It’s the Fourth of July in New York City, and that can only mean one thing. No, not fireworks, sweltering subway rides, and family barbecues. It’s time for the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island.
The contest has long been a staple of New York City holiday parties and a staple of midday TV shows nationwide. But this year’s edition, which tests “competitive eaters” on how many hot dogs they can rabidly devour in 10 minutes, promises to be exceptionally suspenseful.
For the first time in nearly a generation, the men’s competition, which kicks off at noon, has no clear favourite.
Joey Chestnut, a 16-time champion, was forced to part ways with the competition last month after signing a sponsorship deal with Impossible Foods, a Nathan’s rival that makes vegan hot dogs.
Many viewers tuned in year after year just to see Mr. Chestnut devour a pile of hot dogs like a wood chipper. The news of his departure from the competition was greeted with the kind of public angst one might expect from a major league baseball player, not a man who ate 62 hot dogs in 10 minutes last July 4.
But the show must go on. On Thursday, 38-year-old Miki Sudo easily won the women’s title for the 10th time, beating
a group of competitors, some of whom came to Coney Island from places as far away as Japan and South Korea.
She ate 51 hot dogs in 10 minutes, setting a new women’s record and surpassing her 2023 total of 39.5 hot dogs. Second-place finisher Mayoi Ebihara of Japan ate 37 hot dogs on Thursday.
After her victory, Sudo thanked her family and the Tampa dental school where she is studying to become a dental hygienist, and reflected on the pressures of being a mother, a student and a world-famous hot dog eater.
“It feels like you’re juggling,” she said. “You’re trying your best to balance everything.”
George Shea, the host of the larger-than-life event, described Ms. Sudo as a woman whose “soul glows like flaming magnesium against the dark mountain of night.”
In an interview last month, Mr. Shea, the charismatic showman who helped elevate the spectacle to a New York Times-covered event, said he was “devastated” by the Chestnut case. Even Senator Chuck Schumer, a Brooklyn native, lamented what he called “incredibly hard news to swallow.”
Mr. Shea said Mr. Chestnut’s sponsorship deal left Major League Eating, which bills itself as “the governing body for all stomach-centric sports,” with no choice but to exclude him.
“It would be like Michael Jordan, back in the day, coming to Nike, which made his Air Jordans, and saying, ‘I’m going to represent Adidas, too,'” Mr. Shea said. “That’s not possible.”
But the split also “opens the competition to new champions,” he added. Their efforts will be broadcast around the world — the competition seems particularly popular in Asia — and shown live in the United States on ESPN2 and ESPN3. The competition will be replayed on ESPN twice Thursday night.
The men’s competition was scheduled to begin at noon in front of Nathan’s Famous, the Coney Island stand that spawned a hot dog empire.
On Wednesday, the budding champions gathered in Midtown for the contest’s official weigh-in ceremony. (The contest doesn’t divide eaters into weight classes, so it wasn’t clear why anyone needed to be weighed.)
Among those jostling for a chance to replace Mr. Chestnut were five men, some of whom had traveled as far as Brazil, Australia and the Czech Republic. (“I eat ravioli,” said Radim Dvoracek, 33, the Czech contender. “Hot dogs are hard for me.”)
The favourite to succeed Mr Chestnut as men’s champion appears to be James Webb, 35, a former professional Australian rules footballer.
He started competing in cooking competitions “as a joke,” he said in an interview, and is now a full-time content creator on social media, where he posts cooking videos.
Mr. Shea describes him as “the number one eater in the Southern Hemisphere” and the fifth-largest competitive eater in the world. (The Southern Hemisphere has only about 10 percent of the world’s population.)
Mr. Webb seemed delighted to be in New York and said he hoped one day to have a cooking career like Mr. Chestnut’s.
“Joey set standards that we all try to exceed,” he said. “Joey is like the Terminator.”
The hot dog eating contest is the kind of absurd public event for which New York City has long been known. Over the years, it has developed its own tradition, canon and epic heroes, of which Mr. Chestnut was long the king.
According to outer borough legend, the contest has been held annually since 1916, when Nathan Handwerker opened a hot dog restaurant at the corner of Surf and Stillwell avenues in Coney Island.
But like many legends, this one is largely myth. The contest actually began in the early 1970s, and in 2010 one of its original promoters, Mortimer Matz, admitted that he had invented the origin story “like a Coney Island vendor.”
In recent years, the event has been fueled largely by the wordplay and theatrical patriotism of Mr. Shea, who calls it “a celebration of freedom,” and by Mr. Chestnut’s celebrity.
The contest made him famous and he in turn became synonymous with the event, meaning his spectre looms over the events this year. As the weigh-in ceremony began on Wednesday, Mr Shea repeated the story of Mr Chestnut’s departure to the crowd, before reassuring them that he would be welcome to return to the Coney Island event at any time.
Mr. Shea then introduced the first female competitor, Elizabeth Salgado, 32, by noting that she was from Vallejo, Calif., “Joey Chestnut’s hometown.” (Ms. Salgado said her hot dog goal was “to eat as many as I can, just to beat my sister.”)
Representatives for Mr. Chestnut did not respond to a request for comment.
For those still hoping to see Mr. Chestnut eat a disturbing number of hot dogs on July 4, he will travel to Fort Bliss in El Paso to compete with soldiers in a five-minute hot dog eating contest, according to the Associated Press.
He will also headline a Labor Day hot dog eating contest that will be streamed live on Netflix, along with Takeru Kobayashi, another former Fourth of July hot dog champion who was booted from the 2010 Coney Island contest after a falling out with Major League Eating.
Mr. Chestnut’s trajectory may have kept him out of Nathan’s competition — for now, at least — but Mr. Webb said Wednesday that some version of his celebrity status was what everyone in the competition hoped to achieve.
That’s why they spend the year working out, eating and stretching their stomachs. (His method involves using a foam roller on his abdomen, followed by a trip to a buffet, he explained.)
“We’re all weird,” Mr. Webb said, as a person in a giant hot dog costume danced nearby in front of television cameras lined up beneath the Vessel at Hudson Yards. “We’re all weird in our own way. But we’re very competitive and pretty disciplined. And that’s the kind of thing people don’t see.”
News Source : www.nytimes.com
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