At Hot Dog Eating Contest, a Chance to Crown a New King

NEW YORK — It was the Fourth of July in New York City, and for some, that meant only one thing. No, not fireworks, sweaty subway rides and family cookouts. It was time for the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island.

The contest has long been a holiday mainstay in New York, and its worldwide television exposure has made celebrities of its most famous champions. But this year’s event, which tests “competitive eaters” on how many hot dogs they can frantically scarf down in 10 minutes, crowned a new men’s champion for the first time in almost a generation and witnessed a women’s record.

Patrick Bertoletti, 26, from Chicago, snagged the men’s title — or, in the parlance of Coney Island, the Mustard Belt — by eating 58 hot dogs in 10 minutes, while Miki Sudo, 38, ate 51 hot dogs.

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The former men’s champion, Joey Chestnut, 40, won the competition 16 times but was banned from entering after a falling out with the organizers. Bertoletti was the world’s ninth-ranked eater before the competition, according to Major League Eating, and he bested several competitors promoted by event organizers as Chestnut’s potential successors.

“Always a bridesmaid and never a bride,” Bertoletti said afterward. “But today I am getting married.”

He described winning as a life-changing event.

“With Joey not here I knew I had a shot,” he said, referring to Chestnut. “I was able to unlock something and I don’t know where it came from.”

Chestnut parted ways with the contest last month after he signed an endorsement deal with Impossible Foods, a rival to Nathan’s that makes vegan hot dogs.

But he loomed large over Thursday’s proceedings, in one case literally: A huge Pepsi ad bearing his image hung just one block from the contest location.

Many of the spectators also wore Chestnut memorabilia and chanted or held up signs pleading for his return. Mark Sterling, 35, did brisk business selling Chestnut bobblehead dolls to the crowd for $35.

“Why would you not want a bobblehead of a legend?” said Sterling, from the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. “Joey Chestnut not being here is like people saying Derek Jeter’s not at Yankee Stadium anymore — people still love him.”

Many viewers tuned in year after year just to watch Chestnut go through a pile of hot dogs like a wood chipper. News of his departure from the contest was met with the sort of public anguish one might expect for a major league baseball player, not a man who ate 62 hot dogs in 10 minutes last July 4.

At the women’s contest Thursday, Sudo easily won that title for the 10th time, besting a group of competitors, some of whom traveled to Coney Island from as far as Japan and South Korea.

She ate 51 hot dogs in 10 minutes, exceeding her 2023 total of 39.5 hot dogs. The runner-up, Mayoi Ebihara of Japan, ate 37 hot dogs.

As Sudo ate hot dogs two at a time, an ESPN announcer was inspired to opine, “Her style is like the prose of Eudora Welty,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning 20th century novelist not known to have enjoyed 51 hot dogs in one sitting.

After winning, Sudo thanked her family and the dental school in Tampa where she is studying to be a dental hygienist, and reflected on the pressures of being a mother, a student and world-famous hot dog eater.

“You feel like you’re juggling,” she said, “You try your best to balance everything.”

George Shea, the event’s larger-than-life emcee, described Sudo as a woman whose “soul shines like magnesium set afire against the dark mountain of night.”

Nonna Titulauri, 31, a banking intern who lives in the East Village, said she was thrilled to witness a women’s world record. But her friend Christina DeCarlo was less amused.

“It’s kinda gross,” said DeCarlo, 33, a project manager who lives in midtown. “I just want to understand, who decided it’s a thing?”

In an interview last month, Shea, a charismatic showman who helped elevate this whole spectacle into the sort of event that is covered by The New York Times, said he was “devastated” by the Chestnut situation. Even Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Brooklyn native, mourned what he called “‘impossibly’ hard-to-swallow news.”

Shea said Chestnut’s endorsement deal had left Major League Eating, which bills itself as “the governing body of all stomach-centric sport,” with no choice but to bar him.

“It would be like back in the day Michael Jordan coming to Nike, who made his Air Jordans, and saying, ‘I am just going to rep Adidas too,’” Shea said. “It just can’t happen.”

The hot dog eating contest is the sort of absurd public event for which New York City has long been known. Over the years, it has developed its own lore, canon and epic heroes, of whom Chestnut was long the king.

According to local legend, the contest has been held each year since 1916, when Nathan Handwerker opened a hot dog joint on the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues in Coney Island.

But like many legends, this one is mostly myth. The contest actually began in the early 1970s, and in 2010, one of its original promoters, Mortimer Matz, admitted that he had cooked up the origin story in “Coney Island pitchman style.”

In recent years, the event has been powered largely by the wiener puns and theatrical patriotism of Shea, who calls it “a celebration of freedom,” and by the star power of Chestnut.

The contest made him famous, and he in turn became synonymous with the event. As the weigh-in ceremony began Wednesday, Shea repeated the tale of Chestnut’s departure for the crowd, before reassuring them that he would be welcome to return to the Coney Island event at any time.

Representatives for Chestnut did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

For those who still wished to watch Chestnut eat an unsettling number of hot dogs on July 4, he traveled to Fort Bliss, in El Paso, to compete against soldiers in a five-minute hot dog eating contest. The event streamed live on Chestnut’s YouTube channel, where 22,000 viewers watched him eat 57 hot dogs in front of a crowd that looked more like a town fair gathering than the flashy Coney Island event. His closest competitor, Daniel Almaraz Puente, ate an eye-popping 49.

He will also headline a hot dog eating contest on Labor Day that will stream live on Netflix, along with Takeru Kobayashi, another former July 4 hot dog champion who was ejected from the Coney Island contest in 2010 after a falling out with Major League Eating.

Chestnut’s trajectory may have taken him out of the Nathan’s competition — for now, at least — but James Webb, a former professional soccer player from Australia who began competitive eating “as a joke,” said in an interview Wednesday that some version of his celebrity status is what everyone in the contest hoped to achieve. Webb placed third Thursday by eating 51.75 hot dogs.

“We are all weird,” said Webb, as a person in a giant hot dog costume danced nearby for TV cameras lined up beneath the Vessel in Hudson Yards. “We are all weird in our way. But we are hella competitive and pretty disciplined. And that’s kind of the part people don’t see.”

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