Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest Crowns Patrick Bertoletti as New Men’s Champion

It is the Fourth of July in New York City, and that can mean only one thing. No, not fireworks, sweaty subway rides and family cookouts. It is time for the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island.

The contest has long been a holiday mainstay in New York, and must-see midday TV across the country. But this year’s event, which tests “competitive eaters” on how many hot dogs they can frantically scarf down in 10 minutes, crowned a new men’s champion for the first time in almost a generation.

Patrick Bertoletti, 26, from Chicago, snagged the men’s title — or, in the parlance of Coney Island, the Mustard Belt — by eating 58 hot dogs in 10 minutes.

He took the title from Joey Chestnut, 40, who won the competition 16 times but was disqualified from entering. Mr. Bertoletti was the ninth-ranked eater before the competition, according to Major League Eating, and he bested several others competitors who event organizers had talked up as Mr. Chestnut’s potential successors.

“Always a bridesmaid and never a bride,” Mr. Bertoletti said after his victory. “But today I am getting married.”

He described winning the competition as a life-changing event.

“With Joey not here I knew I had a shot,” he added, in reference to Mr. Chestnut. “I was able to unlock something and I don’t know where it came from.”

Indeed, despite his absence, Mr. Chestnut loomed large over Thursday’s proceedings. He was forced to part ways with the contest last month after he signed an endorsement deal with Impossible Foods, a rival to Nathan’s that makes vegan hot dogs.

Many viewers tuned in year after year just to watch Mr. Chestnut go through a pile of hot dogs like a wood chipper. News of his departure from the contest was met with the sort of public anguish one might expect for a major-league baseball player, not a man who ate 62 hot dogs in 10 minutes last July 4.

At the women’s contest on Thursday, Miki Sudo, 38, easily won the that title for the 10th time, besting a group of competitors, some of whom traveled to Coney Island from as far as Japan and South Korea.

She ate 51 hot dogs in 10 minutes, setting a new women’s record and exceeding her 2023 total of 39.5 hot dogs. The second place competitor, Mayoi Ebihara of Japan, ate 37 hot dogs on Thursday.

After her victory, Ms. Sudo thanked her family and the dental school in Tampa where she is studying to be dental hygienist, and reflected on the pressures of being a mother, a student and world famous hot dog eater.

“You feel like you’re juggling,” she said, “You try your best to balance everything.”

George Shea, the event’s larger-than-life emcee, described Ms. Sudo as a woman whose “soul shines like magnesium set afire against the dark mountain of night.”

In an interview last month, Mr. Shea, a charismatic showman who helped elevate this whole spectacle into the sort of event that is covered by The New York Times, said he was “devastated” by the Chestnut situation. Even Senator Chuck Schumer, a Brooklyn native, mourned what he called “‘impossibly’ hard-to-swallow news.”

Mr. Shea said Mr. Chestnut’s endorsement deal had left Major League Eating with no choice but to bar him.

“It would be like back in the day Michael Jordan coming to Nike, who made his Air Jordans, and saying, ‘I am just going to rep Adidas too,’” Mr. Shea said. “It just can’t happen.”

The competition, held outside Nathan’s Famous, the Coney Island stand that spawned a hot dog empire, will re-air on ESPN twice on Thursday night.

On Wednesday, the aspiring champions gathered in Midtown for the contest’s official weigh-in ceremony. (The contest does not separate eaters into weight classes, so it was not clear why anyone needed to be weighed.)

James Webb, one hopeful, said in an interview he began competitive eating “as a joke,” and is now a full-time content creator on social media, where he posts food videos.

Mr. Webb, a former professional soccer player from Australia, appeared delighted to be in New York, and said he hoped to someday have an eating career like Mr. Chestnut’s.

“Joey set standards that all of us are trying to beat,” he said. “Joey is like the Terminator.”

The hot dog eating contest is the sort of absurd public event for which New York City has long been known. Over the years it has developed its own lore, canon and epic heroes, of whom Mr. Chestnut was long the king.

According to outer-borough legend, the contest has been held each year since 1916, when Nathan Handwerker opened a hot dog joint on the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues in Coney Island.

But like many legends, this one is mostly myth. The contest actually began in the early 1970s, and in 2010, one of its original promoters, Mortimer Matz, admitted that he had cooked up the origin story in “Coney Island pitchman style.”

In recent years, the event has been powered largely by the wiener puns and theatrical patriotism of Mr. Shea, who calls it “a celebration of freedom,” and by the star power of Mr. Chestnut.

The contest made him famous, and he in turn became synonymous with the event — which means his specter loomed over the proceedings this year. As the weigh-in ceremony began on Wednesday, Mr. Shea repeated the tale of Mr. Chestnut’s departure for the crowd, before reassuring them that he would be welcome to return to the Coney Island event at any time.

Representatives for Mr. Chestnut did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

For those who still wished to watch Mr. Chestnut eat an unsettling number of hot dogs on July 4, he was to travel to Fort Bliss, in El Paso, to compete against soldiers in a five-minute hot dog eating contest. The event will stream live on Mr. Chestnut’s YouTube channel at 5 p.m. Eastern.

He will also headline a hot dog eating contest on Labor Day that will stream live on Netflix, along with Takeru Kobayashi, another former July 4 hot dog champion who was ejected from the Coney Island contest in 2010 after a falling out with Major League Eating.

Mr. Chestnut’s trajectory may have taken him out of the Nathan’s competition — for now, at least — but Mr. Webb said on Wednesday that some version of his celebrity status is what everyone in the contest hoped to achieve.

That is why they spend the year training, eating and stretching their stomachs. (His method involves using a foam roller on his abdomen followed by a trip to a buffet, he said.)

“We are all weird,” said Mr. Webb, as a person in a giant hot dog costume danced nearby for TV cameras lined up beneath the Vessel in Hudson Yards. “We are all weird in our way. But we are hella competitive and pretty disciplined. And that’s kind of the part people don’t see.”