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The world’s most freakish athletes are competitive eaters

Roar Pro
17th September, 2015
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Roar Pro
17th September, 2015
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Some of the world’s best athletes are described as freaks. They do things on the field that defy belief.

When Lance Franklin spins out of a couple of tackles and kicks a long-range goal from the sideline, he is called a freak.

When Shaun Johnson beats three defenders and creates a try out of nothing, he is called a freak.

But nothing bends my mind more than seeing competitive eaters devour kilos of food in a matter of minutes.

I’m always at a loss seeing eaters shove a pile of food that looks bigger than their whole torso down their throats. Then I realise your stomach is a lot smaller than your whole mid-section.

How much these people can eat really does defy belief.

The leading organisation in the world of competitive eating is Major League Eating, or the MLE. The MLE website describes their top athletes as “warriors” and “weapons of mass digestion”.

The most freakish athletes in the world of competitive eating are current world number one Matt Stonie and world number three Miki Sudo. They are small but punch well above their weight when it comes to eating.

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I’ve skipped over current world number two Joey Chestnut, who the MLE describes as “the greatest eater in history” purely because he is actually a very big human being.

I’ve written a short profile on both Stonie and Sudo so you can learn a little more about these champions.

Matt ‘The Megatoad’ Stonie
San Jose, California
Age: 23
Weight: 130 lbs (59 kgs)

The Megatoad’s eating prowess has helped him achieve numerous titles and over 800,000 subscribers on YouTube. He satisfies his many fans with vision of MLE competitions and his own eating challenges.

Stonie first went professional in 2011 at age 19. His strategy in competition is to start hard and fast to set a large gap ahead of his rivals.

MLE competitions are generally a two-horse race between Stonie and Joey Chestnut. They are generally neck and neck throughout their contests but always end up way ahead of the competition. But as I said before, Chestnut is a big man and Stonie is not.

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Two highlights of Stonie’s recent competition wins are consuming 14.5 pounds (6.58 kilograms) of cake in eight minutes, and devouring 103 three-inch tacos, again in eight minutes.

At age 23, Stonie still has a big future ahead of him in the world of competitive eating.

Miki Sudo
Las Vegas, Nevada
Age: 29
Weight: 120 lbs (54 kgs)

Sudo is the world’s top-ranked female competitive eater, and her career began as a dare.

Sudo told Foodie Pleasure that there was a restaurant “in Las Vegas Chinatown that was offering $1500 to eat a 12 pound bowl of pho within an hour. I was the first person to finish it”.

My reaction when I first saw her in a video of an eating contest was: far-out, she’s pretty small!

That is what makes her a freak. She packs away a heap of food into what has to be a small amount of space, or so you might think. Sudo has said she can naturally eat up to 20 pounds (9.07 kilograms) of food. That is one sixth of her bodyweight.

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What. A. Freak.

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