Dogged by Injury
RAFU STAFF AND WIRE SERVICE REPORTS
Sunday, July 1, 2007

Kobayashi reveals that an arthritic jaw may keep him out of next week’s Fourth of July hot dog eating contest.


Associated Press photos
Takeru Kobayashi holds the coveted Mustard Belt while showing off his stomach after winning the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Competition Tuesday, July 4, 2006, in Coney Island, New York. Kobayashi won his sixth straight title by beating his own record and eating 53 and 3/4 hot dogs.

Richard Shea, the president of Major League Eating, the group that hosts the July 4 competition, described Kobayashi’s condition as “day to day,”
adding, “Eater safety is our top priority and we will respect whatever decision Kobayashi makes about participating in these events.”

Kobayashi, know as “The Tsunami” on the competitive eating circuit, said he can only open his mouth wide enough to fit in a fingertip, after being diagnosed with jaw arthritis or a form of temporomandibular joint disorder, which causes pain in the joint that connects the lower jaw to his skull.

Doubts about Kobayashi’s appearance at Coney Island this summer began to surface after the death of his mother earlier this year and a reported lack of training. His schedule came to a halt for several months due to mourning, but he wrote Sunday that he still wanted to go to the competition in New York.

“I want to be the pride of my mother,” he said in the blog.

Major League Eating said that Kobayashi remains scheduled to eat at
Nathan’s and at a Pizza Hut contest in Manhattan on July 10th.

His absence would certainly be the source of great disappointment at Coney Island. Last year, more than 30,000 fans clamored to watch Kobayashi win his sixth straight title.

This year, there was added drama, after a 23-year-old American broke
Kobayashi’s record in a qualifying event in Arizona. San Jose’s Joey Chestnut, a student who placed second in the 2006 final, managed to stomach 59 and a half franks in 12 minutes in the southwest regional in Phoenix last month. In some gambling circles, Chestnut is the favorite going into this year’s Nathan’s.

Kobayashi burst on to the scene at the 2001 Nathan’s contest, when, at a weight of just over 110 pounds, he downed 50 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes–nearly double the previous record. The large crowd, along with his several competitors more than twice his size, were stunned. Numbered placards used to show how many franks he had eaten didn’t have large enough numerals, so the organizers took to writing them by hand as he devoured the dogs.

His domination of the event has continued, up to last year, when he consumed 53-3/4 hot dogs in the 12-minute span.

Kobayashi, a native of the Olympic city of Nagano, has transformed eating contests around the globe, both in terms of training and technique as well as its popularity and marketability. He is the inventor of the “Solomon Method,” where the hot dog is broken in two and the halves are chomped down together. The buns, also halved, are dunked in water to held them slide down his throat.

Also part of his method is the “Kobayashi Shake.” After each hot dog, he shakes his body to help compact the food in his stomach as much as possible.

Kobayashi’s very size may be the point that has had the most revolutionary impact on the sport, however. For decades, eating contests were populated by huge men with big appetites. Kobayashi has spawned popularity of the “Fat Belt” theory: the concept that layers of fat
around the mid-section restrict the expansion potential of the stomach, thereby limiting how much it can hold.

Kobayashi has become a fanatic about weight training, mainly to insure his body fat content remains low. Last summer, he claimed to be nearly 200 pounds, with most of the added mass in the form of muscle.

While the Japanese have a reputation as very moderate eaters, Kobayashi’s exploits made him a television sensation in his homeland. Programs featuring “food fighters” downing everything from cakes to rice balls spiced the airwaves.

The mania tapered a bit in 2002, after a 14-year-old junior high school student choked to death trying to imitate competitive eating during a school lunch.

Among Kobayashi’s other marks:
• 83 gyoza in 8 minutes in 2005. The following day, he ate 100 pork buns in 12 minutes.
• In 2006, he downed 58 bratwurst in 10 minutes, shattering the previous record set the year before–35 by Sonya Thomas.
• 41 Lobster Rolls in 10 minutes in 2006, replacing the previous record of 22 rolls.
•Also last year, he ate 97 Krystal hamburgers.
• He suffered his first defeat–of sorts– in 2003, when he was bested by a 1089-pound Kodiak bear, during a hot dog contest set up for the Fox program, “Man vs. Beast.” Kobayashi ate 31 bun-less hot dogs in 2 minutes and 36 seconds, while the bear gobbled up 50.