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This may not be a literal penis-measuring contest, but fertility advocates may have developed the next-best thing.
Men of the world are invited to pit their sperm against each other in a racy race where the owner of the swiftest swimmers takes home a sizable $100,000.
Dubbed the 2026 Sperm Racing World Cup, this “science-based competitive sport” will see 128 semen samples, each representing a different country, face off on a microscopic race track next month in San Francisco at a yet-to-be-disclosed location.
The event was teased in an epic trailer featuring ripped competitors going head-to-head and animated facsimiles of sperm swimming through a tube like a more salacious version of a UFC fight promo.
“We’re searching for the healthiest man alive,” the narrator intones.
This so-called Kentucky Derby of Creative Juices, dubbed Sperm Racing, was developed by tech entrepreneurs Eric Zhu, Garret Niconienko, Nick Small and Shane Fan as an entertaining way to shed light on declining male fertility rates worldwide.
According to co-founder Fan, the baby-batter Olympiad has attracted more than 10,000 male applicants from around the globe, including hopefuls from the US, Iran, Israel and even North Korea, the Daily Mail reported.
Once they’ve been whittled down to the elite 128, it’s off to the randy races.
The entrants are sent a kit with which to provide a semen sample, which will be mailed back to California and processed “through advanced lab techniques such as incubation, sperm washing, pipetting, and through a centrifuge,” Zhu explained in a December video. “These steps isolate and prepare the most viable cells for racing.”
Then, under a microscope, the competitors will race each other along a customized microfluidic track, where they will travel a straight distance of 400 microns or about 0.02 inches — approximately the size of a granule of salt.
All the while, “a controlled microcurrent flows through the channel, creating resistance, pushing each racer to its limits,” Zhu said.
Despite the tiny course, times can range from several seconds to over 40 minutes, depending on whether the spunky sprinters get stuck on an obstacle.
For reference, the swimming speed of human sperm in fluid is approximately 5 millimeters per minute, so theoretically the teeny swimmers could make it “through the cervical canal in a matter of minutes or hours,” according to Science Direct.
The 128 athletes will initially be selected for the qualifier stage with each sperm sample representing a different country, encompassing Asia/Oceania, the Americas, Africa and Europe. They’ll be be timed individually and then put in a heat based on their motility, or sperm speed.
Then, much like their soccer tournament namesake, the athletes face off in elimination rounds and head-to-head matchups until eventually only one winner remains — in other words, the cream rises to the top.
Winners are determined by which spermatozoa is first across the finish line, and the owner of the last sperm standing will collect their six-figure grand prize.
Similar to a regular-sized sporting event, the race will be tracked by high-resolution cameras and broadcast online, while giant screens will display the progress, leaderboards and even competitors’ health data, such as body composition and biomarkers.
To qualify for the race, competitors must be at least 18 years old, free of sexually transmitted diseases, able to provide biological samples in compliance with competition regulations, among other qualifications.
Due to the format, population-dense nations such as the United States will be substantially more competitive than smaller or less-represented countries. Therefore, to maximize one’s chances of making the cut, the Sperm Racing organizers encourage “applicants to consider representing a lesser-known country, provided they meet eligibility requirements.”
One such requirement is that the the competitor or their parents had to have been born in a nation to fly their flag. Alternatively, their swimmers can compete if they are a resident or a citizen of that nation or have 25 percent ancestry from the place in question.
The Post reached out to the founders for further comment.
While billed as the downsized swimming race’s official coming-out party, the inaugural iteration of the “world’s smallest sporting event” actually occurred in Los Angeles in April 2025.
Two college students went spunk-to-spunk for a $10,000 prize in front of hundreds of people.
The victor’s time from that competition was one minute and three seconds, set by USC’s Tristan Mykel.
While the contest may seem ridiculous, Zhu is insistent that they are raising awareness.
“It’s about making male fertility something people actually want to talk about, track and improve,” he writes on the site. “We’re taking a topic no one wants to touch and making it interesting, measurable, and weirdly changing this paradigm.”
Between 1973 and 2018, the concentration of sperm among men worldwide dropped by more than 50% from 101 million to 49 million sperm per milliliter of semen, per the manifesto.
This dip has been blamed on a variety of factors, including obesity, sedentary lifestyles, smoking and exposure to certain chemicals and pesticides.
Normal sperm count ranges from 15 million sperm per milliliter to 200 million per milliliter, according to the World Health Organization, which deems a rate below 15 million as “low.”
