Japan Times has an interview with Takeru Kobayashi about The Good, The Bad, The Hungry. He says that while he is pleased with the film, it did not fully convey his side of his dispute with MLE.

The documentary showed my rivalry with Joey Chestnut, but I had more of a problem with George Shea,” he says. “He used Joey Chestnut to conceal the fact that he had a problem with me. George Shea was employed by Nathan’s, so if you look at the bigger picture, the problem was really between me and Nathan’s. That doesn’t come across in the documentary.

PermalinkComments (8)

Here are the results for Takeru Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut in the 15 contests they competed against each other. Kobayashi had the higher finish in 8 of the competitions.
Read the rest of this entry »

PermalinkComments (2)

Daily Beast has an interview with Takeru Kobayashi where he expands on recent critical comments made on twitter about Joey Chestnut:

If you ask me, do I want to compete with him? Mmm, not necessarily. I don’t even want to be in the same room with him. The face he gives you in the movie—he says something different every time, so it’s difficult for me to trust that those are his words, or if they’re George Shea’s scripted words, and where his feelings are coming from. It’s stressful for me to compete against, much less be around, a person who has that kind of personality. So I just choose not to be around him.

and George Shea:

It’s a manipulation game for him. If I always have to wonder what the truth is, or that they’re going to manipulate the truth when I’m taking something so seriously—I can’t be around a human that I can’t trust.

Kobayashi also mentions an upcoming alternative competitive eating league. He will attend a watch party for The Good, The Bad, The Hungry tonight at Rochelle’s in Manhattan.

PermalinkComments (27)

The ESPN schedule for early July is now out. The men’s Nathan’s finals will be televised on ESPN at noon Eastern and rerun at 3PM and 4PM. The women’s finals will be streamed on ESPN3 for the ninth consecutive year. (ESPN2 will be showing First Take during the women’s Nathan’s finals). ESPN3 will also show camera feeds focused on Joey Chestnut and Miki Sudo.

The Good, The Bad, The Hungry will be televised on ESPN on July 2 at 8 pm and be rerun at 9:30 pm.

PermalinkComments (4)

Newsday has an article about the upcoming ESPN competitive eating documentary The Good, The Bad, The Hungry directed by Nicole Lucas Haimes which includes the following quotes from Joey Chestnut about the MLE contract.

“She opened my eyes,” Chestnut, who has won 11 of the past 12 contests, said of Haimes. “Honestly, I’m so competitive that sometimes I don’t understand what other people are going through . . . I realized doing interviews that, ‘Oh my God, I was pretty insensitive to [Kobayashi’s] problems.’

“I had the same problems when I got older. I wanted more freedom, and eventually they gave me the same things he was asking for. So it’s sad that we had to lose years of competing against each other . . . . When he decided to protest his contract, I saw that as a way of not competing, a reason not to compete.

“But later I thought it took some serious guts to step away from the biggest contest of the year, and something you love. He loves it. He loves it as much as I do . . . If we had communicated more we could have helped him to solve his contract issue and continued competing against each other.”

Fink Beats the Stomach’s latest podcast includes a review of the documentary.

PermalinkComments (19)