The University of Southern California has long been a beacon of athletic excellence, home to Olympians, NCAA champions, football hall-of-famers and, most recently, the winner of the first-ever recorded sperm race.
Sophomore Tristan Wilcher defeated UCLA’s Asher Proeger at the Hollywood Palladium in front of thousands on April 25 — but the race might’ve been a load of nonsense.
“Let’s be very clear, this is an excellent piece of publicity,” said Richard Paulson, the Director of USC Fertility and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology. “But the images they showed on the screen, those are not sperm. That’s a cartoon of sperm.”
The screen in question was the custom track designed to replicate a reproductive system where the sperm allegedly raced — like a boxing ring or basketball court. Sperm Racing, the start-up that organized the event, claimed that microscopic footage of the actual sperm was rendered in real-time onto the 3D-track, effectively serving as a visual for the raw, microscopic footage of the race through “advanced imaging.”
But the race wasn’t actually live.
“Around 30 minutes before, we basically put in the microfluidic and have [the sperm] race from one end to the other,” said Eric Zhu, the 17-year-old cofounder of Sperm Racing. “Twenty minutes beforehand, we got the raw footage, and then we [used] computer vision to trace it onto the Unreal Engine to basically simulate the sperm.”
Zhu stressed that only four people were in the room for the live race, and that they signed contracts preventing them from sharing or betting on the results – a crucial condition given Sperm Racing’s partnership with crypto-based betting site Polymarket. The race was less of a live show and more of a rerun.
But a bigger question still lingered: can sperm actually race each other, under a microscope or otherwise?
“I think it’d be very challenging,” Paulson said. “Let me be clear: It’s not that you couldn’t do it, I think you could possibly do it, but a normal ejaculate has 150 million sperm in it. How do you know you chose the most modal one?”
Paulson said that it would be very difficult to pit two sets of sperm against each other in a capillary and compare them, let alone determine which one was faster. Nonetheless, he said he supported the race for its goal of raising awareness of male fertility rates, which have decreased 59% in the last few decades, according to a study published in the Oxford Academic in 2017.
“It’s always good when people talk about fertility,” Paulson said. “Our society is very shy talking about all things reproductive, and last week was National Infertility Awareness Week.”
All in all, the sperm did indeed race behind closed doors, but for the audience, they were mostly treading water.