In the wake of yet another history-making performance by Joey Chestnut in the annual Independence Day Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, I decided to take a visual dive into the history of the contest’s winners.

Takeaways:

1. Joey Chestnut has that dawg in him.

2. More people should be talking about Birgit Felden. At just seventeen years old and 130 pounds, she won the contest, beating 20 men. Her competitive spirit is to be expected—she was a member of the West German national judo team. The most fascinating part of her story? She had never eaten a hot dog before the day of the competition.

3. People have gotten… a lot better at eating hot dogs? Over the course of forty years, the number of hot dogs consumed by the winner has increased sevenfold. I’m guessing this is the result of a combination of factors:

   1. It’s unlikely that Steven Abrams, the champ in 1982, was the best hot dog eater in the world. Most people simply didn’t know the context existed at the time. Since then, the rise in publicity around the Nathan’s Famous contest has led more qualified people to enter.
   2. Competitors have invented new techniques that allows for faster ingestion of hot dogs and buns. For instance, Takeru Kobayashi employs the so-called “Solomon Method” in which he splits the hot dog in half, dips the bun in water, and then stuffs both halves in his mouth simultaneously.
   3. With more money on the line, namely contracts with Major League Eating, contestants have an incentive to train. Joey Chestnut’s routine includes fasting and stretching his stomach with milk and water.

4. The ggplot package could use better support for annotations. It’d be helpful to have annotations placed automatically, instead of having to manually adjust dimensions and location. I’d be interested in a plugin designed for this purpose.

5. If you’re interested in learning more about the Nathan’s Famous contest, John Green has an excellent podcast episode on the topic.