Ghadeer Bustani, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1677, a medical student named Johann Ham approached the Dutch scientist and future “Father of Microbiology” Antonie van Leeuwenhoek with unsettling news: there were tiny creatures living in his semen. Or not in his semen, not necessarily. Some incorrigible friend—someone who certainly wasn’t Ham—had dislodged his wad in the company of an “unclean woman” and then transferred custody of his deposit by means unattested into Ham’s hands. Curious Ham had splashed the discharge under a microscope and, startled by its contents, brought his discovery and its medium to Van Leeuwenhoek for a second opinion. Examining the sample, the renowned microscopist, who had already described what we call red blood cells and protists in pioneering detail, glimpsed spindly tailed animalcules moving in the muck. He proceeded to set about procuring new goo from a close, morally uncompromised source. “What I here describe was not obtained by any sinful contrivance on my part, but the observations were made upon the excess with which Nature provided me in my conjugal relations,” he wrote some months later to the Royal Society of London regarding the remains of an emission he’d slathered under his powerful single-lens microscope. I relate this lightly editorialized and moderately abridged history of the identification of what would become known as spermatozoa because it marks the first time that a man had cause and the capability to wonder at the meaning of the living contents of his ejaculate—and thus to search his little reflecting pool for the secrets of humanity, of himself. And because, in 2024, some 347 years after Van Leeuwenhoek fired his fateful blast, a money-minded form of this fascination prompted a team of teenage and early-twenties shitpost entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to found a sports start-up called Sperm Racing. It has raised $10 million in funding.

The company first came to my attention this February, a month before it was due to roll out an ambitious Sperm Racing World Cup featuring contestants representing 128 countries. When an editor for this magazine asked me to write about the championship, I began to picture myself as an anxious, anthropomorphized gamete paddling desperately toward its subject, its theme, its egg, endeavoring to fulfill its purpose, to conceive a story. Come is, as it happens, a subject on which I enjoy some expertise. Through the power of the internet and promiscuity, I’ve learned to appreciate the rich diversity of whitish matter the human body can produce. Color, velocity, viscosity, volume, reach, and duration differ from person to person, from shot to shot. I’ve become familiar with the venerable tradition, staged between men (and not only men) every day, of exhibition, comparison, and analysis, in which the relation between the two parties, or between one’s fantasy and one’s reality, or between one’s present output and one’s memory of past productions, adds to the pleasure that inheres in the act itself. 

Sperm Racing is, more or less, a scientized and de-eroticized update on this “venerable tradition.” At the Sperm Racing headquarters in San Francisco, two contestants donate their semen, which is centrifugally cleaned; healthy sperm are isolated from the samples; and the cells then race through courses less than a half-centimeter long that are etched into microfluidic silicon chips. The sperm are pipetted into warm liquid currents designed to mimic the reproductive environment; these currents allow the cells to orient themselves in the faux canal, such that the cells begin to swim upstream, as they would against the flow of mucus in a vagina, toward the finish line. (Until recently, the company’s chief science officer was a teenager named Rishi Kanaparti, whose past work includes papers on, among other things, “Motion Resilient Deep Learning for ECG Signal Classification.”) The raw footage is boring and difficult for the human eye to parse—vaguely defined blobs move against a white background—so the company’s computers track the cells’ coordinates and generate visual approximations of the contests. They then debut these videos at occasional live events, like one that pitted a USC student against a UCLA student last April, and post them on social media. Several Reels on Instagram feature a bellowing commentator who goes by BSTCHLD. “This is a microscopic masterclass,” BSTCHLD shouts during one blowout. As a sperm enters the end zone: “INSEMINATION!”

In preparing for the World Cup, I imagined how I might engage my subject. I could follow the matches as they unfolded. I would attend a race if possible; I might host a watch party; I might gather some gays at my house to shoot rope on camera for an unaffiliated competition during the watch party. Sperm Racing could beget fagslop. I had thoughts. I had plans. They would, at length, go somewhat bust. 

***

One such plan: In the spirit of participatory journalism, I applied to the Sperm Racing World Cup a few days after receiving this assignment, assuming that I would be screened out for being old (thirty-three), common (American), and of no particular repute as a content creator and thus of no particular value to a would-be sport whose founders require significant reserves of the public’s attention for their goop regatta saga to succeed. I answered questions about my ancestry, diet, workout frequency and routine, and motivations (options included “fertility awareness” and “national pride”). I dutifully took screenshots of the Sperm Racing webpage and forwarded them to my editor. I scoured my inbox for a form email explaining my unworthiness—“Do Not Come,” its subject line might have read—but found nothing. I waited.

