Reigning chicken-eating champion and senior Katherine Dirksen, with her partner sophomore Joe Kain, led the Sigma Chi spirit team to victory in Wednesday’s Third Annual Wing Eating Contest, held in A.J.’s Cafe.
The 12 spirit teams competing in homecoming week entered two representatives, one male student and one female, to compete in the chicken challenge. Each team had to consume 4.4 pounds wings in the shortest amount of time. Dirksen and Kain finished the wings in a record-setting time of 3:26. In total, 123.2 pounds of wings for the competition.
Freshman Mary Clare Smith and sophomore Connor Gleason from the Olds Residence team took second place, while senior Sarah Leitner and sophomore Matthew VanOpstall from the Simpson Hall team took third.
Gleason and Smith threw up their hands in celebration, thinking they had beaten the Sigma Chi team. After further review, the judges gave the win to Dirksen and Kain, who had cleaner bones and a slightly faster time.
“Awesome,” Kain said directly after the win. “I feel like I’m on top of the world, but I can’t feel the outside of my mouth right now.”
Saga employees Kevin Kirwan, Patrick Leach, and Marty Morrison made the sauce using ample amounts of five different peppers: Thai chile, Habanero, jalapeno, crushed red, and cayenne.
Morrison described the sauce as being the hottest yet created for the competition.
“I just got out of a three-hour [swim] practice. I’m hungry,” Leitner said.
Prior to the competition, competitors removed watches and rings, signed waivers, and donned protective T-shirts — “the sauce could burn through clothes,” joked the master of ceremonies, financial aide counselor John Quint — focusing on the upcoming competition and the 25 spirit points at stake.
“I had a chicken-themed 16th birthday party. I really like chicken, OK?” said senior Abigail Panabaker of the Treble Meets Base team. “I have eaten two tablespoons of [Buffalo Wild Wings] Blazin’ Sauce. If I can do that, I can eat these hot wings.”
Two minutes before the competition was scheduled to begin, at 6:28 p.m., three male competitors were missing, including Panabaker’s partner, junior Jack Bartlett. Sophomore Marshall Gobba and another crowd member volunteered to fill in. Bartlett showed up at exactly 6:30 p.m., wearing a cow costume complete with a Chick-fil-A “eat mor chikin” sign around his neck.
“Bartlett is a tough man. He takes out anything in his path be it wild animals or chicken wings. He doesn’t back down,” junior Maxwell Kleber said. “Mu Alpha has high standards of manliness, and Bartlett holds those standards well.”
The crowd of student observers assisted in giving a 10-second countdown, and then the competitors dug into their bowls of steaming chicken. Faces quickly began to turn pink and sweat began to gather at temples as the students tore and grappled with the wings until every remnant of chicken was off the bones.
Most of the competitors gnawed and sucked the meat off the bones from the side, turning the bone as they ate, but others applied techniques garnered from prior experience, such as Kappa Kappa Gamma’s female representative, senior Andrea Rotary. She held the wings upright against the table and fanned off the meat, which she ate in single mouthfuls.
“I didn’t even chew,” said senior Brittany Hulett of the Galloway Hall team, who won fourth in the competition. “I was just swallowing the chicken whole.”
Though most were in a hurry to gulp down glasses of milk and water, when the competition came to a close, everyone left with a smile on their faces and friends clapping them on the back in congratulations.
“Spirit Week is just so much fun. I love it,” said freshman Mary Agnes Geiger, who was supporting the Olds Residence team. “I was here for some of homecoming last year, because of my brother, but it’s so much fun to be a part of this.”