It’s going to be a real intense battle.
Only one man has beaten Joey Chestnut in the Nathan’s Fourth of July hot dog eating contest in the past 17 years, and he says his newest competitor and former nemesis can do it too.
Matt Stonie defeated Chestnut 62-60 in the 2015 edition of the Sausage Fest, arguably the pinnacle of the professional eating circuit.
Reigning champion Chestnut, 40, will not compete at Nathan’s this year as he will face longtime rival Kobayashi Takeru, a Japanese power eater who has stayed away from the U.S. speed-eating circuit in recent years.
To win, the 46-year-old Kobayashi will need to stay focused and train hard, but surprisingly, he also needs to rest, Stoney said.
“Joey is the greatest competitive eater of all time. I put a lot of work into it, but it took me five years from when I started to when I beat him.”
He recounted that a “turning point” in his training in the year before his win was when he cut back on training and increased his diet.
Instead of continuing his ridiculous exercise routine, he focused on hydration and “resting my body instead of pushing it.”
In preparation for the 2015 competition, Stoney said he made 50 to 65 hot dogs, set a 10-minute timer, turned on some music and tried to eat them all.
After that, he “basically just chills” for a few days before doing it again. “That’s the time I need to recover,” he said.
“A lot of the training comes down to food and practice. It seems counterintuitive, but I was actually cutting back and resting my body instead of pushing it.”
Kobayashi, a competitive eating legend, was the July 4th winner and held the “Mustard Belt” for six consecutive years from 2001 to 2006.
He drew with Chestnut in 2008 and lost again in 2009 before losing to Chestnut in sudden death.
Around that time, he was suffering from a jaw problem – common among competitive eaters who have to train their mouths rigorously – but he seemed to use it to his advantage.
But in 2011, at an unofficial simultaneous event in another part of New York, he made a surprise comeback, gobbling down 69 hot dogs – more than Joey’s 62 in the official Coney Island competition.
Stoney added: “He’d been going around saying he had a problem with his chin and then he went out and played better than he’d ever been, so it just makes me wonder… maybe he was trying to fool people a bit. I know players who do that.”
Although Kobayashi achieved the status of a legendary figure, he announced his retirement from professional eating on May 21, joking that he wanted to “repair his brain and intestines” because he wasn’t hungry anymore.
However, it appeared to be a bluff, and less than a month later, it was announced that he would be appearing in the Labor Day special “Kuri vs. Kobayashi: Unfinished Beef.”
Stoney, who weighs about 130 pounds and is 5 feet 8 inches tall, is retired from the hot dog business and now Known as a YouTube influencer.
He regularly takes on wild food challenges, like eating a 100-layer lasagna or downing 20,000 calories in one meal, and his videos have collectively garnered more than 3 billion views.
Still, he called the win over Chestnut one of the “most memorable moments of my career.”
