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Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How many hot dogs did Joey Chestnut eat? Year-by-year results for 'Jaws'
Joey Chestnut made his triumphant return to the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest in 2025 after a contract dispute kept him out of the 2024 edition of the event. Chestnut is the most prolific eater in Hot Dog Eating Contest history. He has downed well over 1,000 hot dogs during his career and has crossed the 70-dog plateau a whopping seven times in his 20 appearances at the contest. Advertisement Chestnut wasn't quite able to break his record of 76 hot dogs at the 2025 event, but he was able to easily capture his 17th Mustard Belt. Here's a look at Chestnut's year-by-year results at the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, along with his total hot dogs consumed after his 2025. How many hot dogs did Joey Chestnut eat in 2025? Chestnut ate 70.5 hot dogs at the Hot Dog Eating Contest in 2025. The total was enough for him to win his 17th Mustard Belt, as he beat second-place finisher Patrick Bertoletti, who finished with 46.5 hot dogs eaten. How many hot dogs did Joey Chestnut eat in 2024? Chestnut did not participate in the Hot Dog Eating Contest in 2024. He was embroiled in a contractual dispute with Major League Eating stemming from his sponsorship with Impossible Foods, a company that develops plant-based alternatives to various meats. Advertisement Major League Eating doesn't allow competitors to endorse rival brands, resulting in Chestnut being banned from the 2024 iteration of the event. He is returning in 2025 after reaching an agreement with Nathan's Famous, the long-time sponsor of the Hot Dog Eating Contest. How many hot dogs did Joey Chestnut eat in 2023? Chestnut ate 62 hot dogs in 2023, his most recent appearance at the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. He beat second-place finisher Geoffrey Esper by 13 dogs and buns after Esper finished the contest with 49 total hot dogs eaten. The victory gave Chestnut his 16th overall Mustard Belt. Advertisement Joey Chestnut hot dog eating contest results by year Chestnut has eaten at least 60 hot dogs at each contest dating back to 2011. That included a record 76 hot dogs eaten during the 2021 edition of the event. Chestnut has won each of the contests in which he has participated since 2007, save for one. That came when Matt Stonie earned an upset win over him at the 2015 contest. Below is a look at Chestnut's results at the event since his debut in 2005, a third-place finish behind Takeru Kobayashi and Sonia Thomas. 2025: 70.5 – First place 2024: Did not participate (contract dispute) 2023 : 62 – First place 2022 : 63 – First place 2021 : 76 – First place, world record 2020 : 75 – First place 2019 : 71 – First place 2018 : 74 – First place 2017 : 72 – First place 2016 : 70 – First place 2015 : 60 – Second place 2014 : 61 – First place 2013 : 69 – First place 2012 : 68 – First place 2011 : 62 – First place 2010 : 54 – First place 2009 : 68 – First place 2008 : 59 – First place 2007 : 66 – First place 2006 : 52 – Second place 2005: 32 – Third place Joey Chestnut career eatings Chestnut has eaten a total of 1,284.5 hot dogs in 20 career appearances at the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. That's good for an average of 64.225 hot dogs per appearance. Advertisement This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Joey Chestnut hot dog record: Year-by-year results at contest
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
Joey Chestnut returns to Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest
He ate 70 and a half hot dogs in 10 minutes to earn his 17th Mustard Belt. Just a little shy of his record 76 dogs in 2021.
