Netflix announced on Wednesday a new hot dog eating competition between two American and Japanese champions after the shock exclusion suffered by the former from a very old competition in New York.
The streaming giant published a drawing on
The “Unfinished Beef” match — beef means “meat” and also “bickering” or “quarrel” — will be broadcast live on Netflix on September 2, Labor Day in the United States.
On Tuesday, a conflict broke out in the small community of hot dog eaters.
Joey Chestnut, 1.85 m tall and 104 kg, capable of devouring 76 hot dogs in ten minutes, was de facto excluded from “Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest”, which has been held in New York since 1916 every July 4, national holiday.
Photo AFP
The reason given by the organizer, Major League Eating (MLE)?
Joey Chestnut wants to promote, this year, a competing brand of plant-based hot dogs, plant-based meat, and with which he has an advertising agreement.
Photo AFP
The person concerned declared on Instagram, Tuesday evening, to be “very disappointed to learn (his) exclusion by the media after almost 20 years” of competition and clarified that he had “no contract with the MLE or Nathan’s.
Joey Chestnut has won the competition 16 times and holds the record for victories.
Photo AFP
His best opponent is Takeru Kobayashi, but this Japanese champion was also excluded from the Nathan’s competition in 2010, following a disagreement over the exclusivity of a contract.
The MLE competition, more than a century old, refuses to allow its participants to represent brands other than its own, Nathan’s.
Saying she was “devastated”, she denounced Joey Chestnut’s commercial support of hot dogs in the form of plant-based meat substitutes, sold under the Impossible Foods brand.
Before Netflix’s announcement, the MLE still tried to coax the big eater.
“Joey Chestnut is an American hero. We would love nothing more than to have him” in the competition this year, she said.
Every July 4, some 35,000 fans gather in the Coney Island neighborhood on the Atlantic coast in the south of the New York borough of Brooklyn.
The five biggest eaters share $40,000 and the first wins the “mustard belt” with an extra $10,000.
According to the American press which nicknamed him “Jaw”, Joey Chestnut has, in recent years, pocketed hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars by also devouring 30 Greek sandwiches in ten minutes or 182 chicken wings in 30 minutes.
