You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Nathan’s World famous Hot Dog eating contest.
What a tradition. What a nauseating vomit inducing festival of disgust.
competitors line up in Coney Island to the fan fare of a heavy weight title fight. There’s not doubt this is a spectacle. It’s a mustard slathered, mice dropping filled, sheath inhaling, mystery meat swallowing disgust-a-thon.
Is it the most disgusting contest in the world? Perhaps professional blood letting is grosser, but it’s not as American.
In case you are wondering, this event is ten minutes of controlled chaos. The rules are simple: stand shoulder to shoulder with another mutant and swallow death dogs and buns and liquified nastiness. Whoever holds down the most wins.
What could be more classicly sick than this?
The winner this year is the same winner as last year and the year before. His name is Joey Chestnut. He is the world’s greatest eater.
I was sitting with my daughter and she continually had to turn away from the screen. She almost vomited multiple times watching this filthy inhalation of meat by products one after another.
The way competitors shove hot dogs into their mouths, and then jump up and down and then pinch their noses as if to force it down their throats is filthy hideous. One dog after another, its like an assembly line of putrid perfection.
It’s so obscure ESPN’s Sports Science analyzed this sport.
It was called the science of top ranked eater Joey Chestnut.
Standing in front of a table full of franks, world champion Chestnut and the reporter eat as many hot dogs as they can in five minutes.
By the time the host eats one. Joey Chestnut has all ready eaten ten.
How does he do it?
The announcer says it all starts with his jaw. The Masseter muscle, he says is ferocious and pound for pound, Joey Chestnut creates 280 pounds of force with his jaw.
That’s stronger than a German Shepard, he says.
Next the announcer says it’s the esophagus. Most of us rely on rhythmic contractions known as peristalsis to move food into our stomachs. Most of us don’t force food into our stomachs at Indy race car type speeds. Competitive eaters do, pinching their noses to increase pressure, like a scuba diver, to move food thr0ugh the esophagus into the stomach.
To help move that food along, the competitor often jumps up and down using gyrations and gravity to pull the food down.
“I will do whatever it takes,” Chestnut will say. “There is nothing pretty about it.”
There’s an understatement. This sport has all the romance a dog licking itself.
And if you are going to be the champ, you need a champion like stomach. Chestnut can expand his gut forcing it to expand by 400 percent, from the normal one liter to four liters.
That sounds more like the anatomy of a camel than a man.
And if you wondered if these guys are athletes? The announcer says body fat reduces stomach expansion so many competitive eaters are thin to allow for maximum expansion.
The host says he ate three hot dogs in five minutes. In that same five minutes, Chestnut ate 36 hot dogs. That’s 9,000 calories worth of hot dogs. That’s 5 days worth of calories for the typical American and this guy ate that in 5 minutes.
Gross?
Picking your nose and eating it in public is gross.
Hot dog inhalation is absurdly foul, like licking rancid chicken.
So while my daughter gags trying not to vomit. ESPN will continue to broadcast this spectacle in all it’s fourth of July glory.
It is American as fireworks, complete with close ups and puke defying awesomeness.
Life’s Crazy™