Leonland - Leon Barnard
Chapter 4 > The International Hot Dog Eating Contest
One day, while sitting in a hotel room, I watched a program on the Discovery channel about competitive eating. At the end of the program they showed scenes from the 2001 Nathan's Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island. It was amazing. A scrawny Japanese kid named Takeru Kobayashi had doubled the previous record by eating 50 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes! I decided that I had to see this for myself. So, since Coney Island is only about a one hour train ride from Manhattan, I woke up early on the fourth of July and dragged all my friends out to Coney Island to see the 2002 competition.
The original Nathan's Famous, where the contest takes place each year.
Some pre-event entertainment - a guy singing about hot dogs and a guy dressed up as a hot dog.
The excitement really picked up when the Bus of Champions containing all of the contestants arrived.
This was the moment that everyone had been waiting for: the introduction of the champ. It's hard to comprehend how a 115 pound kid can compete with 400 pounders. Could he defend his title? Could he break his record of 50 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes? That's what everyone wanted to find out.
The competitors get ready.
Last year's performance brought a lot of attention to this event, there was media from all over the world.
This was taken about 8 minutes into the contest. Notice that Takeru has eaten 36 at this point and the nearest competitor has 20. He was a machine, it was unbelievable. Everyone else had slowed down dramatically by this point, but he just kept going, totally focused.
Once again, he destroyed the competition, this time eating 50 1/2 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes. It was like nothing I had ever seen before.
Takeru holding up his trophy, 9 pounds heavier than when he arrived.
Here he is posing for a picture after the contest. He doesn't look very excited about even looking at a hot dog after that.
Posted by Leon on July 4, 2002 08:45 PM [Top of page]