Every Fourth of July, one man stands on a stage in Coney Island and does something the human body was not designed to do, and every Fourth of July, he acts like it was just an okay Tuesday.
This year, Joey Chestnut ate 66 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes, which works out to roughly one complete hot dog every nine seconds, to win his 18th Mustard Belt at the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest. He beat second-place finisher Patrick Bertoletti by 15 dogs, a margin so large it’s less “close competition” and more “different sport entirely.”
The real plot twist: he blamed the weather
It was 92 degrees at Coney Island with the kind of humidity that makes a hot dog contest feel like a genuinely bad idea for everyone involved. Reporters asked Chestnut, freshly $10,000 richer, if the heat had slowed him down. A lesser champion might have said “no comment” or flexed for the cameras. Chestnut, a man who has eaten a documented 76 hot dogs in 10 minutes at his personal best, shrugged and admitted: “Yeah, it did.”
Imagine being so good at something that your excuse for an “off day” is 66 hot dogs instead of 76. Most people’s excuse for an off day is traffic.
Meanwhile, in the women’s bracket, someone was quietly having an even better day
While Chestnut was out here rationing his greatness, Miki Sudo won her 12th title and fifth pink belt in a row, eating 38.5 hot dogs — a new personal best for her, achieved in the same brutal heat Chestnut was complaining about. No excuses offered. Just dogs, buns, and a belt.
Why this is objectively very funny
There is something deeply American about a sport where the athletes discuss “pacing strategy” and “hydration” with the seriousness of Olympic marathoners, except the finish line is a plate of processed meat and the trophy is shaped like a belt buckle. Add in a heat wave, a 15-dog margin of victory, and a champion who sounds mildly annoyed with his own historic performance, and you’ve got the most gloriously unbothered sports story of the summer.
Chestnut’s 66 dogs weren’t even his best. And that, somehow, is the funniest part of the whole thing.
This article is based on reporting by ABC News, CBS News, and TMZ. Read the original coverage here.
Photo by Tony Fischer Photography (https://www.flickr.com/photos/22714323@N06), licensed under BY 2.0.