The Guardian
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Listen to Joey, sport is always trying to tell you something, even by the medium of hot dogs
The Big Dog is back. And the Big Dog is hungry. Hungry, above all, for dogs. Joey Chestnut has fulfilled his sporting destiny by reclaiming his world champion crown at the legendary 4 July hotdog eating contest in Coney Island, New York. Chestnut, AKA The Silent Warrior, is basically the Messi of elite eating. Or rather he's the Ronaldo, relentless in his perfectionism, possessed of an alluring competitive arrogance, and with the GOAT-level numbers to back it up: winner of the Mustard Belt now 17 times and the world record-holder as of 2021, when he ate 76 hotdogs in 10 minutes, a huge uplift on his debut in 2005 when he ate a frankly pathetic 32 hotdogs. Above all, Chestnut had a point to prove. He was banned from competing last year over a controversial sponsor deal with a plant-based hotdog alternative. Losing the title was a kind of Icarus moment. No one is bigger than the sport. Eating had to rein him in. And so this time around it wasn't about the $100,000 (£73,000) prize. It was about legacy. 'I'm back doing what I love,' Chestnut told the cameras ahead of Thursday's weigh-in. Which is, it seems, cramming an unbelievable amount of hotdogs into his face, and doing so in a contest that, frankly, feels like one of the few things that actually makes any sense this week, perhaps even the greatest and most fundamentally honest of all current human activities. Mainly, this is about will and about passion. 'I want to push myself,' Chestnut told USA Today, going on to talk about marginal gains and the tiny details of preparation, about taking up yoga, about working on rhythm, on ever-smoother delivery. There is talk of applying an 'electric simulation machine' to his abdomen 'to get everything loose', of endless tinkering with the temperature of the water used to dampen the buns, of burping exercises to develop the internal muscles, asthma drugs to improve air flow, open the sinuses and increase his capacity for stuffing hotdogs into his face. Plus of course the daily hard yards of the eating athlete. Chestnut performs endless neck hoists with a 7kg weight attached to a mouthguard. 'When I'm raising up, I'm almost imagining I'm swallowing, so I'm thrusting my tongue against the leather strap the mouthpiece is glued to.'' You've got to admit. This is incredibly sexy. The real kicker, as ever in elite sport, is attitude. Joey Chestnut? Joey Chestnut brought aggression to eating. He is looking for 'a perfect mix of anger and calm'. This is all very real. Three years ago he was forced to employ a chokehold on a stage invader who had run on in a Darth Vader mask to protest against killing animals just so people can stuff them in their mouths. Chestnut didn't stop. He still won by 15 dogs. This is eating heritage. And yes it is also highly confusing. Is this whole thing ironic? Is the world hotdog eating championship a joke? Nobody seems to really know. The stage announcer certainly seems to think it is a comedic event. The crowd has a kind of loose, spring break frat boy vibe. But there are rivalries here, men's and women's events, a massed judging corpus, stats and fandom, and of course that cash prize. It feels real, or like a thing that has become so unexpectedly. This is also not about mocking America: Brit-snobbery, the oh dear what have they done now Jeeves dynamic. I love America, love it as an idea and also as a place, as energy and colour and (even now) optimism. I also love hotdogs and can cram in up to one of them at a single sitting. But at the same time, it is also impossible to overstate how disgusting the hotdog eating championship is as a spectacle, and in every sense of the word. You probably think you already know it's disgusting. Well, you don't know nothing Mr Garrison, because you've never been confronted by an endlessly replicating pork-beef dog coated in your own semi-vomit. The world hotdog eating championship looks, and there is no other way of putting this, like a self-loathing high-speed fellatio marathon, the competitors constantly nodding their heads, thrusting in food with both hands, finishing up coated in bun paste and meat-goop, looking stricken but also impossibly excited. All of this is spectated by a mob crushed up into the notorious Splash Zone, with its crouching judges, its stern warnings about 'flying debris'. To be fair, you can really see the neck exercises pay off at this point. The natural assumption is the eating athletes will be large. They're not. They're buff, trim, competition-ready. Joey Chestnut's head is perfectly