Dear Daily Princetonian: Fourth of July in hot dog heaven

Sixty-eight hot dogs in 10 minutes.

If I’m rushed, I can go from my bed to class in 10 minutes. I can walk across campus in 10 minutes. I can even skim the reading for my precept in the 10 minutes before class starts. But one thing I cannot do in 10 minutes is shove roughly 20 pounds of water, hot dog and bun into my mouth. I leave that to the professionals.

Though I’m incapable of this type of extreme gorging — and yes, I’ve tried — my own failures have only sharpened my appreciation for the sport and ultimately led me to attend the Coney Island National Hot Dog Eating Contest this past Fourth of July.

I found out I would be working in New York in April. Not long after landing the job, I began to plan spending Independence Day at the most American of venues: an eating competition. Initially my friends weren’t too enthused about riding the train an hour and a half to watch an event they deemed “disgusting.”

America seems to be split between people who think that competitive eating is “not a sport” or that it “promotes gluttony” and those who are unabashedly fascinated by it.

Those in latter category find watching people cram colossal quantities of food down their throats incredibly satisfying.

As a member of this group, I can admit that it is hard to pinpoint exactly what I enjoy about watching competitive eating, but I guess I would say it is most similar to watching the surgical portions of “Grey’s Anatomy” — it’s disgusting and uncomfortable, but I just can’t look away.

Ultimately my argument that a hot dog eating contest is something everyone should attend at least once in his life convinced my friends to join me and more than 30,000 other competitive eating fans in watching two-time champion Joey Chestnut defend his title against six-time champion Takeru Kobayashi.

I even convinced them that, to get the true experience, we had to get there early and find good spectator spots. Thus we found ourselves on Coney Island at 9:30 a.m. waiting for an event that began two hours later.

“I still can’t believe that I stood there for two hours to watch something that repulsed me,” Nikki Sequiera ’11 said.

Fortunately, we had plenty of company. As it turned out, getting to Coney Island hours before the competition was less of an exception than a standard.

We were behind thousands of people who appeared to have arrived the night before and camped out. We struggled to find a place to sit and ended up standing, on a sweltering July day, in a giant crowd that was becoming increasingly packed with every train that dumped off another horde of competitive eating fans.

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“I was amazed at the sheer number of people getting off the train,” Gracie Hoerner ’11 said. “I thought we were early, but we couldn’t even really see the stage. I was kind of annoyed to be there because it had no appeal for me really.”

Luckily the good people at Nathan’s anticipated the discomfort that comes with standing around for hours at a time and provided entertainment. Very odd entertainment.

Among them were a “neatness” hot dog eating competition between various 12-year-old boys from the crowd (a truly fail-blog-worthy thing to witness), trampoline acrobats and, perhaps strangest of all, a performance by record-holding competitive eater/rapper Eric “Badlands” Booker whose many, many inspired lyrics included the gem, “I’m an eating machine / I scrap the plate clean / from the crumbs to the morsels I’m a gourmet fiend / with a well-oiled and primed ingestion engine / when it starts revving put a buffet on suspension.”

A few minutes before 11:30 a.m., a bus filled with the world’s top competitive eaters dropped off the day’s real entertainment.

The athletes were announced and walked on stage one by one.

Included in the event were several well-respected competitive eaters such as Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas — a 98-pound Korean woman who once consumed 65 boiled eggs in six minutes, 40 seconds — as well as Tim “Eater X” Janus who, in addition to being ranked fourth in the world of competitive eating, never performs in a competition without a painted face-mask.

But the crowd was really only there to watch two people perform: Kobayashi and Chestnut. These two were announced last and drew the loudest roar from the crowd. As the eaters lined up behind their plates, which were piled high with hotdogs, the crowd fell silent. Then, with a 10-second countdown, the methodical shoving-in of hotdogs began.

I would like to romanticize the event and say that only once you see the contest in person can you truly appreciate how much food the athletes eat or that only in person are you close enough to witness the strain the athletes fight through to hold back their vomit.

Unfortunately, I was behind a lot of people, which made it really, really hard to see.

“It would have been cool for me if you could have actually seen something,” Hoerner said. “But I ended up watching it on a big monitor which they set up, so it was like I was watching it at home, but with a hot sun. If I held up a camera and took a picture, then I could see something. There was a really tall guy in front of me.”

With some maneuvering, however, I was able to get a partial view of the table that the eaters were hunched over.

As I watched the contestants methodically dip their buns in the water and shove the hot dogs in their mouths, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them, because it looked like such a painful process. Their bodies seemed to be hunched over not for strategy, but because they were rejecting the hot dogs, as their hands refused to stop shoving them down in spastic, unnatural motions.

“The contest itself repulsed me,” Sequiera said. “They just ate the most disgusting food in disgusting quantities.”

Using his technique of eating two hot dogs at once before downing the buns, Chestnut quickly pulled into the lead. Unfortunately for fans of the Japanese former champ, Chestnut pretty much maintained at least a two-hotdog lead over Kobayashi for the rest of the race.

While relative rookie Pat Bertoletti from Chicago kept things interesting by downing 55 hot dogs in his first appearance at the hotdog competition, beating out the favored Eater X and Black Widow for third place, he was nevertheless far behind the two top competitors. As the clock wound down, the crowd counted aloud the seconds the eaters had left to shove any remaining hot dog bits into their mouths.

Though Kobayashi frantically tried to unhinge his jaw and swallow his plate whole, his efforts were not enough. With only 64 hotdogs, Kobayashi again lost the title to Chestnut, whose performance earned him another year in possession of the much-coveted mustard belt.

Is there anything more patriotic than an American winning a hotdog-eating contest on the Fourth of July? I don’t think so. So while the live viewing experience was not really for me, I fully intend to watch the event live on ESPN in 2010.

And Chestnut has promised to eat 70 dogs next time.