# Hot Dog Eating Contest

https://minguhongmfg.com/en/products/hotdog-eating-contest

Date: 2016-07-04

July 4, 2016, was a very meaningful day for some people. For most Americans, it was the 240th Independence Day; for hot-dog enthusiasts, it was the day of the Hot Dog Eating Contest marking the centenary of the hot-dog chain Nathan’s Famous. It meant something to me as well. Staying briefly in New York as a student for the first time in a while, I attended at the earnest request of my friend Cho Kyungkyu, widely known for the webtoon *Omurice Jam Jam*. Attending amounted to little more than topping up my MetroCard and boarding a train to Coney Island, where the contest was held.

Coney Island, at the southern tip of Brooklyn, was originally an island in the Atlantic, as its name suggests. Until the nineteenth century, it was a place for the wealthy. When the railroad arrived in the early twentieth century and hotels and rides followed, it became one of New York’s leading summer resorts and amusement destinations. Around that time, in 1916, Nathan Handwerker, from Galicia, Spain, settled there and opened Nathan’s Famous with his wife.

![](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/hotdog-eating-contest/bba089f249-1791638230/image1-600x600-q100.jpg)

Coney Island. The yellow sign of a Nathan’s Famous branch is visible beneath the Ferris wheel on the left. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, MusikAnimal

On Independence Day that same year, a contest began outside Nathan’s Famous among four immigrants to decide who loved this country most. Except for 1941 and 1971, when large political demonstrations prevented it from taking place, the contest has continued for a century. Its rules are as simple and clear as a plain hot dog: the person who eats the most hot dogs in just ten minutes—“crams into their stomach” may be more accurate—wins. I doubt there is time, but contestants may add mustard, ketchup, or other sauces and drink any kind of beverage between bites. The winner receives ten thousand dollars, roughly eleven million won, and a mustard-colored championship belt. A stomach swollen to bursting with hot dogs comes as a bonus.

The contest took place outside the original Nathan’s Famous. One entire wall of the building was decorated with past champions, and an electronic sign counted down to the start. Whether commemorating Independence Day, watching the contest, or both, people making memories packed the road so tightly there was hardly room to stand. Their voices, a local band’s boisterous playing, the emcee’s interjections, and beverage-company staff shouting to promote their products made it predictably deafening. The challengers took the stage one by one as the emcee called their names. Only after the American national anthem, which I could not sing along to, did the contest begin.

It ended a refreshingly precise ten minutes later. Joey Chestnut won the men’s division with seventy hot dogs, and Miki Sudo the women’s with 38.5. That worked out to about nine seconds per hot dog for Chestnut and sixteen for Sudo. Lee Sunkyung, known in the United States as Sonya Thomas and nicknamed the Black Widow, had won the women’s division three years running after the competition was split by gender in 2011: forty in 2011, forty-five in 2012, and 36.75 in 2013. This time she managed only twenty. To me, who takes a good twenty minutes to eat one Big Mac, even that seemed magnificent. Takeru Kobayashi, who won the men’s division for six consecutive years from 2001, once made a telling remark about such greatness: “The decisive organ for winning is not the stomach, but the brain.” In other words, if you believe you can eat, you can.

![](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/hotdog-eating-contest/f51b0934cd-1791638231/image2-600x600-q100.jpg)

The contest site outside the original Nathan’s Famous. The electronic sign on the building counts down to the start in seconds. Below are the men’s and women’s records from the previous contest. The graphics surrounding the sign change every year. Photo: Min Guhong

Now it was time to eat rather than watch. But given the occasion, every shop was crowded with people wanting hot dogs, so I barely even saw the all-important hot dogs themselves. All I did was wander through the crowd, buy a centenary contest T-shirt for Cho Kyungkyu, dip my feet briefly in the Atlantic, and carve something into the beach with a long, hard object. On the train back to Manhattan, I kept smacking my lips and imagining the shape and taste of a hot dog. Across from me, a young Black man wearing a padded jacket with a loud graphic sang “Amazing Grace.” I could only regret not being a Christian.

I returned to Coney Island about a month later, this time with my wife. My first impression of the hot dog handed over by a man with thick black hair on his forearms was that it was truly “an exemplary hot dog.” The long sausage, properly grilled and casually tucked into a bun, even looked dignified. There was no need to examine the origins of the hot dog, supposedly invented in ancient Rome. Unlike my wife, who looked unimpressed, all I could do was slowly add onions, mustard, and ketchup to taste. It tasted exactly as I had imagined a month earlier. Looking out over the Atlantic and beyond, my wife and I chewed our hot dogs like J. P., played by Dan Aykroyd in *Nothing But Trouble*. In my ears I heard the young Black man’s song from the train a month earlier.

> I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see…

- [image1.jpg](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/hotdog-eating-contest/bba089f249-1791638230/image1.jpg)
- [image2.jpg](https://minguhongmfg.com/media/pages/products/hotdog-eating-contest/f51b0934cd-1791638231/image2.jpg)

Tags: School for Poetic Computation, Cho Kyungkyu