rounded with muscle, like a boxer's biceps or a gymnast's core. If I were to nitpick I would suggest making the sport more robust with a rule that all dogs and buns must be consumed as a whole, not tearing it apart and going dog then bun, which is essentially ball-tampering. Otherwise, it is a compelling spectacle, and in its own way very honest too. All American sports are basically an excuse to eat things, a complex machinery entwined around the founding desire to have a hotdog. The hotdog championship cuts to the chase, like reducing football to a one-kick penalty shootout. Here is the thing you actually want. Just have it. It is the perfect sport in structural ways, too. All sports are supposed to reflect a culture, to express some part of the character of a nation, even in bastardised form, like bullfighting in Spain, or the way cricket dramatises the English class system. And yes it would be easy at this point to mock America's dysfunction around food, but this also is a relationship with roots in something real and beautiful: abundance, prosperity, fecundity of the land, tired hungry masses settling a new frontier. Eating was stitched into the American century. JK Galbraith's famous 1957 study, The Affluent Society, concluded 'capitalism works', as proved beyond doubt by excess consumption. 'More die in the United States of too much food than of too little,' he concluded, back when this was a good thing. So food is freedom in America. 'Tastes like Freedom' is a common banner at the hotdog championships, even if that taste turns out to be a bolus of compacted sawdust-sausage the size of a moped. And even if like so many of the freedom things – cars, sex, guns – this is a freedom that has bolted terminally out of hand. Daily life in America can feel like being chased by food, constantly craving the perfect salty sweet hit that is America's gift, burdened by the patriotic duty to consume. Restaurants that look like car showrooms. The idea that a salad is in fact some kind of toxic assault by steroid-fed flaps of ungodly meat. The fact even in high-end places the business is still fetishising food: the greatest burrito in the world, the most organic vegan dim sum ever devised. America and food is so obviously dysfunctional you start to feel you could fix the whole place if you went at it symptoms-first. Don't stop eating. Just stop eating that. And yes, this is all doubly, trebly, hyper-disgusting when America is also in effect sponsoring a famine in Gaza, and all the while staging a hotdog competition where Joey Chestnut can win $100,000. But there is domestic sadness to this, too. The hotdog is one of those American objects, icons of the everyday, things that feel even now like a shot at happiness fallen wide. The hotdog origins story is suitably diffuse, credited to a sausage vender at the 1906 St Louis World Fair, or to a moment of founding genius in Louisiana in 1904, or to Germans everywhere who were already putting 'dachshunds' in buns. It doesn't matter. There should be a vague and folksy feel to this. The hotdog is immigrant food, sports field food, egalitarian food. This is American symbolism, American art. It's Gatsby's green beacon, Jack Kerouac burning like a roman candle, Ignatius Riley pushing his hotdog trolley around New Orleans and muttering about the wheel of fate. And now the hotdog has been updated, via the Joey Chestnut show, into a klaxon of decay and excess. Basically, everything is a hotdog eating contest now, from sport to business, to the shared human experience, all of us in the wealthy world assailed by this agony of consumption, wants, desires. In the same week of the world hotdog eating championship the UK government has even started pushing weight loss drugs as a healthy living choice. We will create a world full of calories, we will take away your green space, stick you in front of a screen, make your life a matter of passive consumption. Then when it gets too expensive to fix your mind and body, well, we have an injection for that. Shoot this thing full of painkillers, antidepressants and weight loss jabs, we might just about muster up a functional human. So Joey Chestnut and his hotdog performance speaks in a way that is oddly heartening, an act of punkish satire. This is the life you have made for us, Joey Chestnut is saying, human need extrapolated to a wild extreme. I will take this world and hold up a mirror, turn it into a spectacle that mocks the spectacle. Enter the splash zone, Big Food. Feel his spittle on your face. It does always feel like sport is trying to tell you something, even here, via the medium of hotdogs. Sometimes well, sometimes you just get the heroes you need.
