is supposed to drink from a big, glass bottle of milk – but it’s been around long enough that it’s become a recognizable and almost iconic part of the event. (Pouring it over one’s head is also accepted, though not required.) In 1993, when Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi won, he drank orange juice, presumably because he owns orange groves in his home country. The following year, he was booed specifically for his spurning of the milk.

This all started, reports USA Today, back in 1936, when star driver Louis Meyer was photographed drinking his beverage of choice, buttermilk. (Buttermilk is about the last beverage we’d consider refreshing; it is, in reality, a drinkable yogurt, being a dairy product fermented with Lactobacillus bacteria. But Meyer won the Indy 500 three times, so who are we to judge?)

That photo was widely disseminated and beloved by the dairy industry, and milk was given to the Indy 500 winner on and off for the next two decades. In 1956, the owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway made the “winner gets milk” trend an official part of the race, and every winner since then has been given a bottle. (Even Fittipaldi drank some when he won, though not publicly.)

This tradition even comes with a spattering of strangely formal ceremony. Indiana dairy farmers are designated “Milk People” – that’s seriously their title – and given a two-year term. In their “rookie” year, the Milk Person gives a bottle of milk to the owner and mechanic of the winner car, and the second-year Milk Person ceremonially hands a bottle of milk to the driver.

The drivers hand in their preference for milk type before the race – this year’s favorite, Scott Dixon, asked for 2 percent – and as yet, nobody has ever begged off or requested an alternative milk, like almond or soy. And as expected, the milk always comes from local Indiana dairy farms, though it’s not advertised as coming from any specific farm.