Tsunami down! Tsunami down!
So despite the injured jaw the Tsunami broke the World Record of 59.5 hot dogs with 63 but unfortunately Joey Chestnut had just a bit more in the tank and finished with 66, breaking Kobayashi's streak of 6 championships and 7 in a row by Japanese contestants.
Joey "Jaws" Chestnut: 66
Takeru "Tsunami" Kobayashi: 63
Patrick Bertoletti: 49
There seems to be a bit of controversy with the results:
1) Apparently Kobayashi had a "reversal of fortune" towards the very end and some are saying he should be dqed but much like NBA Superstars and traveling he's not being called on it.
2) EatFeats says they're not sure where the extra 3 dogs came from for Joey because the final numbers were 63 Chestnut, 63 Kobayashi.
Also, I'm sorry but there seems to be a slight theme of racism towards Kobayashi (look at the Gothamist comments or here for examples). Plus apparently the ESPN commentators were rolling out Japanese stereotypes during the broadcast. Stay classy America.
Ah well, Kobayashi will be still be in America for some sort of Pizza Hut eating contest.
EatFeats, a blog dedicated to competitive eating, has a liveblog of the event as does the Gothamist. I wasn't able to watch the event live (not that I really want to see people shoving hot dogs in their faces for 12 minutes) so I apparently helped crash EatFeats along with whoever else was reloading their site to see the results. Sorry about that guys.
Is this the end of an era? Well, considering that Kobayashi was not in optimal condition, it's possible that he'll be itching for a rematch next year.
Other links of interest:
Kobayashi's official blog!
Contest Wikipedia entry in English and Japanese
Kobayashi on Wikipedia in Japanese and English
Eater Profiles at the IFOCE
2 comments:
oh yes. America is always classy. Urm, so where did the 3 hotdogs come from? Those judges can count, right? Yum, pizza.
I believe they counted the scraps that were left on the table. Which doesn't make sense because wouldn't they deduct dogs for scraps?
I think Kobayashi suffered a lot of backlash because he was so dominant for so long.
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