The Guardian
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Listen to Joey, sport is always trying to tell you something, even by the medium of hot dogs
The Big Dog is back. And the Big Dog is hungry. Hungry, above all, for dogs. Joey Chestnut has fulfilled his sporting destiny by reclaiming his world champion crown at the legendary 4 July hotdog eating contest in Coney Island, New York. Chestnut, AKA The Silent Warrior, is basically the Messi of elite eating. Or rather he's the Ronaldo, relentless in his perfectionism, possessed of an alluring competitive arrogance, and with the GOAT-level numbers to back it up: winner of the Mustard Belt now 17 times and the world record-holder as of 2021, when he ate 76 hotdogs in 10 minutes, a huge uplift on his debut in 2005 when he ate a frankly pathetic 32 hotdogs. Above all, Chestnut had a point to prove. He was banned from competing last year over a controversial sponsor deal with a plant-based hotdog alternative. Losing the title was a kind of Icarus moment. No one is bigger than the sport. Eating had to rein him in. And so this time around it wasn't about the $100,000 (£73,000) prize. It was about legacy. 'I'm back doing what I love,' Chestnut told the cameras ahead of Thursday's weigh-in. Which is, it seems, cramming an unbelievable amount of hotdogs into his face, and doing so in a contest that, frankly, feels like one of the few things that actually makes any sense this week, perhaps even the greatest and most fundamentally honest of all current human activities. Mainly, this is about will and about passion. 'I want to push myself,' Chestnut told USA Today, going on to talk about marginal gains and the tiny details of preparation, about taking up yoga, about working on rhythm, on ever-smoother delivery. There is talk of applying an 'electric simulation machine' to his abdomen 'to get everything loose', of endless tinkering with the temperature of the water used to dampen the buns, of burping exercises to develop the internal muscles, asthma drugs to improve air flow, open the sinuses and increase his capacity for stuffing hotdogs into his face. Plus of course the daily hard yards of the eating athlete. Chestnut performs endless neck hoists with a 7kg weight attached to a mouthguard. 'When I'm raising up, I'm almost imagining I'm swallowing, so I'm thrusting my tongue against the leather strap the mouthpiece is glued to.'' You've got to admit. This is incredibly sexy. The real kicker, as ever in elite sport, is attitude. Joey Chestnut? Joey Chestnut brought aggression to eating. He is looking for 'a perfect mix of anger and calm'. This is all very real. Three years ago he was forced to employ a chokehold on a stage invader who had run on in a Darth Vader mask to protest against killing animals just so people can stuff them in their mouths. Chestnut didn't stop. He still won by 15 dogs. This is eating heritage. And yes it is also highly confusing. Is this whole thing ironic? Is the world hotdog eating championship a joke? Nobody seems to really know. The stage announcer certainly seems to think it is a comedic event. The crowd has a kind of loose, spring break frat boy vibe. But there are rivalries here, men's and women's events, a massed judging corpus, stats and fandom, and of course that cash prize. It feels real, or like a thing that has become so unexpectedly. This is also not about mocking America: Brit-snobbery, the oh dear what have they done now Jeeves dynamic. I love America, love it as an idea and also as a place, as energy and colour and (even now) optimism. I also love hotdogs and can cram in up to one of them at a single sitting. But at the same time, it is also impossible to overstate how disgusting the hotdog eating championship is as a spectacle, and in every sense of the word. You probably think you already know it's disgusting. Well, you don't know nothing Mr Garrison, because you've never been confronted by an endlessly replicating pork-beef dog coated in your own semi-vomit. The world hotdog eating championship looks, and there is no other way of putting this, like a self-loathing high-speed fellatio marathon, the competitors constantly nodding their heads, thrusting in food with both hands, finishing up coated in bun paste and meat-goop, looking stricken but also impossibly excited. All of this is spectated by a mob crushed up into the notorious Splash Zone, with its crouching judges, its stern warnings about 'flying debris'. To be fair, you can really see the neck exercises pay off at this point. The natural assumption is the eating athletes will be large. They're not. They're buff, trim, competition-ready. Joey Chestnut's head is perfectly rounded with muscle, like a boxer's biceps or a gymnast's core. If I were to nitpick I would suggest making the sport more robust with a rule that all dogs and buns must be consumed as a whole, not tearing it apart and going dog then bun, which is essentially ball-tampering. Otherwise, it is a compelling spectacle, and in its own way very honest too. All American sports are basically an excuse to eat things, a complex machinery entwined around the founding desire to have a hotdog. The hotdog championship cuts to the chase, like reducing football to a one-kick penalty shootout. Here is the thing you actually want. Just have it. It is the perfect sport in structural ways, too. All sports are supposed to reflect a culture, to express some part of the character of a nation, even in bastardised form, like bullfighting in Spain, or the way cricket dramatises the English class system. And yes it would be easy at this point to mock America's dysfunction around food, but this also is a relationship with roots in something real and beautiful: abundance, prosperity, fecundity of the land, tired hungry masses settling a new frontier. Eating was stitched into the American century. JK Galbraith's famous 1957 study, The Affluent Society, concluded 'capitalism works', as proved beyond doubt by excess consumption. 