The Big Dog is back. And the Big Dog is hungry. Hungry, above all, for dogs. Joey Chestnut has fulfilled his sporting destiny by reclaiming his world champion crown at the legendary 4 July hotdog eating contest in Coney Island, New York. Chestnut, AKA The Silent Warrior, is basically the Messi of elite eating. Or rather he’s the Ronaldo, relentless in his perfectionism, possessed of an alluring competitive arrogance, and with the GOAT-level numbers to back it up: winner of the Mustard Belt now 17 times and the world record-holder as of 2021, when he ate 76 hotdogs in 10 minutes, a huge uplift on his debut in 2005 when he ate a frankly pathetic 32 hotdogs.
Above all, Chestnut had a point to prove. He was banned from competing last year over a controversial sponsor deal with a plant-based hotdog alternative. Losing the title was a kind of Icarus moment. No one is bigger than the sport. Eating had to rein him in. And so this time around it wasn’t about the $100,000 (£73,000) prize. It was about legacy.
“I’m back doing what I love,” Chestnut told the cameras ahead of Thursday’s weigh-in. Which is, it seems, cramming an unbelievable amount of hotdogs into his face, and doing so in a contest that, frankly, feels like one of the few things that actually makes any sense this week, perhaps even the greatest and most fundamentally honest of all current human activities.
Mainly, this is about will and about passion. “I want to push myself,” Chestnut told USA Today, going on to talk about marginal gains and the tiny details of preparation, about taking up yoga, about working on rhythm, on ever-smoother delivery. There is talk of applying an “electric simulation machine” to his abdomen “to get everything loose”, of endless tinkering with the temperature of the water used to dampen the buns, of burping exercises to develop the internal muscles, asthma drugs to improve air flow, open the sinuses and increase his capacity for stuffing hotdogs into his face.
Plus of course the daily hard yards of the eating athlete. Chestnut performs endless neck hoists with a 7kg weight attached to a mouthguard. “When I’m raising up, I’m almost imagining I’m swallowing, so I’m thrusting my tongue against the leather strap the mouthpiece is glued to.’” You’ve got to admit. This is incredibly sexy.
Joey Chestnut proudly holds up a plate of hotdogs after winning Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July hotdog eating contest in Brooklyn, New York. Photograph: Sarah Yenesel/EPA
The real kicker, as ever in elite sport, is attitude. Joey Chestnut? Joey Chestnut brought aggression to eating. He is looking for “a perfect mix of anger and calm”. This is all very real. Three years ago he was forced to employ a chokehold on a stage invader who had run on in a Darth Vader mask to protest against killing animals just so people can stuff them in their mouths. Chestnut didn’t stop. He still won by 15 dogs. This is eating heritage.
And yes it is also highly confusing. Is this whole thing ironic? Is the world hotdog eating championship a joke? Nobody seems to really know. The stage announcer certainly seems to think it is a comedic event. The crowd has a kind of loose, spring break frat boy vibe. But there are rivalries here, men’s and women’s events, a massed judging corpus, stats and fandom, and of course that cash prize. It feels real, or like a thing that has become so unexpectedly.
This is also not about mocking America: Brit-snobbery, the oh dear what have they done now Jeeves dynamic. I love America, love it as an idea and also as a place, as energy and colour and (even now) optimism. I also love hotdogs and can cram in up to one of them at a single sitting. But at the same time, it is also impossible to overstate how disgusting the hotdog eating championship is as a spectacle, and in every sense of the word.
You probably think you already know it’s disgusting. Well, you don’t know nothing Mr Garrison, because you’ve never been confronted by an endlessly replicating pork-beef dog coated in your own semi-vomit.
The world hotdog eating championship looks, and there is no other way of putting this, like a self-loathing high-speed fellatio marathon, the competitors constantly nodding their heads, thrusting in food with both hands, finishing up coated in bun paste and meat-goop, looking stricken but also impossibly excited.
Joey Chestnut (right) and James Webb get eating at the Fourth of July contest. Photograph: David Dee Delgado/Reuters
All of this is spectated by a mob crushed up into the notorious Splash Zone, with its crouching judges, its stern warnings about “flying debris”. To be fair, you can really see the neck exercises pay off at this point. The natural assumption is the eating athletes will be large. They’re not. They’re buff, trim, competition-ready. Joey Chestnut’s head is perfectly rounded with muscle, like a boxer’s biceps or a gymnast’s core.
