Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. When I was 17 years old, I used to set things on fire. Nothing major, just little things: potato chips, cotton balls. I wasn’t a pyromaniac, I was just bored, and lived in Ohio, and didn’t have a car. Mostly, I was curious about what would happen. I begin this way to remind you about the sort of thinking that’s innate to the teenage brain, so you’ll hold off on judging Eric Zhu—also 17, also from the Midwest—too harshly for putting four guys’ sperm under a microscope to race, in front of 400 ticket holders, during a first-of-its-kind sporting event livestreamed from a studio in L.A. Teenagers don’t often hide behind euphemism: The event is called Sperm Racing. Influencers Noah Boat, 27, and Jimmy Zhang, 29, make up the undercard event, with Tristan “Milker” Wilcher, 20, and Asher Proeger, 19, college students at USC and UCLA, respectively, competing for the title of fastest sperm. About an hour before the race, all four of them ejaculated into cups backstage. The samples were then centrifuged (to separate bacteria and dead sperm from the living, raceable cells) and stored at body temperature in an incubator until they were pipetted into a track made from a microfluidic chip, where the sperm’s movement was tracked under an inverted trinocular microscope. The first sperm to reach the finish line (magnified 100x via a camera and broadcast on giant screens) wins—the prize is $10,000 and a golden sperm trophy. Zhu and his fellow organizers (most of them also in their teens or early 20s) admit the competition is silly, but claim it’s silly in service to something more serious. “Male fertility is declining,” they wrote on Sperm Racing’s online manifesto. (All of the site copy is lowercase, evoking e. e. cummings—please let me have one pun.) “Sperm racing isn’t just a joke,” they say. “It’s not just some viral idea for the internet to laugh at. It’s something much bigger.” What that “something much bigger” is seems up for grabs. The race is sponsored by several reproductive health tech companies, and the emcees (influencers Nina Lin and “Rhino”) occasionally mention a “male fertility crisis” in between jabs at the racers’ perceived sexual desirability (“No bitch want you,” Nina tells Zhang, who’s wearing white face paint and a costume that reads “NUT KING”). Mostly, however, Sperm Racing feels like a boxing match: There are wordless women wearing a combined 20 square inches of fabric pacing the back of the stage. A DJ pumps songs so hip I don’t recognize them at a volume so high I have to pop in my sound-muffling earbuds. There’s a prerace fistfight between Zhang and Boat, that, if staged, fools most of the audience, who shout with excitement until it’s broken up. Huge screens list the players’ testosterone levels, weight, and … “What is a ‘No F. A. P. score’?” I ask the Men’s Health stringer standing next to me. He stammers for a moment before I realize. “Ohhh, ‘No fap.’ Like, no fapping.” He nods his head. Most of the adults in the room are being impressively serious about all this. I catch Stephanie Sabourin, director of clinical services for at-home sperm-testing and -freezing company Legacy, before she hops on stage to weigh the racers and question them about their “training.” She tells me that she postponed her departure to the American Urological Association’s annual Vegas conference to be here. “Sperm is funny—until it’s not,” she says, regarding male infertility. Her hope is that more young men will get their sperm analyzed, and sooner, when there is still time to take action if needed. Her company profits from such forward thinking, but she seems genuinely concerned. Whether there is actually a fertility concern, at least for this age cohort, is probably an overstatement. It’s not sperm speed but sperm count that is supposedly down across the globe, provoking panicked shouts of “Spermageddon!” from certain corners of the internet. There is debate in the field regarding this, though—some studies have found declines of over 50 percent in some countries; others have found that sperm counts aren’t down at all. (A number of experts have also dismissed the declining sperm-count research as poor science and thinly veiled white nationalism.) In any case, it’s unclear what either sperm speed or count has to do with the “fertility crisis” that Sperm Racing hinges on. According to Richard Pilsner, a male-fertility researcher at Wayne State University School of Medicine, “We’ve been measuring sperm count, morphology, and motility for six or seven decades, and they’re really not tied to fertility, per se. Obviously, if you have no sperm, that’s an issue, but I think we gotta drill a little bit deeper.” With this in mind, it’s funny to listen to the contestants rattle off the different speed-increasing “regimens” they tried in advance of competing: steak-and-ice-cream diets; suntanning their scrotums (which Jesse Mills, director of the Men’s Clinic at UCLA dubbed “the dumbest bro-science trend since dry scooping.”) But it’s grim to then realize that even if they ate well, exercised regularly, avoided smoking and excessive drinking, and followed Mills’ tried-and-true “eat, move, sleep” health regimen, it could speed up their sperm and increase their concentration, but it would still not necessarily cure them of infertility. “Forty percent of males who are infertile are idiopathic,” Pilsner says. “We don’t really know why.” In other words, the winner of tonight’s race might still be unable to someday have a child. Not that anyone here is actually thinking about having children. Many of them are children. In fact, the entire night, I didn’t find one person older than 27 who wasn’t an organizer’s mom, a tech company