Joey Chestnut Still Reigns Supreme No Matter Where He Eats

Though the world-famous competitive eater may not have been in his usual arena, he still showed why he’s in a league of his own.

Chestnut dominated his alternative option in lieu of the Coney island contest, establishing his supremacy above the world of competitive eating. / Bruce Newman/Special to the Clarion

Joey Chestnut spent the Fourth of July the same way he has spent the holiday for nearly his entire adult life. He sat down before dozens of hot dogs and consumed them with a remarkable, almost visceral sense of purpose, the product not of hunger but of years of study, weeks of intensive training and a mind and body perfectly suited to his craft. No one eats like Chestnut.

That was as true Thursday as it has ever been. It was everything around him that was different.

Chestnut was not at Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest, the annual competition at Coney Island in Brooklyn where he made his name and where he has spent every Independence Day since 2005. (Chestnut holds the world record in the specialty—76 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes—and has won 16 of the last 17 contests). Instead, due to a sponsorship dispute over vegan hot dogs, Chestnut posted up at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, where he competed against a quartet of servicemen in a modified contest.

The eating was streamed online, rather than carried live on television, without quite the same crowds or pomp and circumstance, but the rest was familiar. Chestnut downed 57 hot dogs and buns in five minutes. That handily beat the combined total of his competitors: The four soldiers together ate 49. “I wasn’t holding back,” he told the crowd at the event, which raised money for military families. 

Here, for the first time in nearly two decades, was a look at Chestnut on the Fourth of July somewhere other than Coney Island. Five hours earlier and a few thousand miles east, Coney Island had tried to establish what might be on the Fourth of July without Chestnut.

The Nathan’s contest on Coney Island saw its first new winner in nearly a decade. Patrick Bertoletti won the battle with 58 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes. “With Joey not here, I knew I had a shot,” he told reporters afterward. “I was able to unlock something that I don’t know where it came from.” After several lead changes in the early going, Bertoletti pulled away toward the end of the contest and won by a margin of five hot dogs and buns. But it was hard not to compare with the performance that might have been. Bertoletti’s 58 may have been a decently comfortable victory this year, but it would not have been enough to beat Chestnut in any contest since 2010, the last time he posted a total under 60. And, of course, Bertoletti’s 58 in 10 minutes in Brooklyn were very nearly matched by Chestnut’s 57 in five minutes in Texas. 

Even in absentia, Chestnut loomed over the Nathan’s contest. The ESPN broadcast included a lengthy tribute featuring comparisons to luminaries such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Pablo Picasso. The tone of the coverage suggested that he’d disappeared off the face of the earth, or at the very least been forced into some kind of tragic, sudden retirement. (For the record: Chestnut, 40, says he sees a doctor regularly and is given a clean bill of health to compete.) But the source of his disappearance was something far less dramatic. It was a contract dispute.

The subject of the disagreement is an endorsement deal that Chestnut entered with Impossible Foods. The plant-based food company sells a vegan hot dog. Chestnut did not believe the sponsorship represented a conflict, he says. Major League Eating and Nathan’s had not previously included any plant-based hot dogs on a list of competitors. “Everything with Impossible was perfectly fine by all my previous agreements,” Chestnut told Sports Illustrated. “They changed terms and conditions [around] exclusivity.” Major League Eating commissioner George Shea pushed back on that framing. No plant-based hot dogs were specifically listed as competitors before this year, but the spirit of the rule was clear, he believes. “We have always had a hot dog exclusivity aspect to the hot dog eating contest,” Shea told SI. “The fundamental rule has been that you cannot endorse a rival hot dog brand.” (Shea is also the host and emcee of the contest.) The disagreement became public in mid-June, when Major League Eating gave a statement to the New York Post, saying that Chestnut had chosen Impossible over Nathan’s and would not be allowed to compete at Coney Island. That blindsided Chestnut. The situation quickly soured.

Chestnut maintains that he sees plant-based hot dogs as a complement to beef and not a replacement. “The way it was set up, I think it made it sound like I was abandoning beef hot dogs for plant-based,” he says, noting that he’s long eaten a plant-based, high-fiber diet in the days after consuming many pounds of meat for competition or training. (The deal with Impossible was not meant to limit his ability to publicly eat other hot dogs; Chestnut ate beef hot dogs at Fort Bliss.) Shea does not agree. But he notes that Major League Eating ultimately decided they would be willing to concede the point for this year and permit Chestnut to compete at Coney Island.

By the time that offer was made—weeks after the negotiations were leaked and news coverage began saying he was banned from the contest—Chestnut was already planning the event with service members at Fort Bliss.

It remains to be seen whether he will be able to return to Coney Island next year to potentially reclaim the Mustard Belt.

“We did bend to accommodate Joey,” Shea says. “We are fully disposed to resolve things and have him next year.”

Chestnut says he is similarly open to return under the right circumstances.

“I’m not burning any bridges,” Chestnut told SI. “And I love it—I love the Fourth of July and that contest. I’m always willing to try. I don’t hold grudges. So nothing is out of the question.”