If I were to nitpick I would suggest making the sport more robust with a rule that all dogs and buns must be consumed as a whole, not tearing it apart and going dog then bun, which is essentially ball-tampering. Otherwise, it is a compelling spectacle, and in its own way very honest too.
All American sports are basically an excuse to eat things, a complex machinery entwined around the founding desire to have a hotdog. The hotdog championship cuts to the chase, like reducing football to a one-kick penalty shootout. Here is the thing you actually want. Just have it.
It is the perfect sport in structural ways, too. All sports are supposed to reflect a culture, to express some part of the character of a nation, even in bastardised form, like bullfighting in Spain, or the way cricket dramatises the English class system.
And yes it would be easy at this point to mock America’s dysfunction around food, but this also is a relationship with roots in something real and beautiful: abundance, prosperity, fecundity of the land, tired hungry masses settling a new frontier. Eating was stitched into the American century. JK Galbraith’s famous 1957 study, The Affluent Society, concluded “capitalism works”, as proved beyond doubt by excess consumption. “More die in the United States of too much food than of too little,” he concluded, back when this was a good thing.
So food is freedom in America. “Tastes like Freedom” is a common banner at the hotdog championships, even if that taste turns out to be a bolus of compacted sawdust-sausage the size of a moped. And even if like so many of the freedom things – cars, sex, guns – this is a freedom that has bolted terminally out of hand.
Daily life in America can feel like being chased by food, constantly craving the perfect salty sweet hit that is America’s gift, burdened by the patriotic duty to consume. Restaurants that look like car showrooms. The idea that a salad is in fact some kind of toxic assault by steroid-fed flaps of ungodly meat. The fact even in high-end places the business is still fetishising food: the greatest burrito in the world, the most organic vegan dim sum ever devised. America and food is so obviously dysfunctional you start to feel you could fix the whole place if you went at it symptoms-first. Don’t stop eating. Just stop eating that.
And yes, this is all doubly, trebly, hyper-disgusting when America is also in effect sponsoring a famine in Gaza, and all the while staging a hotdog competition where Joey Chestnut can win $100,000. But there is domestic sadness to this, too.
The women’s winner, reigning champion Miki Sudo, managed 33 hotdogs for her title. Photograph: Sarah Yenesel/EPA
The hotdog is one of those American objects, icons of the everyday, things that feel even now like a shot at happiness fallen wide. The hotdog origins story is suitably diffuse, credited to a sausage vender at the 1906 St Louis World Fair, or to a moment of founding genius in Louisiana in 1904, or to Germans everywhere who were already putting “dachshunds” in buns.
It doesn’t matter. There should be a vague and folksy feel to this. The hotdog is immigrant food, sports field food, egalitarian food. This is American symbolism, American art. It’s Gatsby’s green beacon, Jack Kerouac burning like a roman candle, Ignatius Riley pushing his hotdog trolley around New Orleans and muttering about the wheel of fate.
And now the hotdog has been updated, via the Joey Chestnut show, into a klaxon of decay and excess. Basically, everything is a hotdog eating contest now, from sport to business, to the shared human experience, all of us in the wealthy world assailed by this agony of consumption, wants, desires.
In the same week of the world hotdog eating championship the UK government has even started pushing weight loss drugs as a healthy living choice. We will create a world full of calories, we will take away your green space, stick you in front of a screen, make your life a matter of passive consumption. Then when it gets too expensive to fix your mind and body, well, we have an injection for that. Shoot this thing full of painkillers, antidepressants and weight loss jabs, we might just about muster up a functional human.
So Joey Chestnut and his hotdog performance speaks in a way that is oddly heartening, an act of punkish satire. This is the life you have made for us, Joey Chestnut is saying, human need extrapolated to a wild extreme. I will take this world and hold up a mirror, turn it into a spectacle that mocks the spectacle. Enter the splash zone, Big Food. Feel his spittle on your face.
It does always feel like sport is trying to tell you something, even here, via the medium of hotdogs. Sometimes well, sometimes you just get the heroes you need.