It’s not a big deal in NASCAR. I remember laughing watching a Home Depot sponsored race being won by Jimmie Johnson in the Lowes car. They didn’t make him change sponsors, change paint scheme or not race.
The opposite may have happened at a Lowes sponsored race were Tony Stewart in the Home Depot car won.
Sure, but going with a fake meat hot dog company was just twisting the knife in the back of the real animal parts hot dog industry. Why would he do that? The conspiracy deepens.
I just read somewhere that Chestnut and Kobayashi are going to do their own contest on Netfilx.
I have to agree that this sort of “sport” is at best distasteful but still, I’m in awe of the record. I’ll typically have one (jumbo) hot dog, and at most I’ll have two if I’m really hungry and they’re good quality all-beef dogs. If I had 76 in any period less than a month I’d have to be taken straight to the ER. How this guy can consume 76 hot dogs in 10 minutes mainly raises the question of why any human being would do that to themselves. Come on, is this really a “sport”?
OK, so I’m having a Poe’s law moment, or missing tons of cultural context. Is sitting down to watch people eat horrendous quantities of third-rate meat really something that is being done in America, like, for entertainment, on an appreciable scale? I mean, I’m aware there’s something like competitive eating out there, but I always thought it was just something confined to some weird insular sub-culture, not really discussed in polite society, perhaps a dodgy country fair side show, that sort of thing. But this is popular enough for its champions to be household names, or “American heroes”, as the quote in that article says?
I have bad news for your sensibilities; it’s being done in other countries as well.
So I take it that’s a ‘yes’, then. So what’s the entertainment value in that? I mean, I get that for every human activity, there’s for some reason always a contest at who is ‘best’ at that activity, even though being better than anybody else at it has no inherent utility whatever. It’s just how humans are wired.
But that doesn’t mean that every such thing has mass appeal, so why competitive eating of all things? Do people, like, root for their favorite congestant? Is there merchandise? Or is it just a kind of freak show thing?
It’s just a marketing ploy by a hot dog company. Find a few schmucks to stuff their faces with your product, make it a competition complete with announcers and prizes, align the contest to the most American of holidays, and et voila, a “tradition” is born.
Thanks, that makes sense. Still, the whole thing appears to have a viewership in the millions, attracts reporting from major news outlets, and the sponsorship contract of Chestnut seems to be worth over a million bucks, which isn’t exactly chump change.
Also, I may be in the process of answering my own question.
He knew the rival endorsement rules. To piss and moan about how disappointed he is in not being eligible makes him a big weiner.
It gets reported nationwide largely due to the freakshow nature of it. Maybe Nathan’s makes a big deal of it locally in NY, I don’t know.
But I’m skeptical that the event gets impressive television viewership.
Or that Americans in general know who Joey Chestnut is. America: Who came in second last year? The year before? Or third place last year?
Frankly, I agree.
Or alternatively, many many smaller weiners.
Competitive eating is a thing.
It’s not a particularly big thing, but the annual Nathans Hot Dog Eating Contest is something I would expect any American who doesn’t live in a cave to know exists.
Level 2 awareness adds in the fact that Joey Chestnut is the multi year reigning champ.
Level 3 awareness notes that Kobayashi was a top competitor who stopped taking part because they have restrictive rules about taking part in other eating competitions.
Level 4 awareness is where the weirdos live, because it implies greater interest in the topic than I personally have.
Well, in 2011, it had a viewership of 1.95 million, two-thirds of what Wimbledon seems to get…
There’s a basketball championship series currently being played in the US:
Sunday’s Game 2 averaged 12,063,000 viewers, peaking with 14,106,000 viewers at 10 ET.
I see what you did there…
A while back I went on a kick watching a YouTube channel called Beard Meats Food, which is run by a British competitive eater. He travels and does food challenges at restaurants, and gets recognized by owners and other patrons quite often.
It’s utterly fascinating to watch the food disappear, though after a while it gets repetitive watching him eat yet another ten pounds of pizza or whatever.
I just checked the channel and most of his videos get between 2.5 and 5 million views. His most popular is 21 million views and he has six videos that are over 10 million each.
I guess i live in a hole. I was aware of hot dog eating competitions, but i didn’t realize there was one special one in NY sponsored by Nathan’s. And i certainly didn’t recognize the name of the champ.
I mean, sure there’s bigger sports events, but still, being on a comparable order of magnitude as the biggest tennis tournament for stuffing your face with sausage is not something I would’ve expected.
(As an aside, I’ve been looking at similar things locally, and chanced upon this article, which starts with the words: “Most people would probably not believe that competitive eating could attract many viewers. But in the US, these contests are a big business.” So it seems my reaction is not so unusual… I’m not sure, incidentally, if the pun on ‘großes Geschäft’, which can mean both ‘big business’ and ‘going number 2’, is intentional, but I definitely hope so.)