6. Great American Events

There is a huge amount of sport on American TV. The most popular of American sports are ones that Americans excel at because they are not played much anywhere else in the developed world – baseball and football (American version). Other TV sports, NASCAR (stockcar racing), hockey (meaning ice-hockey), basketball, golf, tennis, boxing and track and field (athletics) have their followings, but are definitely not in the same league as baseball in summer and football (American) in winter. Soccer gets some coverage, for example by Farks! (Fox Soccer Channel) because of the growing numbers of Hispanics in big cities like New York.

Cricket has not caught on over here as far as I can see, whereas the Tour de France got a lot of live coverage on Outdoor Life Channel. This small channel also broadcasts hunting programmes where you can see grown men in camouflage showing young men in camouflage how to stalk and shoot elk, with pictures of the hunters posing beside the still warm corpse congratulating each other. One advert in this programme was for a brand of bullet, I noticed.

Not all “minor” sports warrant as much TV coverage as the Tour de France, but some unusual ones are worth mentioning. College lacrosse, drag racing (not what some may imagine), professional poker and the national arm wrestling championships. I’ll not mention beach volley ball as unusual or monor, since it is after all an Olympic sport.

One minority sport that most Brits will be unaware of, but where you would think we should excel is Competitive Eating. August saw the US Open of Competitive Eating in Las Vegas. Highlights were covered on Saturday TV. Like any other self-respecting sport it is rigorously regulated – by the International Federation of Competitive Eating. “Pro-eating”, I discover, is a mixed sport, where men and women compete on equal terms. Two women were among the 16 “eaters” (as we aficionados refer to them) attempting to get though to the quarter-finals. This round involved eating pasta, easy enough you may think. A significant rule in this round was that “utensils were mandated”, so no use of the fingers. One commentator said of a competitor; “My mom would nail him for eating badly but the rules of etiquette don’t apply in competitive sport”. The eater was using a fork rather than his fingers nonetheless, but you could see what he meant.

I cannot say how popular the elite version of the sport is, but looking around me I reckon it has a strong grass roots base. The regular eater however has to put down his pizza and applaud the game’s stars.

There is the Richard and Carlene Lefevre husband and wife team. The name is pronounced Le Fever by the way. Carlene is reckoned to be one of the "most elegant eaters" on the circuit. I read that she frequently can be seen reapplying her lipstick immediately following a contest, using the side of a knife as a mirror. She has given her name to one interesting move. By popping up and down as she eats, she settles the food down in her stomach, releasing any air pockets. This move is known as "The Carlene Pop”.

38 year old Ed “Cookie” Jarvis is seen by some as a fading star, but holds more titles than anyone in the world, including the World Ice Cream Eating Championship. The former IFOCE Rookie of the Year did last year manage a corned beef and cabbage win, but he faltered at Coney Island in the 27th Nathan's Famous hot dogs and buns contest. From the nickname I guess he excels in sweet rather than savoury.

Eric “Badlands" Booker a 420 lb African American has been on a run lately, so to speak, with victories in cannoli, of which I plead ignorance, cheesecake and pumpkin pie. He has also released a rap album entitled "Hungry and Focused”. He is regarded by many now as the top American. His significant victories include a pea contest in which he put away nine and a quarter pounds of peas in 10 minutes. Reports don’t say whether it was fresh, processed or mushy peas – but if mushy I guess not chipshop flavour, 'though there is a chip shop in manhattn called A Salt and Battery, honest . Badlands is a conductor on the New York City Subway. "Conductor" may mean he is a driver, but I can't be sure.

The Americans are, however, no longer top of the tree. The favourite for the US Open was the winner of the competition that brought the sport to my attention, the Coney Island hot dog contest, Takeru Kobayashi. The 27 year-old, nine and a half stone Japanese now dominates pro-eating as Tiger Woods dominates golf. The trouble is he is not American. He obliterated the competition in Coney Island by consuming forty-nine hot dogs in 12 minutes. Superbly fit, he is also one of the most cerebral of the elite competitors. He did, after all, once eat 17.7 lbs of cow brains in 15 minutes.

In Las Vegas the fans were asking can anyone beat Kobayashi. Well, America’s new great white hope is a woman, the diminutive Sonya Thomas. Slender of stature and, from her speech, of Hispanic extraction, she has been excelling recently, second only to Kobayashi in Coney Island (which does not appear to be an island in itself by the way). She was IFOCE 2003 Rookie of the Year and was rarely beaten in competition in 2004, except, we learn, for one highly controversial loss to Dale Boone in a baked bean eating contest in which the beans were said to be far too hot. She prefers the Long Course version of baked bean eating (an outdoor sport, I hope), and her record for Pulled Pork is 23 pulled pork sandwiches in 10 minutes. She is single by way, chaps.

