THERE ARE MANY things one can do to relax at the end of the week. Dinner and drinks with your partner. A baseball game. The movies. I chose to spend the last Friday night in April inside a downtown Los Angeles sound stage, designed to resemble a Vegas title fight arena, to watch sperm race.
This Sperm Racing event (I know, I know) was conceived by Eric Zhu, a 17-year-old tech entrepreneur from Indiana who got kicked out of high school after the principal caught him taking fundraising meetings from the bathroom. The precocious teen now lives in San Francisco, running one of his bathroom-born companies, Aviato, which builds B2B software tools. He’s also a general partner at Bachmanity Capital, which backs startups in deep tech and space (as in literal outer space).
According to Zhu, the idea for Sperm Racing started as a joke. An unnamed billionaire—described by the event’s (also teenage) media handler as someone who moves in the same circles as right-wing, tech demi-god Peter Thiel—flew Zhu to New York and asked for his “craziest” idea. He pitched competitive sperm racing, assuming it would flop. Instead, the billionaire loved it. He didn’t love it enough to fund it, but the reaction got the ball rolling. Zhu soon raised $1.5 million, mostly from friends at early-stage venture funds, to “turn health into a sport.”
When I first saw the buzz around Sperm Racing about a week before the event—posters with the “racers” posing shirtless like fighters and tweets with captions like “our generation is cooked” and “are men okay?”—my reaction was existential resignation. The internet spectacle felt like the inevitable collision of meme culture, bro-podcast masculinity, and the ongoing effort to biotech-ify literally everything. But that reaction softened when I read the event’s manifesto, which frames Sperm Racing as a spectacle with a purpose: raising awareness about an important issue. “Male fertility is declining. Like, a lot,” it read. “It’s happening quietly, steadily, and nobody’s really talking about it.”
It’s true. A major 2017 meta-analysis of over 40,000 men found that average sperm concentration had dropped by more than 50 percent over four decades. It could be due to a mix of factors: genetic and biological (varicoceles; hormonal imbalances), lifestyle (poor diet, smoking, drinking, stress), and environmental (“forever chemicals” and microplastics are everywhere, including our junk). Still, is a sperm race really the answer to *waves hands* all this?
The event was supposed to take place at the Hollywood Palladium, a classic Los Angeles concert venue that’s hosted everyone from Frank Sinatra to Jay-Z. Zhu claimed Sperm Racing would draw 5,000 people, which should’ve raised a red flag, considering the Palladium maxes out at around 4,000 people. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn the venue cancelled their contract days before the race for reasons Zhu wouldn’t disclose. Instead, I got a last-minute email the day before the race inviting press to swing by a setup at a totally different location: Los Angeles Center Studios, where they just so happened to be filming The Lincoln Lawyer. A lucky break, maybe—just in case things got so out of hand the Sperm Racing team needed a slick TV attorney.
That evening, Zhu met me and about a half dozen other members of the media inside a cavernous soundstage, where three dozen production assistants were hammering, shouting, and trying to rig up a digital scoreboard and a jumbotron the size of a highway billboard. Zhu was accompanied by Shane Fan, his co-founder (one of three) who has his own blockchain startup but is better known for making social media videos that estimate people’s real height. Zhu looked every bit the teenager—lazy posture, black hair hanging over his forehead, braces recently off. He wore blue jeans, a dark gray T-shirt, and white Air Force Ones, speaking in rapid, machine-gun bursts as he explained how the whole thing was supposed to work.
Drawing inspiration from F1, UFC, and the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match, Sperm Racing would include two races. The first would be a single, prizeless, do-or-die-match between internet personalities Noah Boat and Jimmy Zhang. Then, the title match, a best-of-three race between Asher Proeger, a freshman at UCLA, and Tristan Wilcher, a sophomore at rival USC. Both had been given $1,000 to “train” during a prep period that, according to tongue-in-cheek promo videos, involved Wilcher compulsively working out and downing two gallons of pineapple juice. Proeger apparently focused on eating ice cream, steak, and tanning his balls—which, ironically, reads more like a checklist of what not to do for healthy sperm. The guy with the fastest swimmers would get $10,000.
“It was a lot harder than we thought to race sperm,” Zhu said as he explained that his team had to scramble to pull together the elaborate production and develop the technology that could somehow make watching sperm…compelling. First, the racers would give a sperm sample at the venue about an hour before showtime. It would be warmed, filtered for the fastest swimmers, and placed on a microscopic track in fluid that mimics the female reproductive tract. The sperm would then be released, and computer vision—basically AI that interprets visual data—would follow their movement and turn it into the animated race that we, and those watching the livestream at home, saw on screen. Each race would run about two minutes.
