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Geoffrey Esper knows a thing or two about second place. The humble Massachusetts native, recognizable for his beat-up Red Sox hat, placed runner-up behind megacelebrity Joey Chestnut three years straight at the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.
When the world-record holder was disqualified from last year’s competition over his sponsorship deal with Impossible Foods, Esper was favored to win. He put on his best performance yet with 53 hot dogs, but settled for the $5,000 second-place check again—and Chesnut is returning this year.
Yet even though the lights are the brightest for the annual event at Coney Island, the hot dog contest isn’t his favorite—or his forte—of the roughly 15 competitions he eats in each year. According to Major League Eating, which runs the Nathan’s contest, Esper holds 19 different records, including corn dogs and two different categories of brats.
Ahead of competitive eating’s biggest event, Front Office Sports spoke with Esper, a vocational high school electronics teacher and the No. 3 eater in the world, about his training, prize money, and handling the spotlight.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Front Office Sports: How are you feeling about this year’s competition?
Geoffrey Esper: We do practice for it, and I have to say the practices haven’t been going as good as usual. But last year they didn’t either and I did well.
FOS: You placed just behind Joey a few years in a row. Did you think last year was finally going to be your year?
GE: I was trying. I didn’t know for sure, because my practices weren’t going too good, but I was hoping. And then when I looked over at the end and I saw Pat [Bertoletti] was a couple dogs ahead of me, I was like, ‘Oh, I guess not this year again.’
It was kind of neat because other people got to shine. Pat Bertoletti won, and he got to do the Good Morning America TV show the next day.
FOS: What’s your mindset this year knowing Joey’s coming back?
GE: Pretty much the same. I’m going to go out there and do my best. I hope the hot dogs are good. … Sometimes, like when Joey’s there, it’s a bigger production. They might put the whole table full of hot dogs out, and then they sit in the sun for like 40 minutes, 50 minutes, and they start to dry out and get leathery, and I’m like, “Oh, Jesus, not gonna be good.” So I hope that doesn’t happen.
I can already tell this year, I think it’s going to be camera on Joey the whole time. … It’s probably less stressful when he’s there for us, the rest of the eaters, because he gets all the attention.
FOS: How much prize money can you make in a year?
GE: That obviously varies from year to year. Anywhere from $20,000 to maybe $35,000, depends on how you do at the contests. Then you gotta take taxes out of it, and you gotta take travel out of it. … So the idea is just to hopefully get all your travel expenses covered by the prize money.
No one makes their living off competitive eating, except for Joey. There’s a couple other people that make their living off YouTube videos, but Joey’s the only one that makes his living off competitions. It’s just a hobby for the rest of us, and we all have other full-time jobs. … The prize is big, but if you win Nathan’s, you’re not gonna be able to retire or anything.
FOS: How often do you train?
GE: I’m a teacher, and it’s really tough for me to practice after work. On the weekend, I can maybe get a practice in, but when school gets out, I’ll try to step it up to twice a week leading up to the contest.
FOS: I imagine that can add up pretty quickly to be an expensive practice bill.
GE: I can’t use the Nathan’s hot dogs because I can’t buy them in bulk, and if I buy them in the supermarket, it’d be over $100 for just one little practice run. So I use a different brand, and it’s a little cheaper, but still it gets to be maybe under $50 for a practice run.
FOS: Tell me about the stretching, why that helps?
GE: It’s easier to stuff [things] in a big bag than it is a little bag. You want your stomach to be as big as possible, because you’re not going to eat over 50 hot dogs if you don’t have room.
I use liquids, and I’ll drink, I won’t give you the exact amounts, but it’s gallons of liquids at one time, just to stretch out my stomach. I got a video on my YouTube where I drink three gallons of eggnog.
FOS: That’s more than I could do.
GE: I hope so.
FOS: What are some of your favorite competitions throughout the year?
GE: Hot dogs is not one of my favorite competitions of the year. I like the small-town contests where people have their own regional types of foods. I remember one time we had a contest, the stuff we were eating were called Aebleskivers, they’re these round pancake type things. They had the contest inside the local fire department, and the people came out and were having a tractor show. It was pretty cool.
For the food, I like capacity type contests, where it’s easy to go in and whoever eats the most wins. Usually the winner is the person who has the biggest stomach, it’s not who’s the quickest. And my favorite food in a contest is probably pizza.
[With hot dogs], it’s one of the few contests where you’re eating two different foods. We take the hot dogs apart from the buns, we eat them separately. There’s two separate textures that you’re trying to eat, where usually in everything else it’s just one texture—you’re eating just pizza or just burgers or something like that. You’re not separating. So it’s actually very technical. There’s a technique to eating them very quickly, because you have to go back and forth, back and forth between the buns and the hot dogs.
I just have a tough time figuring out the best way to eat those things. I haven’t found my technique, so I always kind of struggle with them.
FOS: Tell me about the cycle of being in the spotlight once a year on July 4.
GE: I don’t go seek the spotlight. There’s some people, they’re real characters. They think it’s like their chance to be a WWE wrestler, very dramatic. I don’t do that. I like the competition. The actual 10 minutes of the competition is the reason why I’m there. I’m not there to get famous.
