How Joey Chestnut Fared in Alternate Holiday Hot Dog Eating Contest

Tom Dierberger | Jul 4, 2024

Joey Chestnut, left, greets Ole Miss offensive lineman Eli Acker (73) during the Ole Miss Grove Bowl Games at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Miss., on Saturday, Apr. 13, 2024. / Bruce Newman/Special to the Clarion

Joey Chestnut didn't participate in this year's Nathan's Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest, but he still properly celebrated the Fourth of July holiday by devouring hot dogs.

Instead of chowing down franks on national television, Chestnut hosted his own event at Fort Bliss in Texas that was streamed live on his YouTube channel. The event included a pizza-eating contest and a five-minute, four-on-one hot dog eating competition in which Chestnut took on a team of four Fort Bliss soldiers.

In the five-minute event, Chestnut took down 57 hot dogs, defeating the group of four soldiers, who combined to eat 49. Chestnut's pace Thursday would've been difficult to keep up for the entire 10-minute length of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, but he would've eaten more than enough to win this year's competition in Coney Island.

Patrick Bertoletti won the 2024 Nathan's Hot Dog Eating contest by eating 58 hot dogs in 10 minutes, beating out Geoffrey Esper (53 hot dogs) in second place and James Webb (52 hot dogs) in third. The 58 hot dogs consumed were the fewest from a winner since Takeru Kobayashi ate 53.75 franks in 2006.

Chestnut was banned from competing in the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest in June after he agreed to a partnership with Impossible Foods, a competitor of Nathan's. Chestnut had participated in the holiday contest every year since 2005. He had won 16 of the last 17 competitions.

"I just—I didn’t expect it to go the way it did," Chestnut said of his banishment in an interview with Sports illustrated's Emma Baccellieri. "I’m always willing to make concessions and willing to meet people in the middle. If I start something, I like to finish it, and if we started negotiating, I didn’t want to be sent away or banned. I thought we could finally get it. But it didn’t work out that way."

Chestnut's next notable eating event is a one-on-one hot dog eating competition on Sept. 2 against longtime rival Kobayashi that will be live streamed on Netflix.