It was approaching 9 p.m. on Friday, April 25, and outside the Los Angeles Center Studios, hundreds of people, almost all of them Gen Z, were waiting for the doors to open. It was a rowdy crowd, with lots of drinking, which was hardly a surprise, since they were about to watch the world’s first-ever sperm race. Or at least, that’s what they thought they were about to watch.
The anticipation was palpable. In the run-up to the race—in which, yes, the sperm of two “combatants” were supposed to race through a microscopic track to the “finish line”—the press could hardly have been more enthused. Headline writers searched for the perfect double entendre. “World’s First ‘Sperm Race’ Goes Off with a Bang in LA,” said the Daily Mail. “This time, it’s good to finish fast,” wrote the New York Post on its Facebook page. It was all over X and TikTok. One local news report highlighted the organizers’ Sperm Racing Professional Sperm Analysis Kit, which measures “concentration, motility, progressive motility, motile sperm concentration, and progressive motile sperm concentration.”
Did I get caught up in it too? Yes, I did. In the days leading up to the race, I interviewed 17-year-old Eric Zhu, the co-founder of Sperm Racing, the start-up company organizing the race, and other members of his team. “I really think we can be an Olympic sport,” said Sahana Mantha, who serves as Sperm Racing’s director of operations when she’s not attending high school in North Carolina. I also spoke to Austyn Jeffs, a video editor for The Free Press, who lives in L.A., and we made a plan to have him shoot a video at the event while I watched the livestream from my home in New York, along with thousands of other fans (if fans is the right word).
But then, during the event, Austyn started asking questions he wasn’t supposed to ask, and after it was over, I started doing the same—calling several experts, and pressing Zhu on what we had actually seen. And we discovered that much of what had taken place at the L.A. Center Studios last Friday was not what it initially seemed.