“We spent all the money on this event, which might be stupid,” Zhu said casually when asked how the $1.5 million had been allocated. “But our goal is to go bigger and bigger, right?” As I thought about the fact a group of teenagers had, in a matter of weeks, blown through enough money to buy a house to build the Daytona 500 of semen, I simply wrote “gonna be a shit show” in my notes.
AND A SHIT show it was.
When I arrived the next day, about an hour before the race, the arena buzzed with the kind of nervous energy that screams “we are absolutely not going to pull this off.” Zhu, who was wearing the same clothes as the day before, jogged across the arena trailed by two boys filming him with DSLR cameras. On a small island stage branching off from the main setup, a high-end inverted research microscope sat surrounded by cables and gear. Next to the apparatus, a bald man, clearly one of the lead producers, stood wearing headphones and a pained expression.
“Can I get confirmation that the science is a go?” he said multiple times into the microphone. “The clock is ticking.”
Perched on a raised VIP platform with purple banquettes, a tall guy in a skin-tight white bodysuit fidgeted in place, dressed as a lone spermatozoon (yep, the singular of sperm). Overhead, the scoreboards flashed the Sperm Racing logo and cycled through a rotating lineup of seminal puns: “Almost Ready to Bust,” “Jizz a Few More Minutes,” and “Cumming Soon.”
When they finally opened the doors, the crowd—mostly teenagers and more like 400 people, not 4,000—wandered in looking a little lost. Some wore streetwear, others repped USC or UCLA jerseys. A few slipped on $40 “Swim Team” Sperm Racing tees being hawked outside. Lest you think this is only an event for dudes, I talked to Annie, a young goth from Santa Monica with a septum piercing and chrome grills. When I asked how she’d heard about the event, she shrugged: “I saw a meme.”
Later, I met Stephanie Sabourin, an actual nurse who specializes in male reproductive health. She was there representing the at-home sperm testing startup Legacy, a “loose sponsor” of the event and had skipped the opening day of the nation’s biggest urology conference in Vegas—weirdly, happening the same weekend—to be here.
“I think they’ve done a great job hyping up the not-so-popular topic of male fertility,” she said. But then, almost in the same breath, she added with a laugh, “I might regret this in the morning,” hinting at the tension between medical legitimacy and whatever exactly this was.
Surprisingly, Sperm Racing did make a small effort to honor its mission of getting people to think more critically about sperm health. During the “weigh-in”—a segment modeled after the macho theatrics of a boxing press conference—Sabourin stood on stage asking competitors actual health questions: how much they exercise, whether they smoke or drink. And to their credit, the men answered with a degree of sincerity, mentioning better sleep, cleaner diets, and cutting back on weed and booze.
That earnestness, however, didn’t stand a chance against the event’s dominant vibe: full-blown internet id. Zhang, one of the first racers, had taken the stage flanked by a crew dressed like semen—matching white outfits, just like the guy in the VIP section from earlier—and wearing a plastic paintball vest scrawled with “Nut King” in Sharpie. Boat, his competitor, had arrived in silky purple pajamas, backed by an entourage dressed in black, some dripping in diamond chains. When the two stood nose to nose, Zhang pulled out a squirt gun and blasted Boat with a stream of mysterious white liquid, kicking off a pseudo-wrestling brawl that had me waiting for someone to yell “Worldstar!” After it was broken up, I turned to Annie—the goth girl with the chrome grills—for her take. She shrugged again: “Probably staged.”
Later, when Proeger from UCLA and Wilcher from USC took the stage in NASCAR-style driver suits, the energy shifted from chaotic anticipation to full-blown college rivalry. Proeger, blonde and cherubic, was immediately booed by the USC crowd. Wilcher, with dark curls and a calm demeanor, stood by as Proeger fired back at the hecklers, telling them they “could not get into UCLA” and that they were all “micro dicks.” Soon after, members of Zhang’s crew—the ones dressed in white bodysuits—began simulating masturbation alongside a guy in an inflatable penis suit. At one point, a tall, slender “spokesman” bounded onstage and declared, “Sperm Racing is a serious company” before promptly dropping his pants.
The event also felt like a YouTube echo chamber. About half the attendees I met identified as “content creators”—crews of boys chasing after each other with vlogging rigs and radiating the kind of energy that says “we’re here to get kicked out.” When I spoke to one of them, a handsome guy with face tattoos, his crew swung their rig around to film the interaction and, for a moment, I wasn’t sure who was interviewing whom.
The slapdash execution didn’t help. A/V glitches and botched intros had already delayed the night. And, somehow, Zhu had booked Ty Dolla $ign to perform but after five minutes and a few half songs, the artist told the DJ to turn the music off and stormed off stage. Zhu later told me that someone from the press stuck a camera in his face, and he wasn’t having it.
And, despite all that, I was enjoying myself.
