Vaughan hosts pizza eating competition

Yorkregion.com
July 17, 2018
Steve Somerville

Cheese bits spewed, drinks splashed and bellies bulged. Hundreds gathered at the main stage to cheer a crazy and entertaining match as 11 competitors stomached almost 150 pizzas in the Vaughan Pizza Festival’s pizza eating competition.

The winner was Geoffrey Esper (in the Red Sox baseball cap), who polished off 19-1/4 eight-inch-pizzas in the 10-minute-long contest.

One crowd member noted that the key is to wash down the pizza between each stuffing, which offered up some messy cheesy scenes. Most competitors brought their own drinks, but plenty of water was on hand as well.

Esper’s nearest rival was celebrity competitive eater Joey “Jaws” Chestnut, who whipped through 17 pizzas. Chestnut is the world’s reigning number 1 hotdog eater, recently breaking his own world record by gorging down 74 hotdogs -- including buns, in an American July 4 competition. But he fell just short of winning the $2,000 grand prize here, settling for $1,000 for his second-place finish.

To quote one competitor in mid-competition with a fully pizza-stuffed mouth: “awuddwous wushchsh fyscheee tahhms” which we believe loosely translates into “I wish I had some Tums.”

Every competitor appeared to have held in their stomach’s contents, at least as of 20 minutes after the contest finished.