Hearts were broken all across our great country when it was revealed that Joey Chestnut would not be defending his title this July 4th at the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island. Incredibly, Chestnut has been banned from the competition for sponsoring a rival brand, Impossible Foods.
But any faint hopes of an 11th hour reunion between the folks at Major League Eating (who sponsor the Nathan’s contest) and Chestnut have now fallen by the wayside now that the 16-time champion has made alternative plans for July 4th official. He will head to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas for a hot dog eating contest with soldiers at the military base as part of a festival.
It’s smart for Chestnut to stay in the news and go up against the Nathan’s contest. After all, he has his own competitive eating duel with the legendary Takeru Kobayashi coming up later this year on Netflix to promote.
And here’s more from the Associated Press on the Chestnut event at Fort Bliss:
Competitive eater Joey “Jaws” Chestnut will take his hot dog-downing talents to an army base in Texas for America’s Independence Day this year after a falling out with organizers of the event that made him famous, the annual 4th of July eating contest in Brooklyn’s Coney Island.
Chestnut, of Indiana, will compete against soldiers in Fort Bliss, in El Paso, in a 5-minute hot dog eating contest. That’s instead of the 10-minute Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest, where he competed against the world’s top competitive eaters since 2005 and hadn’t lost since 2015. In 2021 he set the current record of 76 hot dogs, in 10 minutes.
Organizers of that event initially said he couldn’t attend due to a sponsorship conflict, which Chestnut said involved a deal with Impossible Foods, which makes plant-based hot dogs.
At the moment it’s unclear if the Chestnut event at Fort Bliss eating with soldiers will be televised or streamed anywhere. But if the folks at Impossible Foods want to take a page out of the Monday Night Wars of professional wrestling, they will stream it at the exact same time as the Nathan’s contest at Coney Island.
We’ve spent a lot of time in the sports world hand-wringing over when professional golf might reunite after the Saudi Arabian government drove a billion dollar wedge into the game with the PGA Tour-LIV divide. But perhaps we should turn our focus to the plant based vs meat based divide in the world of competitive eating instead, because that is really a battle for the soul of America.