Turning to the most recent competition, the Alka-Seltzer US Open of Competitive Eating, to give it its full name, sponsorship oblige, the unit of measure in Round Two was 20 oz platefuls of cooked spaghetti (al dente) in a marinara sauce. Contestants go head-to-head, or should it be mouth-to-mouth, in knock-out contests to progress to the next round. Carlene Lefevre (Le fever, remember) was eliminated in Round 2, despite a few Carlene pops between plates. Like most competitors she used the single-fork-fill technique. Interviewed, she illustrated the demanding nature of the sport: “If you don’t feel lousy at the end, you haven’t done your best.”

The statistical equivalent of speed of the ball in cricket and baseball or strokes per minute in rowing, the Chew Track statistics on jaw movement did not seem to be in operation during the competition. However, the specialist commentators made up for this by pointing out when certain competitors were eating more quickly than they could sustain. One technical innovation is a headband holding in place a micro video camera that protrudes from the contestant’s forehead giving the TV audience the eater’s view of the plate. Adapted probably from Formula 1, the device is called the Chew-View Cam. It's true.

Sixty-year-old Rich Lefevre (good, you did remember), whose forte is the longer contests favoured in Japan rather than the 15 minute rounds or less as in the US Open, nonetheless broke the world record by scoffing 9 lbs of spaghetti marinara in the allotted time. Asked what had been his strategy, he offered this insight: “Eat as much as I could as fast as I could and when I got tired slow down a bit.”

Sonya “the Black Widow” Thomas once ate 65 hard boiled eggs in 6 minutes 37 seconds. For the pasta she used innovative “two-fork instrumentation”. Her apparently large oesophagus, allied with a lot of muscle tone, great jaw strength and very effective chewing, allowed her to beat the new record with an incredible 10 lbs in 14 minutes.

Up to the gastronomic tatami stepped the muscular young Takeru. In a pre-match interview he said through an interpreter that he was interested in seeing how far he could push himself. When that limit would come he didn’t know. His opponent, in a gesture that recalled, for some of the audience, the famous “Messieurs les Anglais, tirez les premiers”, at the battle of Fontenoy (1745), delayed the both of them digging in immediately. Once Kobayashi did decide to start shoveling in the spaghetti, the commentator contented himself with an awestruck: “Boy, can he put it away!” As indeed he could: thirteen and a half pounds in 14 minutes. He looked about as likely to be beaten as an American in the Tour de France.

The quarter-finals consisted of seven minutes of crunching “chopped mixed salads lightly tossed in a sun-dried tomato and basil vinaigrette” (pronounced “bayzle”, I now know). The surprise of the round was vet Rich Lefevre (that’s vet for veteran by the way, I don’t think a vetinary could do this) succumbing to rookie Tim Janus, who is being groomed as the Beckham of the meatball. Picture a handsome young man, dressed fashionably for his age, I presume, with a reversed baseball cap (hence Janus, I assume, but no one mentioned this) and face paint - honest. Cookie in his Stars-and-stripes bandana beat Badlands. Sonya whupped her increasingly red-faced opponent. As did Koby, using spoons like chopsticks to shovel in the salad. An interesting comment by a commentator on Sonya’s ability here was on “her large mouth – that’s in the evolutionary sense”, whatever that meant, quickly adding the rider “ – not to debate the Creationists”. Sports channels can’t afford to be controversial and lose viewers even if the viewers believe that God created competitive eaters as a separate species.

2 lb plates of potato skins proved no semi-final obstacle to either of the two favourites, and certainly not to Kobayashi’s power nibbling. The rookie lost to Sonja and Cookie to Koby.

Awaiting the two finalists were six-pound tailgater platters, assortments of appetisers from spinach dip, through celery and crooditays, to Swedish meatballs, to name but a few. And fifteen minutes of munching. “There is only one man in the world that can challenge Kobayashi” screamed the commentator, “and that’s a woman”. The petite American had beaten some big power eaters, but was she a match for the muscular Nippon, with his secret weapon, not yet used in this competition, the Koby shake? The Koby shake, we are informed, is being copied on the disco floor, such is the young man’s growing celebrity on the club scene “worldwide”. It’s pretty even to start with, but Kobayashi gradually pulls ahead with his tremendous jaw speed. Two minutes to go and Sonya looks beaten, she’s groggy, her eyes are rolling. Glass jaw rather than glass ceiling. Koby delivers the knockout blow with combination bites into another buffalo chicken sandwich. With a scarcely suppressed burp he accepts the trophy and a check (as we must spell it) for $10,000. Phew! Pass the Alka-Seltzer, someone.

On the IFOCE website fans can subscribe to the official IFOCE magazine, “The Gurgitator”, and buy IFOCE T-shirts (sizes: Large, XL, XXL, XXXL and XXXXL). (http://www.ifoce.com/), honest!