Throwback Thursday: The First Ever Hot Chili Eating Competition … in Canada?!

Anna Pellegrin Hartley | Aug 13, 2020 12:10 pm | Add a comment | 155 reads

Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our 12-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful stories of Beijing's days gone by.

We are beyond excited that the 2020 Hot & Spicy Festival is happening this weekend, Friday through Sunday Aug 14-16. It’s hard to believe that this will only be the third year the festival has been held because it’s already become such a keystone of our social calendar. Combining delicious and spicy food from all over the globe, loads of live entertainment, and a great festive atmosphere for all ages, it is an event not to be missed.

Yet while the festival itself is relatively new, the highlight event, the Hot Chili Eating Competition actually dates back much further, into the mists of time, a forgotten era known as the mid-2000s.

2006 to be exact, the year in which the first-ever Beijinger Hot Chili Pepper Eating Competition was held as a side attraction to the Canada Day celebrations at the Canadian International School of Beijing. The link between the land of moose and poutine and hot chili may be unclear, but our sister magazine the Beijinger embraced it anyway, and the competition was held at the embassy a total of seven times over the following decade.

Back in those early days, competitors simply had to eat as many of one kind of chili as possible and the competition was won a whopping five consecutive times by Gabriel Monroe, who was downing anywhere between 60 to 85 chilies in a sitting.

In 2017, the Beijinger modified the format a bit, teaming up with Maovember and Punjabi to host the event in the name of charity. It was also when they adopted the current format of having to eat a range of different chilis, rather than just a huge number. That year, it was Ankit Nayal – who you may recognize as the director of B-Active Sanlitun – who took the crown, admittedly looking a little worse for wear after eating not one, but four, Yunnan Shabu Shabu chilies, each scoring over 1,000,000 Scoville heat units.

In 2018 and 2019, the competition took it’s rightful position as the centerpiece of the massive two-day Hot & Spicy festivals, with dozens of competitors battling it out on both Saturday and Sunday. During 2018, it was Patrick McCarthy who weathered the pain and came out on top on Saturday, followed by Bill Weydig on Sunday. Speaking about the competition, Weydig described the moment the Hainan lantern peppers kicked in as “the closest I’ve ever come to an out-of-body experience. That was also when I found myself questioning my sanity.”

If you think you have what it takes to eat some of the world’s hottest chilies and would like to take part in this year’s pain-tinged showdown, simply send an email expressing your interest to marketingteam@truerun.com.