Patrick Bertoletti and Miki Sudo Win Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest

It was the Fourth of July in New York City, and for some, that meant only one thing. No, not fireworks, sweltering subway rides, and family barbecues. It was time for the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest on Coney Island.

The contest has long been a New York City staple, and its worldwide televised broadcast has made its most famous champions celebrities. But this year, the event, which tests how many hot dogs a man can wolf down in a 10-minute stint, crowned a new male champion for the first time in nearly a generation and saw a new female record broken.

Patrick Bertoletti, 26, of Chicago, took the men's title, or in Coney Island parlance, the Mustard Belt, by eating 58 hot dogs in 10 minutes, while Miki Sudo, 38, ate 51 hot dogs, setting a new women's record.

Former men's champion Joey Chestnut, 40, won the competition 16 times but was barred from entering after a dispute with organizers. Mr. Bertoletti was the ninth-ranked eater in the world before the competition, according to Major League Eating, and he beat out several competitors promoted by event organizers as potential successors to Mr. Chestnut.

Always a bridesmaid and never married, Mr. Bertoletti later said. But today I'm getting married.

He described his victory as a life-changing event.

“With Joey not being there, I knew I had a chance,” he said, referring to Mr. Chestnut. “I was able to unlock something and I don't know where it came from.”

Mr Chestnut parted ways with the competition last month after signing an endorsement deal with Impossible Foods, a Nathans rival that makes vegan hot dogs.

But he dominated Thursday's proceedings, literally in one instance: A huge Pepsi ad bearing his likeness hung just a block from the contest site.

Many spectators also carried Chestnut memorabilia and chanted slogans or held signs demanding his return. Mark Sterling, 35, did brisk business selling Chestnut bobblehead dolls to the crowd for $35.

Why wouldn't you want a bobble-head legend? asked Mr. Sterling, of the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. Joey Chestnut's absence is like people saying Derek Jeter is no longer at Yankee Stadium, that people still love him.

Many viewers tuned in year after year just to see Mr. Chestnut devour a pile of hot dogs like a wood chipper. The news of his departure from the competition was greeted with the kind of public angst one might expect from a major league baseball player, not a man who ate 62 hot dogs in 10 minutes last July 4.

In Thursday's women's competition, Sudo easily won the title for the 10th time, besting a field of competitors, some of whom came to Coney Island from as far away as Japan and South Korea.

She ate 51 hot dogs in 10 minutes, setting a new women's record and surpassing her 2023 total of 39.5 hot dogs. The runner-up, Japan's Mayoi Ebihara, ate 37 hot dogs.

As Ms. Sudo ate hot dogs two at a time, an ESPN anchor was inspired to remark: “Her style is like the prose of Eudora Welty, a Pulitzer Prize-winning 20th-century novelist who no one knows whether she ate 51 hot dogs in one sitting.”

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

You feel like you're juggling, she said, trying your best to balance it all.

George Shea, the master of ceremonies for the event, described Ms. Sudo as a woman whose soul shines like flaming magnesium against the dark mountain of night.

Nonna Titulauri, 31, a bank intern who lives in the East Village, said she was thrilled to witness a new women's world record being set. But her friend, Christina DeCarlo, was less amused.

“It’s kind of disgusting,” said Ms. DeCarlo, 33, a project manager who lives in Midtown. “I just want to understand, who decided this was a thing?”

In an interview last month, Mr. Shea, a charismatic entertainer who helped elevate the show to a New York Times-covered event, said he was devastated by Chestnut’s plight. Even Senator Chuck Schumer, a Brooklyn native, wept. what he called incredibly difficult news to swallow.

Mr. Shea said Mr. Chestnuts' sponsorship deal left Major League Eating, which bills itself as the governing body for all stomach-centric sports, with no choice but to exclude him.

It would be like Michael Jordan, back in the day, coming to Nike, which made his Air Jordans, and saying, 'I'm going to represent Adidas, too,'” Mr. Shea said. “That's not possible.”

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

According to local legend, the contest has been held annually since 1916, when Nathan Handwerker opened a hot dog restaurant at the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues in Coney Island.

But like many legends, this one is largely myth. The contest actually began in the early 1970s, and in 2010 one of its original promoters, Mortimer Matz, admitted that he had invented the origin story in the style of a Coney Island vendor.

In recent years, the event has been fueled largely by the wordplay and theatrical patriotism of Mr. Shea, who has called it a celebration of freedom, and by Mr. Chestnut's celebrity.

The contest made him famous and he in turn became synonymous with the event. As the weigh-in ceremony began Wednesday, Mr. Shea repeated the story of Mr. Chestnuts’ departure to 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 Wednesday.

For those still hoping to see Mr. Chestnut eat a disturbing number of hot dogs on July 4, he traveled to Fort Bliss in El Paso to compete with soldiers in a five-minute hot dog eating contest..

The event was broadcast live on Mr. Chestnuts' YouTube Channelwhere 22,000 viewers watched him eat 57 hot dogs in front of a crowd that looked more like a town fair gathering than the flashy Coney Island event.

Mr. Chestnut will also headline a Labor Day hot dog eating contest that will be streamed live on Netflix, alongside Takeru Kobayashi, another former Fourth of July hot dog champion who was booted from the Coney Island contest in 2010 after a falling out with Major League Eating.

Mr. Chestnuts’ trajectory may have kept him out of the Nathans competition for now, at least, but James Webb, a former professional Australian rules footballer who began eating competitively as a joke, said in an interview Wednesday that everyone was hoping to achieve some version of his celebrity status. Mr. Webb placed third Thursday by eating 51.75 hot dogs.

“We’re all weird,” Mr. Webb said, as a person in a giant hot dog costume danced nearby in front of television cameras lined up beneath the Vessel at Hudson Yards. “We’re all weird in our own way. But we’re very competitive and pretty disciplined. And that’s the kind of thing people don’t see.”

Nathan Schweber contribution to the report.