A cheating scandal rocks Nathan’s famous hot dog contest

John Angelillo. Shutterstock images.

There is not a man, woman or child among us who did not enter the final week of the holidays worried about what would happen to the sport of kings, competitive eating, after the most dominant athlete of our time, Joey Chestnut, was banned from the most important event:

But there was reason to hope that the Nathan’s Famous Contest would survive. Even thrive. There were other good athletes with great ambition. Men who would finally get the chance to fight for the yellow belt itself. To gain fame and glory. And not just take second place in the darkness of Chestnut’s powerful shadow. Men like Nick Wehry, for example:

Instead, we are witnessing a huge scandal. Allegations of fraud are being made that strike at the heart of the sport itself, which is characterized by saturated fatty acids:

Source – The world of competitive eating has been rocked by hard-to-swallow allegations that a contestant in this year’s Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest cheated to boost his score.

Nick Wehry, the husband of women’s champion Miki Sudo, is accused of using sleight of hand during the July 4 contest to inflate the number of hot dogs he ate and falsely place himself among the sport’s elite contenders, according to two sources closely connected to the competition.

“He was 100% cheating,” a source told The Post on Tuesday.

On the day of the competition, Wehry tallied a respectable 46.75 hot dogs at the Coney Island callout, placing him in fourth place, according to footage and reports from The Post and ESPN, among others.

But that number later rose to 51.75 on the official Major League Eating (MLE) results website, which reportedly gave him five more whole sausages than he was actually served during the competition, the sources said. …

Wehry was accused of “stealing” plates from another contestant’s stack and placing them on his own place setting to increase his score above 50. …

According to one source, Wehry requested a recount after the judge’s first count because he feared his actual result would not be sufficient given the high level of competition.

“I can only assume that after the license plate was stolen, he demanded a recount,” the source claimed.

Before we go any further, let’s all bow down to the incredible power of the NY Post’s wordplay. From the headline “In Hot Water” to “hard-to-swallow” to “cut the mustard,” the newspaper remains the Joey Chestnut of wordplay to the public. Moving on…

Look, it’s important to be fair to Wehry. It’s obviously important to him. And to his wife, whose legitimacy as a champion is not questioned by anyone:

Advertising

But it’s also important to the nation. One of the fundamental principles of the American experiment — which could still go either way 250 years later — is the presumption of innocence. Maybe in countries where eating contests are all about cheese, borscht, or bowls of noodles, you can dispatch your competitors with anonymous accusations of cheating. But in the good old USA, things are different. Here, anyone can face their accuser. From the bottom corner to the highest tiers of the stage at Coney Island, everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and you better bring the receipts, mister. Accusing a man of plate stealing in front of the whole world and hundreds of cameras is a bold claim indeed. And we need to see your evidence before anyone passes judgment.

More than anything, it is imperative that we get to the bottom of this. The integrity of competitive eating is at stake here. And our way of life. I don’t know how to put it better, but something about America just feels out of lately. Like all our systems are broken. Nothing seems to work the way it should. The way we’re used to. We’re lied to all day, every day, by every institution we should reasonably expect honesty from. And now more than ever, we have a right to know the truth about how many collagen-coated tubes of meat byproducts and maltodextrin some Mohawk idiot stuffed down his esophagus on our nation’s birthday.

If we are not able to get a full explanation of what happened on this stage, I am not sure our country can be saved. Or that it deserves to be.

Giphy images.