History
Traditionally, eating contests (usually involving pies) were events at county fairs. The recent surge in the popularity of competitive eating is due in large part to televised coverage of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, an annual holiday tradition that has been held on July 4 virtually every year since the 1970s at Coney Island. Recently, this contest has been dominated by IFOCE eater Takeru Kobayashi, who won it consistently from 2001 through 2006; he was dethroned in 2007 by Joey Chestnut. In 2008, Chestnut and Kobayashi tied at 59 hot dogs in 10 minutes (the time span had previously been 12 minutes), and Chestnut won in an eatoff in which he was the first of the two competitors to finish eating 5 hot dogs in overtime, earning Chestnut his second consecutive title. In the 1990s, competitive eating was popular in Japan but is now frowned on by many.
Read more about this topic: Competitive Eaters
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)