At the Georgia National Fair, a teen wins a corn dog showdown
PERRY — As people walked past rides, food vendors and carnival games Sunday at the Georgia National Fair, one crowd gathered for a different kind of spectacle: amateur competitive eaters racing to down quarter-pound corn dogs in two minutes flat.
The fair’s eating competition, which offered free admission and corn dogs to anyone willing to compete, drew more than a dozen competitors.
Among the group was a trio of Perry firefighters who had never entered an eating competition before. A couple of the firefighters watched a YouTube video suggesting that dunking the corn dogs in water would make eating the quarter-pound beef corn dogs faster.
But despite watching the video 33-year-old William Kersey of Perry opted not to use that technique.
Dylan McLaughlin, a 25-year-old college recruiter from Rome said a free ticket and corn dogs were enough for him to enter the competition.
“I’ll try to win,” he said. “I’m going to go all out, but I don’t have any expectations.”
The rules were simple: Eat as many of the five corn dogs in two minutes as possible. The competition ran in two heats, and the winners of each heat would advance to a funnel cake final.
After the announcer, Anya Turpin, the executive director of Visit Perry, counted down from 10 and the music turned on, contestants devoured the corn dogs as fast as they could.
“When the music starts, you start eating,” Turpin said. “When the music stops, you stop.”
The crowd surrounding the contest clapped and cheered as competitors raced to down as many corn dogs as they could.
McLaughlin won the first heat, eating about two and a half corn dogs. “Five in two minutes is way too ambitious for any person,” he said.
But he faced an uphill battle in the finals, as his opponent, 18-year-old James Dean of Brunswick, devoured more than a pound of beef in the second heat using the water-dunking technique.
Dean took home the trophy in the finals after out-eating McLaughlin, downing three funnel cakes in under two minutes.
Dean, an accounting major at Georgia College and State University, planned to walk around with his girlfriend and family afterward. He said he wouldn’t be getting on any rides.
The fair runs through Oct. 12 in Perry, 105 miles south of Atlanta off I-75.
About the Author
Caleb Groves is a general assignment reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's politics team and a Kennesaw State University graduate.
