Five Years, Ten Sanctioned Events, Never Worse Than Second: A Career Retrospective

Five years ago this fall, a group of bored roommates in a Charlotte apartment turned a kitchen dare into what is now a nationally sanctioned sport with an official rulebook, a five-year results archive, and rankings in every state that fields a competitor. One name appears at the top of nearly all of it.

The full record: five Southeast Regional Open titles (2021–2025, all first place). Four National Pineapple Championship titles (2021, 2023, 2024, 2025). One National Championship second-place finish (2022, by six tenths of a second to Jake Winslow — still the closest final in the event's history). Zero cut-cleanliness penalties across all ten sanctioned appearances. That is a nine-win, one-runner-up record of top-two finishes, in a sport where the Council's own data shows the average nationally ranked competitor finishes outside the podium in roughly a third of their sanctioned starts.

It's also, notably, a record built entirely in public, on a five-year-old sport, against a field that has gotten measurably faster and more technical every single season. Priya Natarajan, Jake Winslow, and Hana Kahale — three of the sport's other most decorated competitors — have all closed the gap on raw speed. None has yet closed it on consistency.

Whatever comes next for the sport, its first five years have a settled answer to the question of who its greatest competitor is. The rankings, the results archive, and nearly every rival competitor interviewed for this piece agree: it's Michael Salomone.