'More die in the United States of too much food than of too little,' he concluded, back when this was a good thing. So food is freedom in America. 'Tastes like Freedom' is a common banner at the hotdog championships, even if that taste turns out to be a bolus of compacted sawdust-sausage the size of a moped. And even if like so many of the freedom things – cars, sex, guns – this is a freedom that has bolted terminally out of hand. Daily life in America can feel like being chased by food, constantly craving the perfect salty sweet hit that is America's gift, burdened by the patriotic duty to consume. Restaurants that look like car showrooms. The idea that a salad is in fact some kind of toxic assault by steroid-fed flaps of ungodly meat. The fact even in high-end places the business is still fetishising food: the greatest burrito in the world, the most organic vegan dim sum ever devised. America and food is so obviously dysfunctional you start to feel you could fix the whole place if you went at it symptoms-first. Don't stop eating. Just stop eating that. And yes, this is all doubly, trebly, hyper-disgusting when America is also in effect sponsoring a famine in Gaza, and all the while staging a hotdog competition where Joey Chestnut can win $100,000. But there is domestic sadness to this, too. The hotdog is one of those American objects, icons of the everyday, things that feel even now like a shot at happiness fallen wide. The hotdog origins story is suitably diffuse, credited to a sausage vender at the 1906 St Louis World Fair, or to a moment of founding genius in Louisiana in 1904, or to Germans everywhere who were already putting 'dachshunds' in buns. It doesn't matter. There should be a vague and folksy feel to this. The hotdog is immigrant food, sports field food, egalitarian food. This is American symbolism, American art. It's Gatsby's green beacon, Jack Kerouac burning like a roman candle, Ignatius Riley pushing his hotdog trolley around New Orleans and muttering about the wheel of fate. And now the hotdog has been updated, via the Joey Chestnut show, into a klaxon of decay and excess. Basically, everything is a hotdog eating contest now, from sport to business, to the shared human experience, all of us in the wealthy world assailed by this agony of consumption, wants, desires. In the same week of the world hotdog eating championship the UK government has even started pushing weight loss drugs as a healthy living choice. We will create a world full of calories, we will take away your green space, stick you in front of a screen, make your life a matter of passive consumption. Then when it gets too expensive to fix your mind and body, well, we have an injection for that. Shoot this thing full of painkillers, antidepressants and weight loss jabs, we might just about muster up a functional human. So Joey Chestnut and his hotdog performance speaks in a way that is oddly heartening, an act of punkish satire. This is the life you have made for us, Joey Chestnut is saying, human need extrapolated to a wild extreme. I will take this world and hold up a mirror, turn it into a spectacle that mocks the spectacle. Enter the splash zone, Big Food. Feel his spittle on your face. It does always feel like sport is trying to tell you something, even here, via the medium of hotdogs. Sometimes well, sometimes you just get the heroes you need.
eNCA
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- eNCA
Fast-chewing Chestnut wins July 4th hot dog contest
BROOKLYN - Competitive eater Joey Chestnut recaptured his title at the Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest on Friday in Brooklyn, downing 70.5 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes in the July 4th holiday classic. The 41-year-old American missed last year's event after signing a deal with Impossible Foods, whose plant-based products include hot dogs, but he was allowed to enter this year and made his Coney Island comeback a triumphant one. Chestnut won by 24 hot dogs over last year's winner, Patrick Bertoletti of Chicago, but the maestro of mastication could not break his own record of 76 hot dogs that he consumed in 2021. It marked the 17th time Chestnut claimed the "Mustard Belt" symbolic of supremacy in the gastronomic showdown and his ninth triumph in 10 years. "Oh my gosh, I was nervous," Chestnut told event telecaster ESPN after his victory. "First couple of hot dogs, I was fumbling a little bit, but I found a pretty good rhythm." Chestnut said that despite his blowout triumph, he was hoping to make a better show of challenging his record consumption total. "My goal was 70 to 77," he said. "I really wanted a little bit more. There's next year and I'm just happy I'm here." On the women's side, American Miki Sudo won by eating 33 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes, her 11th victory in the past 12 years, with American Michelle Lesco second on 22.75 dogs and buns.
