ESPN did a pre-game re-cap and reported that Kobayashi has held the title 6 times, Chestnut twice.
George Shea was the Master of Ceremonies.
It was a pleasant 75 degrees at Coney Island with 49% humidity and the crowd was estimated to be in the neighborhood of 40,000 people for today's contest.
One of the announcers pointed out that 19,000 calories (800 hot dogs) would be consumed during today's event and that last year's record (59 dogs) is almost 30 feet of hot dogs when laid end-to-end.And besides reducing the time from 12 minutes to the original 10 minutes last year, there are several more new rules this year (no soaking the bun until it dissolves, nothing in your mouth when it's over).
This contest started in 1916 and President Obama watched it while on the campaign trail last year.
This year's contest also featured a few side shows (acrobats as the Barnum & Bailey Circus is in town) and yesterday, the circus elephants beat humans in a hot dog eating contest (one of the elephants ate 20 hot dogs at once).
I called the Boy (over at his girl-friend's house), my brother Jim in Cleveland Heights and Chris Masterson in Seattle to let them know the contest would be on in a few minutes, waking up both the Boy and Masterson (my brother Jim is 3 hours ahead of us and was awake hours ago).
I only recognized 9 out of the 22 contestants; one was the only "faith based" eater, another was a vegetarian (except for meat eating contests) and Masterson put his bet on either Eater X or Juliet Lee, one of the 2 women contestants this year.
The contest finally started 40 minutes into the hour long program, with Chestnut taking the lead for most of the 10 minutes.
The final score: Chestnut ate a total of 68 hot dogs (more than he did with OT last year), Kobayashi ate 64.5 hot dogs and Bertoletti was a distant third at 55 hot dogs.
We're taking the rest of the day off (and having home made corn dogs for lunch)...
NOTE: ESPN Classic showed reruns of the program from 2004 to 2009 (in sequence) this afternoon.