When it came time for the first, do-or-die race, Boat and Zhang returned to the stage and were directed to step into cylindrical glass tanks with tubes snaking upward toward fluid containers overhead. I was briefly puzzled—until I had a flashback to childhood afternoons watching Double Dare, where contestants can slime each other from above. Except in this case, the looming question was…is that going to be semen?
At centre stage, two bearded guys—one in a black hoodie, the other in a white lab coat—used a heavy-duty pipette to deposit the samples onto the track, officially starting the race. The crowd, now about 500 strong, erupted as they stared up at the jumbotron, which supposedly displayed actual spermatozoa wiggling down parallel, curved tracks that looked like a top-down view of a Mario Kart circuit. Zhang’s swimmers shot ahead almost immediately, taking a commanding lead.
“Noah’s swimmers aren’t even on the screen!” a hyped-up commentator screeched into the mic. “This is a microscopic masterclass!”
Occasionally, the race looked a little off, with the sperm groupings suddenly surging forward, then stalling. Still, it was exciting to watch, and as Zhang’s top racer swam across the finish line, the crowd erupted and the dunk tank triggered, releasing gallons of white goop over Boat’s head. To his credit, Boat took it in stride. After drying off, he returned to the stage. “At the end of the day, we’re all winners,” he said, a towel slung over his shoulders. “And I definitely need to go see a doctor.”
The Wilcher vs. Proeger matchup was no less thrilling. In the best-of-three-series, Wilcher took home the first win. Then in the second, Proeger stormed back to even the series. As the final race kicked off, I found myself glued to the mega-screen, as both competitors remained dead even, their swimmers jockeying for position in tight formation.
“They are neck and neck. Or should I say tip to tip!” shouted the over-hyped commentator from earlier, clearly thrilled with what was probably his hundredth phallic pun of the night.
Despite the weird little glitches in the livestream, the tension held through the end. Every surge by one racer was matched by the other, the groups of swimmers darting forward in perfect sync. It felt, briefly, like watching the final stretch of the Kentucky Derby—if the horses were microscopic and had long flagellating tails.
In a photo finish, Wilcher’s spermatozoon crossed the line first, taking home the victory and triggering the splash tank, which covered Proeger with an even bigger load of thick, white goop. Wilcher emerged from his tank dry, jogging to center stage, arms raised in victory. As “Congratulations” by Post Malone blasted over the speakers, blooms of confetti rained from the sky.
Just before Wilcher received his $10,000 prize, which turned out to be a black briefcase stuffed with crisp, bound $1 bills, Zhu appeared on stage wearing a headset, looking like a behind the scenes operator in full command. I picked a piece of confetti from the floor and realized it was shaped like sperm.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, I spoke to Zhu, who told me he’d spent the last few days catching up on many hours of lost sleep. But as tired as he was, he still spoke like someone operating at 2x speed—rapid-fire, animated, bouncing between topics like tabs on a browser.
“I thought it was a shit show,” he said, pre-empting the 10 or so questions I’d prepared about the more chaotic aspects of the show, like the brawl, the A/V glitches, and Ty Dolla $ign’s swift exit. “The only thing that worked well was the race.”
He even anticipated my question about whether the races were real, switching our call to FaceTime video so he could show me how the raw footage of the sperm was converted into the on-screen animation. The weird fast-forwarding effect, he insisted, was the result of the mechanics of the microscopic racetrack whose fluid periodically pushed dead sperm up toward the live racers.
Other reporting, however, claims that Zhu admitted the winners were known in advance because the races were recorded an hour earlier and the order was rearranged to make things “more interesting.” The Sperm Racing Instagram account posted an explanatory Instagram video in which Fan—Zhu’s height measuring co-founder—defends Sperm Racing. But he does not address the question of predetermination, saying only that the event is “not a fraud.”
Talking to Zhu was a surreal experience because in one moment he’d say something like, “We basically hate money,” giggling like the goofy teenager he still sort of is. And then, in another, he’d tell me how he had to make sure Sperm Racing wasn’t too NSFW because his tech companies “work a lot with the government.” He told me he made no money from the event (and presumably, neither did his investors).
“Vegas next,” Zhu said when I asked what he had in store for Sperm Racing. “Or maybe even bigger, like the Olympics?”
Zhu’s smirk as he made the final absurd projection reminded me that Sperm Racing is a perfect example of the tightrope his generation is walking: the push for meaning and legitimacy, while navigating a culture where attention is currency and truth is negotiable.
It’s unlikely that this is the last we’re going to see of Zhu’s creation. A few days after we spoke, Zhu posted a story on Instagram, saying that he’d “raised a new round” of funding—though he wouldn’t share more details, only that it would be announced soon. If the “sport” does continue to grow, he will have to deal with the critics who say Sperm Racing is fake. So, Zhu might need that slick TV attorney after all—although, most likely to negotiate his Netflix deal.
This article originally appeared on Men’s Health US.
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