For some of us, the Fourth of July means family barbecues and stuffing our dogs into Thundershirts before the fireworks begin. For others, it means taking the train to Coney Island to stand outside in hundred-degree heat and watch professional athletes wolf down as many hot dogs as possible in ten minutes.
This year, the Nathan’s Hot-Dog Eating Contest is sure to draw in more eyes than ever before. Earlier this summer, Major League Eating, the international organization that has overseen the Coney Island boardwalk contest since 1997, announced that 16-time Mustard Belt winner Joey Chestnut was banned from competing because of a conflicting contract with Impossible Foods, to the shock and disappointment of fans (and Chestnut’s apparent surprise). The hot-dog industrial complex may have booted another legendary eater from its ranks, but if you want to see a defending champion fight for a top spot, it’s the women you should be watching.
Maybe you’re surprised to hear there’s a women’s hot-dog eating contest at all. Women competed alongside the men at Nathan’s until 2011, when the MLE created a separate division to accommodate the growing number of contestants in both categories. The women compete the morning of the Fourth, a few hours before the men take to the table, and their contest is livestreamed on ESPN’s website. The men’s contest, meanwhile, is also broadcast on live television, where it draws in nearly 2 million viewers every year.
The reigning women’s champion, Miki Sudo, has won nine Pink Belts at Nathan’s and holds a record of 48.5 dogs in ten minutes, making her the MLE’s No. 1 woman eater and its third-ranked across men and women alike. The 38-year-old got her start in competitive eating after entering a pho-eating competition in the early 2010s; there, she discovered her knack for stretching her stomach. Sudo didn’t get into it for love of food — she’s endured uncooked-Spam contests and once downed more than 180 oysters, a personal phobia of hers, in the span of three minutes — but rather the thrill of competition. “I’ve been skydiving before,” Sudo tells me. “I’ve hiked Machu Picchu.” (And most professional eaters, she tells me, are similarly adventure-minded.) In 2014, Sudo upset former women’s champion Sonya Thomas and has defended her title ever since. (That is, with the exception of 2021, when she was pregnant with her son, whom she shares with her husband, Nick Wehry, who competes in the men’s division — the two met in a hotel gym the morning before a Nathan’s contest.)
In preparation for Nathan’s, Sudo competes in year-round eating competitions, like the Las Vegas bagel competition she did in January. Hot-dog training heats up in late May, when she and Wehry cook up dozens of franks and try to mimic contest conditions as closely as possible so that Sudo can perfect her technique and activate her muscle memory. On the Nathan’s stage, there’s no room for error or delay. “I have seconds to get started,” says Sudo. “So much can go wrong if I don’t have my water temperature right, or the correct dilution for my flavoring mix,” she says. Contestants dunk their buns in water to help them go down easier, and Sudo adds a strawberry-orange-banana powder to hers. “It combats flavor fatigue,” she says.
Between taking care of her son, attending dental-hygiene school full-time, and worrying about the rise of promising competitors, Sudo’s nervous about defending her title. “I can’t lose this belt,” she tells me. Does she plan to hit 50 dogs this year, shattering her record? “Personally, I just want to win,” Sudo says. She’s trained to break the record before, but circumstances like extreme heat can easily put it out of reach. Joey Chestnut lost his ninth belt to Matt Stonie. Sudo fears the same fate this go-round. “The curse of the tenth year, I don’t want to make that a thing,” she says.
While Sudo’s worried about winning, others just want to keep competing. At the age of 60, Larell Marie “The Real Deal” Mele is ranked fourth among the MLE women eaters and is looking forward to her 14th consecutive year at Nathan’s. “I want to eventually hold the record for longest consecutive years by any female — we have three more to go,” she says. Originally from Queens, Mele says she grew up with a “ridiculous appetite” and has been a fan of competitive eating since the Kobayashi days of the early 2000s. She never considered pursuing it herself until an eater at the gym where she used to train told her about a pierogi contest. Mele signed up, downed 49 pierogies in ten minutes, and registered for Nathan’s. After three eating contests, she made her MLE debut in 2010 at a Nathan’s qualifier in Foxborough, Massachusetts, where she ate 14 dogs but didn’t progress to the Coney Island event. “Back then, unless you were a Miki Sudo–type woman, you weren’t beating the men. I knew I wasn’t going to qualify, but I had fun,” Mele recalls. She tried again the next year, the inaugural year of the women’s division, and ended up winning her qualifier with just 13 dogs. “I was a size zero. The MC said, ‘Oh, look at this little girl!’”
Mele practices with the men’s competitor George Chiger, who lives five miles away from her in Pennsylvania. The duo begin prepping for Nathan’s in April, eating hot dogs cooked by mutual friends who own a hot-dog stand on a weekly basis and inviting spectators to partake. “We do Facebook events. People come out to watch us do our disgusting little task,” Mele says. When Nathan’s day rolls around, she preps her stomach for the sodium by eating light, easily digestible foods the day before, like yogurt. Her game-day mantra is “Don’t choke don’t puke, don’t choke don’t puke don’t choke don’t puke.” Like Sudo, the flavor fatigue of so many dogs challenges her. So does the prospect of vomit. “I’ve been Heimliched at practice. If somebody’s going to choke at the table, it’s going to be me,” says Mele. After Nathan’s, she recovers in her hotel room with a few pints of CVS ice cream; a sweet tooth, she likes to offset the savoriness of hot dogs with her favorite dessert. “I want to be someplace cool and start digesting,” says Mele. “Then I’ll be okay.”
And gender representation, the eaters know, is a fight in any sport — even the unappetizing ones. Mary Bowers, who’s representing Korea, is ranked tenth among the women eaters and is headed to Nathan’s for the ninth time. Her eating journey started at a restaurant in Orange County, California, when she saw a sign for a hot-dog contest headlined by Kobayashi. Bowers went in to watch but ended up putting her name down on the sign-up sheet. She was the only woman at the table. “I did terribly at that contest — I ate five hot dogs,” Bowers says. Afterwards, she went to the bathroom to wash the processed-meat smell from her hands when a mother and daughter approached her. The mother wanted her child to meet Bowers. “The girl said, ‘You’re the only girl at the table and girls can do anything boys can do,’” says Bowers. “I said, ‘Do you want to eat hot dogs too?’ She said no, no way, that’s gross.” Bowers stayed in the game.
Despite all the spectators who will no doubt come out to see the aftermath of Chestnut’s ban, some eaters wish the women’s contest would get more eyes as a stand-alone event. An online livestream and a few evening television replays aren’t enough; the women want to be in the main telecast too. “If they would show us on TV, it would just be so much more broad interest,” Mele says.
Last year, Bowers tells me, rain delayed the men’s competition, and in the chaos, ESPN ended up replaying the women’s contest during the prime telecast. It struck her to see how many fans were surprised to see women eat. “They didn’t know it was part of the contest. They started asking to see it,” says Bowers. ESPN will air a women’s replay during this year’s main telecast, too. For Bowers, that’s as it should be. “We are in demand,” she says. “We can deliver results. I think we’ve proven that point.”
