After a weather delay of nearly two hours and the unthinkable prospect of a Fourth of July without Joey Chestnut – the king of competitive eating – the Nathan’s Famous hot dog eating contest on Coney Island was on. Chestnut, like Miki Sudo earlier in the day, emerged with another championship.
Chestnut won for the 16th time after a lightning and rain delay sent the crowd scurrying and erroneous reports circulating that the rest of the event would be canceled.
If the delay upset Chestnut’s digestive or gustatory game plan, it didn’t show during the 10-minute competition. He quickly fell into his typical rhythmic consumption (two hot dogs, two buns, two hot dogs, two buns), the only disappointment coming when he fell short of his men’s world record of 76 dogs and buns consumed in 10 minutes in 2021.
He won with 62 hot dogs and buns housed. Geoffrey Esper was second with 49 and James Webb third with 47.
“What a roller coaster emotionally,” Chestnut told ESPN. “They told us it was canceled, and we weren’t sure we were going to eat today. I’m just happy. It’s the Fourth of July, I got to eat some hot dogs, and I got a win.”
Chestnut admitted the weather delay threw him off a little but added: “I feel great. I’ve got leftover room, so I’ll be having some beers later.”
The women’s competition went on as scheduled before the storms moved in, and Sudo – “the Taylor Swift of swift eating,” as ESPN’s announcer put it – fended off a challenge to win for the ninth time.
She managed to house 39 1/2 hot dogs and buns. Mayoi Ebihara, who was animatedly gyrating as she competed beside Sudo, consumed 33 1/2. The two battled down the stretch, and it seemed close, but Sudo realized she’d won as the most exciting 10 minutes in competitive eating expired and turned to high-five a “bun boy” standing behind her.
There was a bit of a dispute over the final number because, as Sudo explained, “the hot dogs are stacked five to a plate, and the refs lost count.” Sudo could see she’d “cleared eight plates,” and so could officials.
Her total was a little off her usual game, and she explained she “was really, really aware [Ebihara] was going to mount a threat, so I was watching her at the start. Thirty-nine is a low number – I’m sorry, guys.”
Sudo is the women’s world record holder, having consumed 48 1/2 pups and buns in 10 minutes. The prize for her consumption and Chestnut’s? $10,000 to each winner.
Chestnut ate 63 hot dogs in a win last year. Sudo consumed 40 and won for the eighth time in 2022.
Like all dominant champions, Chestnut and Sudo have a technique down. “We separate the meat from the bun,” Chestnut said in an online video.
He begins training each year at the end of April and has eaten more than 80 hot dogs in 10 minutes five times in training, but he has not reached that mark in competition. “A lot of it is psychological and mental,” he said. “Your body tells you you’re full.”
The Coney Island chowdown may or may not have been held annually since 1916, with George Shea, who oversees it with his brother, Rich, providing an abundance of puns as well as buns to the competition. The event has become a national spectacle, for better and for worse, run by Major League Eating, which calls itself “the governing body of all stomach-centric sports.”
Should you wonder just how far the boundaries of consumption – to say nothing of the human digestive system – can be stretched, a 2020 study (based on 39 years of historical data from the Nathan’s contest and mathematical models that weigh potential for extreme athletic feats by humans) found the human body can devour at most 83 hot dogs in 10 minutes.
That frontier will have to wait another year to be conquered, and when it is, ESPN (the Eating and Sports Programming Network for one day) will be there. “This is our Masters – and the mustard yellow belt is our green jacket,” as Bill Shea put it.