Sydney man James Webb went from ICU to USA’s competitive eating circuit

At 27, James Webb lay paralysed in intensive care and was told he would never walk again. Today, he is fitter than ever and travels to the US to take on the big boys in the world of competitive eating.

Webb spent 18 months in intensive care but is now in great health. Picture: Richard Dobson

The first time James Webb sat down for an eating competition, he polished off 38 pancakes in an hour and broke the Australian record in Brisbane.

A few weeks later in Melbourne he ate 17 sausage sizzle sandwiches in three minutes, again breaking the record.

Soon after in Toowoomba, he finished a 3.5kg doughnut in under 20 minutes.

Then the Americans called.

That was 15 months ago and since then Webb, from Sydney’s northwest, has travelled Australia and America smashing food records as he goes.

In July last year Webb became the only Australian to compete in Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island, New York, which is described as the Super Bowl of competitive eating.

Competitive eater James Webb travels to the US and often beats the Americans at eating tournaments. Picture: Richard Dobson

He came third, eating 41.5 hot dogs and taking out some of America’s best competitive eaters.

And last week, the 34-year-old who quit his job as a sales rep when he started earning more money through food challenges than his regular job, again placed third in the Nathan’s contest, downing 47 hot dogs, just two behind the runner-up.

“Last year when I came to compete in Nathan’s, they thought I was this flash in the pan, this nobody from Australia, but now it’s like they know I’m here to stay,” Webb told Sydney Weekend from New York hours after the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.

Webb, who used to be a semi-professional soccer player, says he never misses a morning in the gym. Picture: Richard Dobson

They’re big words for a guy who only started competing in food challenges by accident in May 2021.

But it’s even more impressive when you consider Webb’s health background.

“I used to be a fat kid, until I was about 16, I was obese, probably about 100kg. When I signed my first professional soccer contract at 17 the coach pretty much said to me ‘You’re a fatso, you’re not going to play, no matter how good you are’. So, I joined the gym and by 18, I was fit as hell,” Webb tells Sydney Weekend about his days playing for Sydney United and the Marconi Stallions in Sydney’s semi-professional football league.

“But I gave away soccer because I got sick. I got Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is a rare auto-immune disease, when I was 27.

James Webb on the circuit in New York City on July 4.

Competing in the 2023 Nathan's Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest.

“I spent 18 months in ICU. I was paralysed, on a ventilator, had four double lung clots, they told me I’d never walk again.

“Basically, I went to sleep one night a professional soccer player and woke up paralysed.

“I had to teach myself to walk again, to breathe without a machine, I had a walking frame, an oxygen tank and I went blind and had to have double cataract surgery.”

He says he always seperates hots dogs from their buns when eating them.

Until recently, treatment for the incurable disease has involved six-hour plasma exchanges, or blood transfusions, every three weeks.

But Webb recently started a new treatment which, all things going well, would mean he only needs transfusions every six months.

Webb gave up his day job when competing on the circuit began earning him more.

It means Webb has to stay in good condition, making sure health markers like his blood sugar and cholesterol don’t blow out.

It’s one of the reasons Webb won’t miss a morning in the gym, no matter which country or time zone he is in.

When he started competitive eating he weighed 82.5kg and had an impressive 4 per cent body fat.

Today, he weighs in at 91kg and his body fat is 10 per cent — not bad for a person who puts away around 15kg of food a day even when he’s not training for a food competition or challenge.

Webb grew up in Sydney’s Baulkham Hills with a Croatian mother and English father.

Being grossly overweight is one of the myths surrounding competitive eaters, says Webb, who has a snack pantry at home and sometimes wakes at 3am with stabbing hunger pains and has to eat before he can go back to sleep.

In fact, if you look at the world’s top 10 competitive eaters, you’ll find a pro powerlifter, a pro cyclist, an endurance runner and two pro bodybuilders.

Webb grew up in Baulkham Hills, the son of an English dad and a Croatian mother. He says his ethnic upbringing was the perfect early training ground for competitive eating.

“Growing up in an ethnic house, my mum would cook, the food would go in the middle of the table and if I was chatting, my brother would be taking the food,” Webb theorises.

“So I’ve always been a relatively quick eater, it was just normal for me. My mother always fed us well. I’d come home from soccer training and there’d be a full three-course meal waiting for me on the table, no matter what time of day it was.

“My grandmother too would always cook my favourite foods, so it was everywhere I’d go.”

The Saturday in May 2021 that changed Webb’s life began like any other, with a visit to the gym and a decent breakfast.

His fiancée, Kate Gibbs, had planned a weekend in the Hunter Valley but as Webb is not a drinker, he had to be coerced into going.

And Kate knew the best way to get her fiancé to agree to anything was with the promise of food.

So, she cleverly waved the carrot of lunch at Khartoum Hotel in Kitchener, near Cessnock.

When they arrived, Webb noticed a picture of a burger on the wall that was so big it looked fake.

At 5kg, it was touted as Australia’s biggest burger and when he inquired about it, he was told 55 people had attempted it, but none had finished it. Better still, every time someone attempted it, they put $10 into a kitty, which was now at $550.