representative, or just another journalist on assignment. Brendan Collins, 18, and Gray Rappoport, also 18, were there because they’re friends with one of the organizers. Neither was aware of declining sperm counts previously, but “I’m hoping to learn a little more about [it] tonight,” Brendan offered politely. A group of kids in UCLA hoodies had heard about the event via a flyer on Bruin Walk and were there just to root for Asher, a fellow UCLA student, same as they would at any UCLA vs. USC match. “Is sperm health something you thought about prior to this race?” I asked Hannalei Hernandez, 24, one of the attendees. “Never in my life, I’m going to keep it so real,” she laughed. When her friend Snazzy Carlos, 27, first learned about the event, he thought it was a joke. “But then I heard it supports men’s health, and I was like, ‘Well that’s cool,’ ” he said. Most attendees heard about the event on TikTok, though few of them remembered which accounts posted about it. That’s a sign of success, according to Zhu. He proudly told me that he spent only two grand on all the marketing for the event, focusing on getting placement on meme accounts. “If you get an article on Forbes or the New York Times, it doesn’t really mean anything unless it goes viral,” he said. “Memes are like the best form of distribution, right?” According to Zhu, the alleged reason we’re gathered here tonight is that “no one’s talking about” infertility. But his goals for the event aren’t weighed down by that burden. The next stop is Vegas, he said, with a bigger, better sperm race, maybe even featuring celebrities. (He told me a lot of people had requested Nick Cannon, but he didn’t know who that was). Then, with the confidence only a 17-year-old kid possesses, he added, “I mean, I want to see the Olympics in four years.” Zhu lives with friends in Silicon Valley, three time zones away from his parents. He dropped out of high school his sophomore year (completing his education online) to focus on his first business venture, an analytics platform called Aviato. When I asked him if he ever wished he could have had a normal high school experience, he said he doesn’t regret anything. “There’s some really hard parts when it comes to building a company. The lows are really low. But the highs are really high.” His mom told me she was very proud of Eric, and she should be; he created his own company at 14. He basically created a new sport. And more than that, he is sweet, and smart, and thoughtful. And he’s 17: It’s probably not his responsibility to fix any global fertility crisis, which is good, because I’m not seeing how this event—or any event—could do that. It is possible that phthalates (an inescapable group of chemicals used to make plastics softer) are disrupting our hormones to such a degree that some people have trouble procreating. As Pilsner explained, “Phthalate exposure is associated with higher sperm epigenetic age. … They’re an endocrine-disrupting chemical.” But whereas a person can quit smoking (a known sperm-count reducer), there’s little they can do to end their exposure to a chemical that’s found in everything from deodorant to food packaging. Still, Pilsner doesn’t believe that every man should line up for sperm freezing at 25. “I don’t think we’re quite there yet,” he said. “Hopefully these declines that we’re seeing, or the purported declines that we are seeing, if they continue on a downward trajectory, maybe it’s a different conversation in 20 years. But at this point I don’t think it’s necessary.” In the meantime, Sperm Racing is just supposed to be fun—even if it ham-fistedly conflates sperm speed with fertility, and even if there may not be a fertility crisis after all. “I wasn’t really happy with the in-person event,” Zhu admitted to me. There certainly were some glitches: audio problems, late appearances, Ty Dolla $ign storming offstage after just one song—not to mention questions as to the scientific legitimacy of the race itself. Several physician influencers have called the race out as a “fraud,” which Sperm Racing’s team defends as a misunderstanding of their broadcast (they claim they used computer imaging to illustrate the race for a better spectator experience, but that the results were genuine). But that’s not really important, as far as the long-term success of Sperm Racing goes. “No one watches a full livestream when it comes to sporting events,” Zhu said. “People only watch clips, and there were some crazy, crazy clips.” He’s right. The best moment of the night, the one most likely to feature in future TikTok reels, is when the sperm of Tristan, of USC, crosses the 100x-magnified finish line in the tiebreaking third race and UCLA’s Asher is soaked with fake ejaculate in his dunk tank. A sea of phones rise like extra appendages from the wrists of their owners to capture it. The music turns up next—Post Malone’s “Congratulations”—and plumes of glittery white confetti shoot from canisters at the front of the stage. As it falls gently, like snow, to the floor, I see that some of the individual pieces are cut into the tadpole shape of a sperm. Of course, they are probably also made from phthalates—we are being showered in the very same hormone-disrupting plastic likely responsible for the infertility crisis that allegedly brought us here to begin with. But before I can dwell on that thought, the lights come on: Night’s over, time to go home. Under the fluorescents, I can see how dirty the floor is, the white plastic sperm already graying under the march of so many Air Jordans. “Well, that was anticlimactic,” I say, but none of the kids around me laugh at the joke. Maybe they didn’t hear. Their faces are tilted down already, eyes illuminated by whatever lights up their screens.