The appeal of certain competitions isn’t hard to understand. Everything from tennis to arm wrestling lets audiences watch a competitor test their mettle against different competitors. There is also, however, one sport in which the participants are microscopic, generally associated with human reproduction and were the subject of the Sparks song “Tryouts for the Human Race.” In other words: sperm racing is a thing that exists in the world in 2025.
Also, Sperm Racing the company raised $10 million in funding earlier this year, according to an article in The San Francisco Standard. In a recent piece for Jezebel, Jackie Jennings took a skeptical position, writing that the company’s business model seems focused on “capitalizing on a demented right-wing panic designed to scare men.”
In an essay for The Guardian published in September, Arwa Mahdawi observed that turning racing sperm into a competitive sport had benefits and drawbacks. The benefits, Mahdawi wrote, include “[reframing] sperm motility (not exactly a dinner-table conversation) in an engaging way.” The drawbacks? Turning health into a competition in ways that might not be scientifically sound.
There’s also the matter of the fertility-centric supplements the company sells under the name Sperm Worms. Yes, they look (mostly) like gummy worms. Yes, it’s a little surreal.
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It could be a big step forward for medicineIt’s worth mentioning here that Sperm Racing seems to be aware at the odd looks it’s been getting from articles like, well, this one. “We recognize that building something truly new often invites skepticism,” the company wrote on X earlier this year. “We’re working hard to make the technology better, faster, and more entertaining with the goal of one day seeing it in the Olympics.”
On the other hand, it might not have the ethical baggage of some other forms of competitve racing, so there’s that.
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