Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Babe Ruth, Joey Chestnut. North America’s greatest athletes.
He can even compete in the realm of (allegedly) fictional athletes like Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez, Charlie Conway, and, of course, Air Bud. His accomplishments are simply so ridiculous that it seems like they have to be made up.
The “King of Coney Island” just won his 16th (and 8th consecutive) Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, held annually on the 4th of July in Coney Island, NY. He took down 62 dogs, cruising to victory. Geoffrey Esper finished in second with 49. Not even close. Chestnut is just that far ahead of the competition. His record is 76, and even being well below his record, he smokes the competition.
Not even Mother Nature could stop the “Sultan of Sausage”, as the competition was at one point called off due to heavy rain and storms, but the clouds parted to allow the show to go on. Nothing, not even Mrs. Nature herself can outshine “July Joey” on the day that belongs to only him and the United States of America.
This win comes a year after a protester hopped onto the stage at Coney Island and attempted to take the title of “Biggest Bum and Loser Supreme” (which was held at the time by people who post videos of themselves crying for likes on the internet). I don’t know if the guy was just against excessive (or any) meat consumption, or if he just wanted to publicly plead for help with removing the massive stick up his ass, but the “Pharaoh of Frankfurters” shut him down immediately, all while continuing to guzzle glizzies.
The guy can truly do it all. But I still have little idea how he manages to do the whole “shoving 70 hot dogs down your gullet in 10 minutes” thing. Sports Science did a video on it a while ago and explained some of the science behind it, but I’m still pretty baffled by the abilities of “Warlord of Weiners”.
I did math in college, and I don’t want to let my degree go to waste, so I’m going to do some basic calculations here. For the sake of simplicity, we will be treating the hot dog as a perfect cylinder and the bun as a perfect rectangle, all while rounding all numbers to one decimal place (in cubic inches). Let’s look at the NextGen stats presented by Amaz… nope… no free advertisements. Sponsors feel free to reach out, though.
Volume of a hot dog = π * radius² * length = π * 0.5² * 6.5 = 5.1 cubic inches.
Volume of the bun = length * width * height = 5 * 1.5 * 2 = 15 cubic inches (these measurements couldn’t be found online so I found a hot dog bun in my freezer and measured with a ruler. I hope this is sufficient for my readers).
Now, I know the competitors squish up their food using water to make it smaller, so I’ll just divide the bun volume by 3 to try and roughly account for this.
In the “Despot of Dogs”’ record setting performance in 2021, Chestnut would have consumed 76 dogs with their corresponding buns.
76 * [5.1 + (15/3)] = 767.6 cubic inches of food consumed. Research has shown that the human stomach can expand to up to 244.1 cubic inches (Johnson, George B. Holt Biology: Visualizing Life. Orlando: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1994: 769.). The average human body in its entirety is only about 3783.5 cubic inches. The fact that Chestnut is able to push his body to eat that much in so little time is truly mind-boggling.
The man pushes his body and beats opponents in an officiated competition that relies on physical performance. Based on that description, hot dog eating competitions are irrefutably a sport, and he is far and away the best at it. He belongs in the discussion of utter dominance in the world of sports; it’s time to give the “President of Processed Meat” his flowers.
Happy 4th of July from A2Z to you. We hope you all had a pleasant and patriotic weekend.