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A new sport is coming to Los Angeles, as the first-ever sperm race will be held at the Hollywood Palladium on April 25, where students from the University of Southern California (USC) and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) will face off and race their sperm, with tickets already available at Live Nation. 3,600 tickets are currently on sale for the event.
A new company called Sperm Racing is seeking to turn the eccentric idea of racing human sperm into a sport that will include racing the sperm on a microscopic track that people can gamble on. The company hopes to expand the sport to be as big as Formula 1 racing or the Ultimate Fighting Championship, with dreams of making a billion-dollar company.
The spokesman for Sperm Racing, known as Dick Gay and Mr. Sperm Racing, described the company as “a team of a dozen students, content creators, and Producers. We've all come together to work on making health a sport through Sperm Racing.”
The company started with 17-year-old CEO Eric Zhu writing the Sperm Racing manifesto after discussing the idea with friends, a seemingly humorous idea that quickly grew into a $1.5 million business venture. After Zhu went around New York pitching his new idea, he raised over $1 million from independent venture capital investors, crypto investors and gambling companies. Garrett Niconienko, also known as Garrett Ronalds, a former employee for YouTuber MrBeast, is working with the Sperm Racing company as well.
Gay stated that with the important intersection of science, technology and a health crisis, the company hopes their sport will raise interest and direct more scientific research into the male fertility crisis. The Sperm Racing team is set out on a mission to turn male fertility health into a sport as a social cause, as described by spokesman Gay. He hopes that betting on health will result in greater social interest in male fertility by making it more entertaining.
The company is partnered with Nucleus Genomics, a company that provides at-home genome sequencing and analysis tests, which can help determine insights into health, including disease risks and trait predispositions. Gay said, “We want to make it so that you can compete over how you score on a biomarker test.”
A study published in volume 29, issue 2 of the Human Reproduction Update journal and titled “Temporal trends in sperm count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis of samples collected globally in the 20th and 21st centuries” by Hagai Levine et al showed that sperm counts fell by 1.2% a year on average from 1973 to 2018, or from 104 to 49 million sperm per milliliter of semen, with the rate of decline accelerating to an average of 2.6% a year in 2000. This means male fertility has dropped 50% in 50 years, and 7% of all males are infertile, according to Human Reproduction Update.
“Right now, the future of men's reproductive health is dismal. The technology is there to improve it, but there's only a germinating interest in fixing. We hope that the future might be changed by this, and we hope that in the future from even a juvenile age, people take their reproductive health seriously,” said Gay.
The cause for this sudden and rapid decline is believed to be a combination of factors, including poor health, diet, toxins in the world, and genetic and environmental factors. Gay said, “We hope that we can make any diagnostic in general health or any type of health a competitive sport.”
The first race will partner with Polymarket, allowing gambling on the race, which the Sperm Racing company hopes will increase viewership and interest in the newfound sport. Polymarket is an American-based cryptocurrency prediction market company that allows users to bet on future events.
Founded by Shayne Coplan in 2020, the company has faced scrutiny in the past for allowing bets on election outcomes. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission cracked down on Polymarket in 2022, issuing a $1.4 million fine for failing to properly register its prediction market, as they are classified as event contracts under U.S. law, which now makes betting on the marketplace illegal in the U.S.
Polymarket subsequently issued a geoblock in an attempt to ban U.S. users from the marketplace, but the block can be circumvented with a virtual private network (VPN). Coplan’s home was raided by the FBI in November 2024 in an alleged attempt to gather evidence that Coplan had awareness of United States users circumventing the ban on the marketplace.
The company has used short-form social media videos to promote its company, accumulating 13,700 followers, and the spokesman has accumulated 25,800 followers, with comedy-sketch-style videos of Gay dressed up in a sperm costume or going up to people asking them for semen donations.
The race is set to feature sperm from two students, Tristan Mykel Wilcher from USC and Asher Proeger from UCLA. Spokesman Gay did state the audience should expect a surprise, but did not further elaborate.
The microscopic 5000-microns-long racetrack will be set up on a microfluidic channel on a microscope slide that will be projected and livestreamed for the audience to watch along. The use of rheotaxis on a microfluidic channel is to push a current through the racetrack, as sperm naturally swim upstream; this will encourage it to stay on course to finish the race in a close mimic of the female vaginal tract.
The semen samples will be freshly collected shortly before the race begins, and to preserve the health of the samples, they will be stored in sperm incubation chambers at body temperature. The semen will be placed into a centrifuge, pushing the cells to the bottom so they can be loaded onto the racetrack. The samples will then be loaded onto two lanes in the five-millimeter racetrack when ready to race.
The company has spent its time and money on research and development into computer vision technologies, and sperm tracking technology, with students from Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University; Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Waterloo; and Canada helping the team. The team has been working since November 2024, but moved operations temporarily to Los Angeles to prepare for the race, with many team members working full time on the project.
When asked for any message to the public, Gay said, “It's as funny as it sounds. This is real, and we are absolutely serious.”