Kobayashi! Ready for Retirement!?

~I think he is. He’s just wearing contacts.~


-Apparently, the great Japanese hot dog eater, Takeru Kobayashi, has come in second in Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest for a second year in a row!

-Now, if you don’t know who Takeru Kobayashi is, that’s totally okay. You either don’t watch MTV, don’t follow competitive eating, nor are you aware of US-Japanese popular culture. But that’s cool! I’ll fill in some of the information for you:

-After surfacing from the depths of some hidden, jungle-ninja-village in Hokkaido, Kobayashi dropped jaws with his double-stuff-eat-jutsu (no joke. He breaks the hotdogs in half and sticks both cylinders into his mouth at the same time), and “Kobayashi Shake” techniques (seriously, that’s what his move to actually get the hot dogs from his mouth to his stomach is called. In other words, he has a NAME for the action of swallowing).

-In his first US contest he dominated by eating 50 hotdogs in 12 minutes. The previous record was 25. From there, Kobayashi’s life turned into one not too unlike that of Ryu from the Street Fighter series. Great eaters from all over the world began traveling on the backs of bears (Russians), sharks (Atlanteans), and slave-children (Chinese) to compete in Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest and test their esophagus’, and gag reflexes against the Sausage Tsunami.

-Although Kobayashi was able to rely on his stomach-expansion-jutsu for the first few years, the onslaught of international eaters pushed the young vacuum cleaner to begin training. He started eating massively huge meals and weight training (think Goku’s style of training but without the energy blasts) to increase the amount of calories his body could take and make sure that his fat cells didn’t store it or something… I don’t really know biology. Anyways, his training worked and he dominated in a five-year reign from 2001 to 2006 as The World’s Strongest.

-But that all came to an end when milk-guzzler Joey Chestnut slammed down 66 hot dogs in 2007. Before the competition Kobayashi had been experiencing somewhat unexplained “jaw problems.” After loosing his first sausage swallowing competition since sausages were first created (yes, he was alive then), there were rumors of the Tsunami going into surgery.

-Luckily for Kobayashi’s face, no scalpels were inserted and the Kobs continued scarfing down massive amounts of whoknows what kinds of foods.

-And now he has lost again. The contest was brought down to 10 minutes, and it seems like they used a different kind of hotdog. He tied with milk-guzzler Chestnut at 59 sausages, but then lost in a 5 hot dog tiebreaker.

-Does this mean the dynasty of Kobayashi is over? I think so. It probably has something to do wit those strange “jaw problems” from 2007 but it’s looking like the World’s Strongest is simply past his prime.

~TECK~

PS- The only being in the universe that has been recorded to legitimately kick Kobayashi’s ass, however, is a 1,089 pound Kodiak bear, on the amazing show, “Man vs Beast”.