SKOL hosts inaugural hotdog eating contest

Thirteen: that’s how many glizzies Aman Gurung took down in the first ever SKOL hot dog eating contest.

As fans trickled into Kirkeby-Over Stadium last Saturday to watch the Vikings take on MSU Moorhead, the real event of the day was unfolding just a bun’s throw away, where nine brave Skoldiers sat down to face a single, terrifying question: just how many wieners can one person handle?

The contest was the brainchild of SKOL co-presidents Lizzie Westra and Julia Wiik, two senior nursing majors. After Wiik called in a favor from a HyVee contact she made during Viking Days, 200 hot dogs came rolling in.

The rules were simple and enforced by a neutral judge assigned to each competitor: 10 minutes on the clock, a full hot dog must be consumed to count, and puking gets you disqualified.

Freshman Harper Hoffman saw a flyer for the event mid-Fortnite session and said it was an instant “oh yeah, I’ve got to sign up for this.” Hoffman said he was aiming for 15 dogs.

Freshman Stefan Gouws saw the event on social media and said he’d “always wanted to do this.”

With a goal of 20 hot dogs at around 300 calories each, Gouws was staring down roughly 6,000 calories in ten minutes — nearly triple what most people eat in a day. 

“I’ve actually been checking my calories; this is gonna blow it out,” Gouws said.

Macros be damned, he decided to compete anyway.

Freshman Clare Leveritt got looped in at a SKOL tie-dyeing event. She mentioned she was gluten-free, and organizers promised her gluten-free buns on the spot — a promise they kept.

Westra and Wiik explained the rules, assigned referees, and without further ado, the race was on.

Gurung came out of the gate like a man with something to prove, blowing past the competition and gobbling ten hot dogs in the first five minutes alone. His dogged pace had the rest of the table struggling to keep up. He was, to put it frankly, on a roll.

Hoffman was not so lucky. At the five-minute mark, with the finish line nowhere in sight, things were getting a little hard to stomach. His 15-dog goal was looking increasingly hard to swallow and he said he needed a moment to “let it digest a bit.”

“I can’t eat another, it’s sickening,” he said. “I’m gonna cry.”

Further down the table, Leveritt had yet to finish her first gluten-free glizzy. And science, it turns out, may be partly to blame.

Gluten-free bread lacks the stretchy gluten network that traps air and creates the light, fluffy texture of a regular bun; without it, the bun stays denser and heavier no matter how many starches or gums are thrown at it.

While everyone else was inhaling airy, glorified bread-flavored air, Leveritt was chewing through a substance more akin to a hockey puck.

It probably didn’t help that she prefers her hot dogs cold, a revelation that visibly disturbed several competitors within earshot. Going from eating cold hot dogs to a hot dog-eating contest intended for normal people was a bit of a system shock. Nevertheless, she took it in stride with a simple game plan: eating “normally, but as fast as possible.”

Elsewhere, Gouws was nowhere near his goal of 20 and had yet to cross into double digits with only a couple minutes remaining. 

A minute left on the clock, Gurung mustard down his 13th dog. As Gouws worked on his 11th, Gurung realized there was simply no way for him to ketchup and took a moment to relish his imminent victory. 

Hoffman finished six dogs, well short of his goal, and had plenty to say about why.

“The lights were brighter than expected; I thought I could handle more meat,” he said.

He pinned some blame on a hydration strategy that backfired — he’d gone through five bottles of water by the end of the competition, more than anyone else at the table.

“I think I ate less because I couldn’t swallow the nasty hot dogs without drinking water,” Hoffman said.

Nine of the 11 original signups actually competed, and organizers called the inaugural contest a success. The remaining hot dogs were handed out to hungry tailgaters before kickoff. 

Wiik and Westra said they hope next year’s SKOL leadership keeps the tradition alive. And while Gurung came out on top, this wasn’t exactly a wiener-takes-it-all situation — all nine competitors went home with a free SKOL hot dog-eating contest T-shirt.

Gurung, meanwhile, walked away with a trophy, a cooler backpack and, perhaps most importantly, the undisputed title of SKOL’s top glizzy gobbler.