After enduring six years in which a really skinny Japanese dude somehow consumed an insane amount of Nathan’s hot dogs, the United States of America has finally retained it’s rightful place at the top of the championship eating circuit:
NEW YORK, July 4 — In a gut-busting showdown that combined drama, daring and indigestion, Joey Chestnut emerged Wednesday as the world’s hot-dog-eating champion, knocking off six-time winner Takeru Kobayashi in a record-setting triumph.
Chestnut, the great red-white-and-blue hope in the annual Fourth of July competition, broke his own world record by inhaling 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes — a staggering one every 10.9 seconds — before a screaming crowd in Coney Island.
“If I needed to eat another one right now, I could,” the 23-year-old Californian said after receiving the mustard-yellow belt emblematic of supremacy in frankfurter consumption.
Kobayashi, the Japanese eating machine, recently had a wisdom tooth extracted and received chiropractic treatment for a sore jaw. But the winner of every Nathan’s competition from 2001 to 2006 showed no ill effects as he stayed with Chestnut frank for frank until the very end of the competition.
Once the contest ended, the runner-up suffered a reversal — competitive-eating-speak for barfing — leading to a deduction from his final total. Kobayashi finished with 63 HDBs (hot dogs and buns eaten) in his best performance ever.
For the record, one Nathan’s traditional dog, with bun, takes up 309 calories. That means our “champion” consumed 20,394 calories, equivalent to about six pounds of body weight, just to win the championship. Hopefully he has one hell of an active metabolism.
These guys train to do this sort of thing. It was disgusting at first, but it got exciting by the end.
Still, looking at most of the competitors, they tended to be with a lean, muscular build. The winner Joey Chestnut was no exception, and neither is the “Black Widow” Sonya Thomas, a petite 5′5″ woman of only 100 pounds, who pounded 39 hot dogs in the same period of time. It is pretty clear that they must exercise heavily to maintain weight; as for practice, I can only imagine how they go about doing that.