Will it be decided by injury?

It is a given that injuries will impact athletic competitions. If your best player is hurt your odds of winning are lessened significantly. If you participate in a solo sport...say tennis, or golf, swimming, maybe track, and you are injured your odds of winning become negligible.

For fans of that particular sport this is a sad fact. We go to see the stars, the top performers. And it is now obvious that the important July 4th competition will be missing an important competitor. Kobayashi is reporting he believes he will be unable to perform.

Like any high profile athlete he has surrounded himself with top-flight doctors and set up a rigourous rehab. Let's all hope these things coalesce into sufficient healing for him to compete on July 4th in the epic confrontation with Joey Chestnut. Just a few months ago a Kobayashi win would have been a foregone conclusion, the only question being whether he would again break his own record during the competition, but that was before Chestnut shattered the record with his performance in Tempe at regionals. This epic showdown between the two premiere competitors is something looked forward to by all the losers who care about competitive eating.

Yes, that is correct...an injury will keep World Champion hot dog eater Takeru Kobayashi out of the World Hot Dog Eating Championships. This is a tragedy on the level of Jimbo Schimbo missing the World Marbles Championship or Peg-Leg Smith missing the Bamboo Pogo Pole Jump Rope Skipping Championships. When you lose a marquee name like that...how can any interest remain in watching a bunch of losers jam hot dogs down their throats as fast as possible? Forget the fact that he "trains" for this epic of stupidity...forget that his record has fallen by 5 dogs...YOU ARE WATCHING SOMEONE BINGE! On pseudo-meat products, no less...

Of course, this leads to the real question...if the competitors in this world of "competitive eaters" train, have specialist doctors for their eating injuries (and do not bother asking how I managed to type that sentence with a straight face..."eating injuries" had me rolling), travel the country to compete in regional competitions to qualify for the "big one"...one can only assume they have sponsors ("Come see Human Hog Takeru Kobayashi take less than a minute to consume enough food to feed Ethiopia for three days!") then why won't people pay me millions of dollars to write this stuff?