“I said sign me up!, Webb laughs. “The burger comes out, they make Kate move out of the way and they explain I can’t move from the table, no toilet breaks and they count down 3, 2, 1.

“I’m eating and I have all these Cessnock locals telling me I’m not going to do it, but I’m 10 minutes in and half the burger is gone and I thought it was pretty easy.

“I said to one local, ‘Look, I’m going to finish this burger so I can have a slice of cheesecake because where I grew up, you don’t get dessert unless you finish your dinner.’

“You get 30 minutes to complete the challenge and I finished the burger, plus wedges, fries, onion rings and three cans of Coke Zero in 20 minutes.

“Then the guy brought out the cheesecake and being a smart-arse, he put a whole tub of whipped cream on top, so I ate the whole thing — everything in 27 minutes.”

Unbeknown to Webb, a Cessnock local had sent a video of the feat to the local newspaper who sent it to Channel 9 and the next morning he was woken up by his mother calling to know why he was on television.

Webb says competing at Coney Island is like the Superbowl of competitive eating.

By that evening, he was on the 5pm news and a producer from Nova 96.9 called to have him come into the station to do a dumpling eating challenge with co-host, Wippa. It was no contest. Wippa stopped at 10 dumplings while Webb ate 100, then went to work.

A competitive eater from Sydney, Yuan Teck Yeap, heard Webb on the radio and messaged him to come to a burger-eating challenge at Marrickville’s Baby Rey’s a few days later.

Webb polished off his entire burger while Yeap was only halfway through and, impressed, he gave Webb a list of local food challenges to try.

Every day for the next two weeks, Webb did a food challenge after work and won.

In one, he ate a table-sized pizza on his own where teams of two had failed.

Webb’s popularity and social media following grew, but it was the 2021 Covid lockdown that supercharged his endeavours when he and Kate started filming their own challenges from home.

Soon, local restaurants and cafes were sending them food parcels to work into their challenges and post online.

Webb says that by the second week of lockdown, he was getting food deliveries daily.

A group of construction workers who would watch Webb’s feats during their smoko, pitched in to Uber him 30 Big Macs to eat. He did it and they were so impressed they paid him $500 in prize money. (Webb hasn’t eaten a Big Mac since).

After lockdown, this turned into financial incentives as restaurants and cafes paid him to post videos eating at their establishments.

In early 2022, America’s Major League Eating (MLE) invited Webb to compete in America. He completed 26 food challenges and contests in 10 days and he left with a professional contract with the MLE, the first Aussie to be offered one.

It was during this trip that Webb, still a relative newcomer to competitive eating, discovered techniques the professionals used.

In one corn-eating contest in West Florida in which Webb came fifth eating 38 corn cobs, the winner told him about the “debris penalty” whereby the competitors scrape the corn with their teeth, letting half of it fall to the ground — an entirely legitimate rule which is written into the waiver.

And he learned the “bite push” technique of eating without chewing; where you take one bite then your second bite compresses the first and the third bite pushes it all down your throat. It’s a technique Webb practises when training. It goes a little like this: “You set the clock, 10 minutes, and bang, eat,” he explains.

“You separate the hotdog from the bun, you eat the hotdog while you dip the bun in water and then you eat it. It’s disgusting but the idea is you try to chew as little as possible.”

Along the way, Webb also learned the dirty tricks some restaurants, cafes and fast food joints will try to get away with in an attempt to stump competitive eaters.

Webb says there was a snack pack challenge in Campbelltown he got halfway through and pulled out of, but not because he was full, but because it tasted so bad.

“They decided to give me three-day old kebab meat and I got halfway through and stopped because it tasted so bad,” Web recalls.

“The owner’s brother told me he had kept it in the cool room for three days, laughing. I had recorded it and I put it on the internet and it blew up. I didn’t know there were restaurants trying to stitch up competitive eaters.

“There are people who give us raw burger patties, burnt bacon or piping hot food with no cooling down time.

“My fork melted in a piping hot pho challenge once it was so hot, and they only had a one-minute cooling time. Some places like to set you up to fail.”

While he holds the world record for eating the most glazed doughnuts — he ate 59.5 in eight minutes in San Diego in June — Webb says his next big goal is to become the ninth person ever to crack 50 hot dogs in 10 minutes.

“(The Americans) treat competitive eating like a national sport, it’s huge,” Web, classified nN. 10 in the world, says.

“Now I’m at the point where I have nothing to prove in Australia, I’m the only Aussie to ever go undefeated in every calendar event, no one has ever beaten me in Australia, I have all the records.

“And now I want to earn the respect of the Americans. I really want to be top five in the world because I think I can match it with those guys.”

And if his recent experience in America is anything to go, Webb may well have been accepted into the fold after all.

“Joey Chestnut came up to me at the after-party, hugged me and said ‘You’re great Mr Webb’,” he says down the phone from Times Square in New York.

“I had the flu and gastro leading up to Nathan’s and I thought I wasn’t going to be able to compete and (my fellow competitors) were all so supportive. Afterwards they were saying ‘You’re going to get 50 next year!’

“It’s all still so hard to believe, but I just want to see where this road takes me.”