If You Build It, Will They Come? On the Sperm Racing World Cup by Paul McAdory

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By Paul McAdory<br>August 21, 2026<br>On Sports

The art and life of Mark di Suvero<br>-->

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...