Start your engines, and may the best sperm win.
Last year saw the world’s first ‘sperm race’, where two chubby cells raced along a 20cm track modelled after the female reproductive system.
University of Southern California student Tristan Milker, 20, won the fertility showdown in Los Angeles and bagged $10,000.
But Sperm Racing, which describes itself as a sports league, announced on Instagram yesterday that it’s hosting a ‘World Cup’.
‘We are searching for the healthiest man alive,’ an announcement video said.
‘The race will immortalise a nation. Your country is watching. The world is waiting.’
The video cuts to dozens of sperm speeding through a futuristic tube – with what we assume to be micron-long banner ads for the betting app PolyMarket, of course.
The 128 athletes will be competing for a grand prize of $100,000. Though we’re not sure if the sperm or the man gets to keep the money.
The tournament’s website says: ‘Sperm racing is a science-based competitive sport.
‘During the 2026 sperm racing world cup, athletes compete by representing a country, advancing through qualifiers, matchups, and tournament rounds that are broadcast and shared publicly.
‘This is not a lottery or a game of chance. Selection and advancement are based on eligibility, performance, availability, and competitive structure.’
Athletes must be at least 18, free of sexually transmitted diseases and be able to ‘provide biological samples’ to compete.
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Organisers have yet to confirm the date and timings of the event.
Eric Zhu, one of the masterminds behind sperm racing, told Metro last year that he’s all too aware of how much of a joke this sounds.
‘It’s so, so stupid,’ the analytical platform Aviato founder said, ‘but it just might work.’
Despite being the tiniest cells in the human body, sperm can slither, spin and dash at speeds of 28mph all to wriggle into an egg cell.
Sperm, of course, don’t have eyes. Instead, they know where to go because egg cells let out a chemical which they sniff out, called chemotaxis.
To replicate these bodily conditions for the 0.05mm racers, the racecourse was fit with ‘chemical signals’ to fool the spermatozoa into swimming.
Eric said that the idea for the F1 of spermatic fluid came from discussions around the decline of male fertility.
Sperm counts have declined by half over the past 50 years for reasons researchers aren’t entirely sure about.
‘If you look at cigarettes, 50 years ago, no one was talking about [the negative health effects],’ Eric added.
‘When people started talking about it, people were getting healthier when they got rid of cigarettes. And I think the same with sperm.
‘In the last 50 years, not enough people have been talking about it.’
Together with three friends, the spunky entrepreneur founded a start-up and nabbed hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments in a week.
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