A SPORTS STORY you may have missed, what with everything else: in the annual Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island, New York, Takeru Kobayashi of Japan smashed the world record for hot dog consumption, putting away a truly jaw-dropping 53.75 hotdogs in 12 minutes.

Kobayashi’s big finish, though, was marked by what can only be described as a serious “did he or didn’t he?” regurgitation controversy, around about the 50-dog mark. Now, in the world of the eating contest, vomiting is a notoriously touchy subject. It tends to be referred to euphemistically as “a reversal of fortune”. Competitors might also speak obliquely of “Roman methods” or simply shake their heads and say, quietly: “He launched.” As Jason Fagone explains in his invaluable new book Insatiable: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream, for any proud “gurgitator”, public regurgitation is powerfully humiliating. Also, it tends to put off the sponsors.

However, the penalty for vomiting is clear: instant disqualification. You throw, you go. Yet, at Coney Island, Gersh Kuntzman, the contest’s judge, ruled in Kobayashi’s favour on the intricate legal nicety that “the effluvia never touched the table”. Kuntzman added: “To me, that’s the testament of a champion and great athlete.”

No kidding. Bear in mind that a Nathan’s hot dog is characterised as “a garlic-spiced, all-beef dog in a white-flour roll”, and that many of us, of a more delicate constitution than Kobayashi, would have difficulty holding down one, let lone re-eating a fiftieth.

According to Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas, a leading draw on the American eating circuit, who has herself known triumph at Coney Island: “The only bad thing is, your jaw gets tired.” But I’m not sure that’s strictly correct. Several other bad things come to mind, such as both the short and long-term after-effects of eating 24lb of processed bread and meat, dunked in lemonade (it takes away the saltiness apparently, much as iced tea reliably masks the sugar in sweet items).

But maybe I sound like a flimsy Brit at this point. Where were the British competitive eaters at Coney Island? Nowhere, of course. A full year ago the website of the International Federation of Competitive Eating was accusing Europe as a whole, and Britain in particular, of being “woefully behind in the competitive eating arena”. This was ahead of a trial event in Birmingham, in May 2005, at which a plucky Brit called Rob Burns ate 18 pork pies in 12 minutes and won a seat at the 2005 Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. He managed ten and finished last.

Didn’t this used to be an area in which British competitors excelled? Certainly Guinness World Records, formerly The Guinness Book of Records, was once a lively catalogue of time trials involving baked beans, cheese sandwiches and cocktail sausages. But its editors vacated the area some time ago on health and safety grounds, and these days, the entry in the index reading “eating feats and idiosyncrasies” directs you to a solitary paragraph regarding Michel Lotito, of France, who has, apparently, “been eating metal and glass since 1959”. That’s not competitive. That’s just weird.

You don’t need to be fat to be a gurgitator, by the way. Advocates of the sport tend to emphasise the importance of skills such as hand-to-eye co-ordination and jaw speed, plus the willingness to undergo extreme training. True, there are overweight competitive eaters. But not being obese is no excuse. Thomas is, it has often been remarked, as thin as a mobile phone. You would never know, from appearance alone, what she is capable of in a Shoo-fly pie contest. Even the great Kobayashi himself is a mere strip of a thing with an abdominal six-pack, who, even after 53.75 hot dogs, looks like he could use a bit of feeding up.

Obviously, cultural objections to competitive eating might include the fact that it is vulgar, mindless, upsetting to watch and, in a world in which people are starving, morally obscene. You could say the same about Formula One, though, and that still has its UK-based participants. It looks suspiciously, then, like the same old British sporting story — once again left in the dust by the superior professionalism, commitment and readiness to invest in excellence of other nations. Pass the mustard.

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