Onto Sperm Racing’s elegantly vulgar premise, the company has grafted a lame higher purpose intended to justify and temper the joyful adolescent stupidity of the enterprise. Sperm Racing’s website features a manifesto written in the tricolon-rich, not-this-but-that style of LLMs: “sperm racing isn’t just a joke. it’s not just some viral idea for the internet to laugh at. it’s something much bigger.” (The bolding and highlighting are in the original manifesto.) It’s about men’s health and male fertility, apparently. A widely cited review of medical literature published in 2022 found that sperm concentration had declined by more than 50 percent globally over the preceding fifty years, and reasonable concerns about the effects of ultra-processed foods, pesticides, and other environmental and social ills on gametes pervade the MAHA sphere and beyond. (At least one more recent study found no significant changes in potency among otherwise fertile American men, and a much-discussed Financial Times article from May presented an analysis of data that compellingly advances the thesis that social isolation resulting from smartphone use may be the single greatest cause of declining birthrates.)

Sperm Racing is also about moving product: The company has sold plastic-free boxer-briefs under the brand name Andros, as well as supplements called Sperm Worms, whose website promises “better tasting loads, fertility support, and daily performance in four gummies a day.” Or, per Sam Kriss, who described the company and its now-eighteen-year-old founder Eric Zhu in a February Harper’s dispatch on Silicon Valley, it’s about attention arbitrage. “Sperm Racing seemed to be first and foremost a social media hype machine,” Kriss wrote. “A third of Eric’s staff work on videos, producing a seemingly endless stream of viral content.” 

Put another way, Sperm Racing is about future anxiety, the fetish for self-optimization, and the drive to monetize people’s fears and weaknesses, not least their screen habits. (Sperm Racing’s videos are part of a larger crop of social media spermslop that includes, for example, an AI-generated video of a mournful spermatozoa being tortured by a smoldering cigarette and heckled by a hotdog and a hamburger.) But to the company’s credit, people have been asking the questions its project poses for centuries—or anyway, they resonated with me. Questions like: Are the contents of my person inadequate? Am I incapable of producing anything worthwhile? Are my devices futile?

In March, during a break at work, I interviewed one of Sperm Racing’s cofounders, a twenty-three-year-old named Shane Fan, an attention economy and crypto entrepreneur who commands millions of followers across social media platforms and calls himself an “internet detective.” It was Zhu who had come up with the comesports idea back in 2024, Fan said. The pair now wanted Sperm Racing “to be one of the world’s biggest sports.” He also told me that sperm hardiness can affect “a child’s immune health as well as a woman’s pregnancy experience,” and that the World Cup had been delayed. (“We will start having the first events in early April,” he said.) I waited for him to mention my application or to laugh it off. Meek or distracted, I did not raise it myself, but learned that Andros’s underwear is “designed to reduce microplastics in your balls, as well as heat and friction.” 

April arrived. The World Cup didn’t. In emails, Fan assured me that later in the month—and then later still—he would share a schedule. Soon I learned that the Cup had been pushed back further. An article about Sperm Racing that appeared in The Daily Mail near the end of the month mentioned a May start date and applications from “the US, Iran, Israel, and even North Korea.” But no action occurred; there was no fap nor any opportunity to stage an orgiastic screening; there was nothing but an implacable urge to describe myself as having been edged and teased. My follow-up emails had stopped receiving responses. Perhaps I was a slow sperm or a broken-tailed one, destined to spin upon myself. Perhaps I would have to make the brave and healthful decision of prioritizing my own sclerosis in the narrative: perhaps I would have to write a personal essay, or to think aloud about the relationship between writing and coming. What writer has not wished his emissions came in greater volume and frequency; that if witnesses to his works were not born anew or overawed—that if his salvos did not literally beget life in readers—they might still please his audience? It seemed the World Cup and I had both been forgotten. We had been lost in the sauce.

***

Then, one day in May, a possible explanation for Sperm Racing’s radio silence appeared in my inbox courtesy of a Google Alert: The company, it appeared, was rebranding as part of an effort to de-emphasize the childishness of its premise and attract millennial and zillennial viewers—a cohort that might be actively trying to sire children, and thus one that might be expected to fret about sperm health. As a symbol of their new maturity, they were considering jettisoning the name Sperm Racing entirely, in favor of the more staid trade-name, “Biomarker Sports.” I’d learned all this from a feature in The New York Times Magazine, whose author, Daniel Waite Penny, had, it seemed, been granted extensive access to Sperm Racing’s facilities and personnel and who had actually gotten to compete in—and win—a race. In the shadow of Penny’s piece, I worried I had been jerked around by nutjobs, that my piece was a bust, that no amount of belabored wordplay would rescue me from dread anticlimax. But the ultimate anticlimax was yet to come.

In June I received an email from Shane. He wanted to talk—he said he had a lead for me. On a call, he told me that in just three weeks’ time, on the eve of Independence Day, Sperm Racing would at last stage a contest that he described as “an inaugural match for the World Cup as well as Biomarker Sports.” Julius Ritter, a twenty-five-year-old venture capitalist and peptide enthusiast from Germany who also works in AI, would compete against twenty-seven-year-old Jayden Clark, an all-natural, iron-pumping jazz musician with “sub-10-percent body fat” (per Fan) from Australia. A question few had been asking—Are one fit biohacker’s sperm quicker than those of a guy who just spends a lot of time lifting and gorging on boy kibble?—would be answered. “We want our next event to be really, really serious,” Fan said.

