Joey Chestnut swallows 66 hot dogs to win his 18th Nathan's Mustard Belt

Joey Chestnut spent the Fourth of July doing the one thing nobody on Coney Island does better than him: eating a genuinely upsetting number of hot dogs very fast. He put away 66 franks and buns in 10 minutes at the Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest, which works out to about one dog every nine seconds, and walked off with his 18th Mustard Belt. Nobody else was in the same area code.

Patrick Bertoletti finished second with 51. That is a 15-dog gap, which in competitive eating is the equivalent of winning a race while the runner-up is still looking for parking. James Webb took third at 47.5. All of this happened in 92-degree heat with the humidity to match, a detail worth remembering the next time you struggle through a single dog at a backyard cookout.

The 66 is a strong number. It is not his best number. Chestnut still holds the world record at 76, set back in 2021, so by his own standards Saturday was a relaxed cruise rather than a personal best. At 42, a relaxed cruise to your 18th title is a perfectly respectable way to spend a holiday.

The year they benched the greatest of all time

Here is the fun part, because there is always a fun part. Chestnut did not eat at Nathan's in 2024. Major League Eating, which runs the contest, kept him out after he signed a sponsorship deal with Impossible Foods, the plant-based meat company. MLE's objection, per reporting at the time, was that he was repping what it considered a rival brand. A hot dog cold war, fought over vegan sausages, with the sport's biggest name as the casualty.

Chestnut has said the whole thing was a misunderstanding, that his Impossible campaign was about encouraging meatless Mondays and not some betrayal of the beef-and-pork gospel. Whatever the exact terms were, he and Nathan's eventually found their way back to each other. He returned in 2025 and won with 70.5 dogs, and he has now stacked title number 18 on top of it. The exile arc is officially over, and the ending was never really in doubt.

Miki Sudo keeps her belt too

The women's side went about how you would expect. Miki Sudo won her 12th title and her fifth straight pink belt with 38.5 dogs. Michelle Lesco, the 2021 champion, finished second again with 22. Sudo still owns the women's record at 51, so like Chestnut she wrapped this one up without needing to reach the top of her range.

The numbers

So the natural order held on the Fourth. Chestnut on top, Sudo on top, and a stadium's worth of people at Coney Island suddenly not hungry for dinner.