When eating is sport, victory as agonizing as defeat
|
|
Jeremiah Jimenez had just wolfed down his 11th bratwurst at an eat-off here earlier this month when he began to experience what is politely known in the competitive eating world as a “reversal in fortune.”
It was a crisis moment and the 29-year-old, who competes on the eating circuit as “El Toro,” decided to try to play through, swallowing hard and reaching for another sausage.
“But when my hand touched the 12th brat,” Jimenez says. “I just gagged. The greasiness just sent a message to my brain to stop ... I was really disappointed. My capacity is double that.”
But even that wouldn’t have put him in the money. Takeru Kobayashi, a 27-year-old eating phenom from Japan, took first place in the event, swallowing 58 brats in 10 minutes and smashing the 35-brat world record set last year by American Sonya Thomas.
ESPN, the U.S. cable network that began covering the sport in 2004 and aired a three-day U.S. Open of Competitive Eating in 2005, says the eat-offs draw the same number of viewers as regular season men’s college basketball.
“There’s clearly an audience with an interest in these events,” says network spokesman Nate Smeltz.
But its popularity has touched off a debate in a country where one-third of the population is obese, according to the government.
The competitors themselves are not generally overweight; former brat record holder Thomas weighs a mere 105 pounds (47.6 kg).
SPORT OR SPECTACLE?
But Michael Jacobson, the executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a U.S. nutrition advocacy group, blasts the food companies that sponsor the events for encouraging consumers to equate “pigging out” with legitimate sports and warns the competitors are risking their health.
Jimenez, who finished 13th in a field of 16 in Sheboygan, thinks says the risks are overblown. “I talked to my doctor before I started,” he says, “and he just shook his head and told me to watch my cholesterol.”
George Shea, the founder and chairman of the International Federation of Competitive Eating, the sport’s leading organizing body, refuses to get pulled into the debate. “America has an obesity crisis, which has nothing to do with competitive eating,” he says.
Since it was founded in 1997, IFOCE has propelled competitive eating from the fringes of county fairs and church picnics to the center of popular culture. In the process eaters like Kobayashi and Thomas have been turned into celebrities.
Among the IFOCE’s key rules: One reversal of fortune and your eating career is over—after you clean up the mess.
Shea, an Ivy League-educated marketing executive, admits the IFOCE was originally simply a way to promote the food industry clients, like Nathan’s Famous and Krystal hamburgers, whose products the contestants were inhaling.
“It was kitschy, campy fun,” he says.
It became a sport, says Jason Fagone, the author of “Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream,” because the contestants took it seriously.
“The eaters decided that they would prefer it not be a joke and that it really mattered,” Fagone says.
Fagone, who spent a year researching his book, says he’s of two minds whether the eaters are athletes. “It’s not a sport in the classical sense of being a way to showcase the human form at its most poised and graceful,” he says. “But it’s skilled physical work that ... takes discipline and training and mental focus.”
One thing he’s sure of: Only five of the top eaters actually make a living on the circuit—though that could grow if its popularity grows.
MARKETING EVENTS
The companies that tend to sponsor IFOCE events—there will be 100 this year, up from less than 10 a few years ago—tend to be smaller, regional companies attracted by Shea’s guerrilla marketing pitch. “It generates media you couldn’t buy,” Fagone says.
The bigger companies have stayed away—for good reason says Jacobson. Watching contestants struggling to keep down the pounds of food they’ve ingested isn’t everybody’s idea of ace product placement. “It’s difficult to believe this does much for the sale of hotdogs,” he says.
As the sport grows, it’s turning even local events like Brat Days, a 53-year-old fund-raiser for a Sheboygan charity, into just another marketing and merchandising opportunity for big business.
When Tom Wolff, then a new marketing director with Johnsonville Sausage, first learned of this city’s annual bratfest, he remembers thinking to himself, “We need to be here.”
They now sponsor the event. This year, the contest - rechristened the Johnsonville Brat-Eating World Championship—aired on ESPN and drew contestants from all over the United States with its $20,000 prize purse.
Among those who turned up to this city, the self-styled Bratwurst Capital of the World, to watch was Charlie Pountain, a 53-year-old retiree from Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin.
But Pountain—who wore a T-shirt that read “Live. Work. Play. Eat Brats.”—said asking whether the eaters are athletes obscures the real issue confronting the sport.
“The question is when it finally makes it to the Olympics,” Pountain says, “will it be a summer or winter event?”
Print Version
Tell-a-Friend comments powered by Disqus