That date came and went too. Finally, on July 12, the night after the FIFA World Cup quarterfinals, I sequestered myself in a dim bedroom at the back of a house in Fire Island Pines and stared bleary-eyed at my computer screen. At the stated start time of 8 P.M. the stream remained dead. Updates were issued via Instagram Story—the race would now kick off at 9 P.M.—and trickled into agitated comment sections on YouTube and Twitch. Four days into a bender, I felt like degraded biological material crusting on a blanket. My body, and likely my boys, was reeling; the orgiastic spectacle I had hoped might carry over into a watch party had concluded twelve hours prior, at a new friend’s compound, after he’d booted the men still chatting or swapping biomarkers around his pool; all joy had gone from the world. “Blue balls,” I thought dreamily as I waited for kickoff. 

When the event did commence, at 9:30 P.M. Eastern, an hour and a half after its appointed time, an introductory video made the case for Sperm Racing’s place in the lineage of Silicon Valley movers and shakers. Images of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and the San Francisco skyline filled my monitor. “Tonight,” a voiceover relayed, “this city becomes the birthplace of something entirely new: health entertainment.” Then the venue came into view: three blazered commentators—one of them Nick Small, another teenage Sperm Racing cofounder—sat behind a gray anchor desk decorated with Sperm Racing’s name and logo. (The Biomarker Sports rebrand seemed to have been forgotten.) Behind them, at the back of a minimalist studio space, lurked a large screen showing Ritter and Clark’s frozen visages in half-shadow; bio storage lockers lined one wall, while several metal lightbox tables flush with scientific equipment stood around the floor. 

Over the course of the event, a mustachioed spokesman conducted brief video interviews with aged physicians, and Sperm Racing’s bio team milled around between pipette stations and microscopes, supposedly preparing brews freshly jettisoned by the Australian and the German for competition. The panel of three commentators leaned forward to read in stilted cadences from a laptop positioned between them and issued tepid pronouncements about T levels and other player stats, their audio meanwhile going in and out. Twice the cameras cut to darkened rooms, leaving the host—one Ricky Del Rosario, a keynote speaker, auctioneer, and certified life coach who alone exuded professionalism and ease in front of the cameras—and pundits to beseech their techs to flip the lights on. Amateurish and tiresome, the affair seemed to have been conducted for the sole purpose of clipfarming it for social media after the fact. “We are the lucky ones,” Del Rosario said, paraphrasing Richard Dawkins, near the end of a would-be soaring monologue about the unlikelihood of being alive that has since been edited into a viral video. “We are the ones who get to die, because we are the ones who got to be born.” Hype reels for the company and the two blonde, short-king contestants flashed across my MacBook’s screen: “Yeah, I think I might be the happiest person alive,” Clark, the Australian, said in one. An ad for Brex, a fintech company, played for the approximately 150 people who were watching the live stream on YouTube at any given time. (Others watched on Twitch and Kick.) Near the end of the sub-sixty-minute boondoggle, the tripart race ensued, with sperm concentration and something called a “full-field competition” supplementing the classic sprint. Do you care who won? I didn’t.¹ I was glad when it was over. 

Nonetheless, sperm racing’s seed is spreading, and an imitator could have better luck. That appears to be the hope of Luke Hawash, a twentysomething AI game developer who uses the social media handle @mr.spermracing and goes by the nom de come “Dick Gay.” Formerly the chief marketing officer for Sperm Racing HQ, Gay-Hawash now refers to himself as the division president for a rival franchise called “Spermrace Asia.” Earlier this month, he hosted what was billed as Asia’s first sperm race in Hong Kong for a crowd that reportedly numbered in the hundreds. Fan seemed less than thrilled: “That is not affiliated with us,” he wrote in an email, “so I cannot comment on that.”

From a certain point of view, Sperm Racing is advancing a kind of radical introspection. Look inside yourself, the company says. Now externalize this hidden part of yourself, this physical instance of your interiority. Subject it to inspection, measurement, and public judgment. Learn if you are dead inside or bursting with life; learn how your exercise regimen, your diet and drug habits, your peptide stack, your age and income redound upon your gametes’ ability to fertilize an egg and thus upon your potency—with all that word’s interrelated and stirring meanings obtaining—and thus upon your status as a man. But from another point of view—from mine, watching the stream on my computer—the World Cup’s innovation, and the disruption Sperm Racing has created in the marketplace of semen production, is to make ejaculation and its contemplation boring. Eros never stood a chance, but I’d thought that Van Leeuwenhoek and Ham’s wonder and curiosity might find purchase on the broadcast. Alas, the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. 

[1] It was the plucky Australian—a victory for gym-rat saxophonists everywhere. 

Paul McAdory is a writer from Mississippi. He lives in Brooklyn.