Chilli-eating champion on what it takes to beat the heat

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Tom Conroy entered his first chilli-eating competition after a night drinking until 3am. Hungover and with a belly-full of KFC, he won Darwin's regional championship and is ready to take on the rest of Australia.

Transcript

00:00 I'm Tom Conroy, I'm the Northern Territory Chilli Champion.

00:14 So the night before the competition I was out on the piss with a couple of mates, completely

00:18 forgot the competition was on, got very carried away and was up drinking until about 3 in

00:24 the morning.

00:25 Initially I was quite confident because I eat a lot of hot chilli.

00:28 The day of the competition being incredibly hungover I was a lot less confident, I felt

00:32 terrible.

00:33 I thought if I went in with a full stomach of food it would help me win because I wouldn't

00:36 be affected so much by the chillis.

00:38 I pulled into KFC at Koolalinga and got a Zinger Stacker box and scoffed that down and

00:43 just finished eating it in the car park.

00:44 You have to eat your chilli, you have to clear your mouth, show everybody you've finished

00:48 it.

00:49 You can't throw up and you have to eat the entire thing and no drinking or eating anything

00:52 else.

00:53 We started off with some chilli jams, just nice sweet things akin to sweet chilli sauce.

00:58 Then we stepped up to jalapenos, bird's eyes, habaneros, chocolate habaneros, then some

01:03 extra hotter sauces similar to these sort of things.

01:06 And then from there we went into extract sprays and then onto Carolina Reapers.

01:13 So all chillis have a different flavour as you come into them.

01:16 Lower end chillis like your jalapenos have got a sort of just a spicy taste.

01:20 As you go up to habaneros they're incredibly fruity which is very nice, they're probably

01:24 my favourite chilli.

01:25 And then reapers have a very distinct, I'd say bold taste but they also kick you in the

01:30 mouth, they are very hot.

01:32 As we started heating up in the Scoville levels on the chillis, I started to sweat from my

01:36 head and as they started hitting my stomach one after the other, my stomach really started

01:41 to cramp up a little bit and I could hear the blood pounding in my head and my ears

01:45 burning and my heart hammering away.

01:49 The hottest thing we had on the day would have been the spray, which is just a chilli

01:53 extract not actual based out of chilli, they just distilled down the capsaicin and then

01:57 sprayed it straight into our mouths.

01:59 The second it went in my mouth I wanted to throw it up, I couldn't breathe, it was in

02:02 my nose, it was the hardest part of the competition.

02:09 I'm going to Sawtelle Chilli Festival in July.

02:12 I like to think I've got a good chance just coming from the territory and eating hot food

02:16 all the time.

02:17 My secret weapon is just pure stubbornness.

02:19 I don't want to be the loser and I'm not going to give up if I make it to the last two people,

02:25 I'll be there until I fall over.

02:26 I'm quite excited to represent the NT, I don't want to let everybody down, there's a lot

02:31 of people that have told me that if I don't win don't come back, if I tell them well it's

02:34 victory or death.

02:35 So I'd like to say to the competitors, good luck, but I'm coming.

02:39 This is your Chilli Champion!

02:44 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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