A Totally Casual Friday Night at the Sperm Racing Arena
My new story for Men's Health about the weird male fertility spectacle that no one asked for
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, and 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.
Well done, Jason! Thrilling read, as always.