Takeru Kobayashi ″My dream is to turn gluttony into a sport! ″ The future of a retired “legendary food fighter

The man who appeared was surprisingly slender. He is food fighter Takeru Kobayashi (46).

He weighs 68 kg and is 173 cm tall, although he has gained a lot since he retired. My body fat percentage was less than 14% when I was active.

After retiring last September, Kobayashi says he would like to “make food fighting a sport, not just a big meal. He has won the “Nathan’s International Hot Dog Eating Championship” held every July in New York for six consecutive years since 2001, and is so famous in the U.S. that Newsweek magazine named him and Ichiro among the “100 Japanese People the World Respects. Let us look back at his stoic life in his own words.

The story began in Kobayashi’s student days.

At a curry chain restaurant near my university, there was a challenge menu: If you ate 1,300 grams of curry, you got a free meal. The previous Japanese record was 5,000 g. I increased the amount by 100 g and set a new record of 5,100 g. I was able to finish the meal in 19 minutes and 40 seconds, just under the 20-minute time limit.

When my then boyfriend found out about this, he took the liberty of entering me in the “TV Champion” food-eating contest broadcast by TV Tokyo. In November 2000, Kobayashi entered the competition.

It was a Hokkaido food-eating contest, and I won, even though I was competing for the first time,” he said. I was really motivated. I entered the competition without any preparation and won. I was convinced that if I trained harder, I could become even stronger.

I am a serious fighter.

Kobayashi quickly became a star on the then-popular gluttony TV show. At the same time, he began to question the attitude of the TV stations.

There were programs that took it seriously as a competition, but there were also many TV stations that considered gluttony as a form of comedy. They would intentionally delay the serving of food and play up the attitude of the food fighters who were at a loss. …… We are fighting for real. It was a complicated feeling to have it turned into a laugh.

Then, in April 2002, a decisive incident occurred. A junior high school student in Aichi Prefecture died after choking on a piece of bread in a school lunch eating contest with his classmates. The school lunch eating contest was met with intense criticism, and the program had to be canceled.

The loss of one program after another forced him to shift the focus of his activities to the United States,” he said. （I had been participating in the famous ‘Hot Dog Eating Championship’ since 2001, so I made that my base.

Kobayashi won the popular championship for six consecutive years until 2006. He became a celebrity in the U.S. as well. However, he was not able to win the “Hot Dog Championship” for seven years,” said …….

The “Hot Dog Championship” is held on July 4, Independence Day in the United States. Many Americans were not amused that a foreigner won on this special day that stirs patriotic feelings. When walking in conservative neighborhoods, beer bottles were thrown at me and people shouted, “Go back to Japan! I was even yelled at for going back to Japan.

Furthermore, in 2010, the governing body of the “Hot Dog Championship” tightened the terms of the contract, including restrictions on media appearances. When Kobayashi protested, he was barred from participating in the championship.

The governing body just issued a one-sided press release saying, ‘Kobayashi will not participate. It was as if I was the problem. So I consulted with my wife Maggie, whom I would later marry, and other people who supported me, and on the day of the championship they went on stage with me hidden. I tried to speak the truth in my own words. ‘Let Kobayashi eat! ‘ some audience members shouted at me the whole time.”

Kobayashi was seized by police officers and arrested on charges of trespassing. The court ruled that he was not guilty of any crime and placed him on probation for six months. Kobayashi’s training regimen is unique: he competes in competitions two to three months out of the year.

I start training three to four months before a competition. The important thing is to increase the capacity of the stomach. First, he drinks 5 liters of water for about 30 minutes, then gradually increases the volume and shortens the time. Eventually, you will be able to drink 12L of water in 90 seconds. My stomach capacity was about 5 kg before training, but before the competition I had increased it to more than 13 kg.”

He also focused on improving the strength of his mouth and throat.

To strengthen his chewing power, he ate bread that had been frozen until it was crusty. To strengthen his suction, he would drink sloshing liquids through a straw. To strengthen your mouth, you lifted a spoon pressed against your tongue. Maybe it was the practice, but I’ve been a big eater for more than 25 years, and fortunately I’ve never experienced any major physical ailments.”

However, in the 1920s, due to the COVID-19 crisis, the competitions were no longer held. Kobayashi was now over 40 years old.

Perhaps it was because of the decrease in the number of competitions that I lost my sense of actual competition, and even after the COVID-19 crisis, I could no longer easily get food down my throat. Perhaps it was age-related decline, too. Above all, I could no longer push myself. I began to feel weak, even when I was training, thinking what if I got injured? If I lost my stoicism, I would be finished as a food fighter. I decided to retire.”

What will the legendary food fighter do now that he has retired?

I want to use my experience to help make gluttony a sport. I would like to teach people how to practice and create competitions where young food fighters can compete.

Kobayashi is now making concrete plans for his second life in Kyoto, where he lives with his wife Maggie.

From the March 7 , 2025 issue of FRIDAY