Coney Island hot dog eating contest set to crown chow down champs; 2012 winners defend titles

NEW YORK, N.Y. – It’s a dogfight, a roast, a frank encounter, a contest to win in the wurst way. In short, it’s an event that devours puns. With relish.

The annual Fourth of July hot dog eating contest was set to, well, roll Thursday in Coney Island, with chomp champs Joey Chestnut and Sonya Thomas defending their respective men’s and women’s titles.

Chestnut, 29, is a six-time winner who set the record — 68 weiners and buns in 10 minutes — in 2009 and tied it last year. Thomas, 45, powered through 45 dogs to take the women’s championship last year and also won in 2011, the first year women competed separately.

They likely will be tough to beat. But this competition can never rule out an upset — stomach, at least.

“Tomorrow’s strategy: just find my rhythm really quickly,” Chestnut, the 210-pounder nicknamed “Jaws” from San Jose, Calif., said after the ceremonial weigh-in near City Hall Wednesday as he munched on a frank, the only thing he’d eaten that day amid a preparatory fast.

Chestnut said his pace has been uneven in the past, but “this year I’m trying to eat a little more gracefully, conserve my energy.”

Thomas, a 100-pound dynamo known as the “Black Widow” of competitive eating, says the challenge of shovelling down dozens of franks is actually “more mental than physical.”

“I have to fight with myself, so I’m going to try to really focus,” said Thomas, of Alexandria, Va., where she manages a fast-food restaurant. And no, it doesn’t serve hot dogs.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, speaking at the weigh-in for his 12th and final year in office, aimed to set a record of his own by stuffing more than a dozen hot-dog-related puns into an elaborate sentence that started “let’s be frank” and ended by looking forward to the “weiner of the contest.”

Now in its 98th year, the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest generally draws a crowd of thousands to marvel at contestants cramming frankfurters down their throats.

The chow down showdown is on this year despite concerns about a swaying, shuttered observation tower that spurred the closure of parts of the nearby amusement park this week. The shutdown didn’t affect Nathan’s.