Sperm Racing

The Free Press (River Page) reports: "The World's First Sperm Race Seemed Too Good to Be True. It Was." But did it really? Did it seem too good to be true? Or good at all?

Comments

[Paladin_44]

Pay-walled!

[Mr. Bumble]

From the NY Post:
https://nypost.com/2025/04/15/lifestyle/millionaires-are-hosting-the-worlds-first-sperm-race-at-iconic-venue/

[Paladin_44]

Thanks!

[Noscitur a sociis]

This would be a good example of the credulous reporting that the Free Press piece is noting, yes.

[Dr. Ed 2]

"Between 1973 and 2018, the concentration of sperm among men worldwide dropped by more than 50%....

(a) If that were happening to women, it would be a global emergency, and (b) what else does this indicate about the health of men who (c) die considerably younger than women do.

Did you miss the part about how "the event was — much like a marathon for breast cancer awareness — created to shed light on the issue of declining male fertility worldwide."

Can you imagine the outcry if there were a 50% increase in breast cancer over the past 50 years?!?

[Noscitur a sociis]

1. As the article notes, “Dr. Allan Pacey, a professor at The University of Manchester, and an expert on andrology, a.k.a. the science of male reproductive health … said that scientists are divided on whether the supposed decline in sperm counts is real.

2. A reduction in sperm counts is not analogous to an increase in breast cancer.

3. Hosting a scam event (with rigged betting) is not a very effective way of raising awareness for a cause.

Other than that, great comment!

[John F. Carr]

NY Post: "This unusual contest was organized by Sperm Racing, a group of young moguls and millionaires"

If you can't trust millionaires and moguls, who can you trust?

[Dan Schiavetta]

It's organized by a 17-year-old boy, which seems predictable.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Greta Thunberg was 15...

[ConservativeProfessor]

These things come and go.

[Mr. Bumble]

There's a joke somewhere in there.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

The yolk's on whatever they were racing for.

[ConservativeProfessor]

With victory at hand, the best one can hope for is a happy ending.

[Speaking for normal people]

It is foul and detestable, generated no comments so far that are worth reading. Why publicize this crap?

[Mr. Bumble]

Why bother commenting?

[Magnus Pilatus, MBA, MD, JD, PhDx2]

To express his disapproval.

Is that okay?

[mike petrik]

Yep.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Because it is a crisis of masculinity?

[Drewski]

They have a website at spermracing dot com which is everything you hoped for, if what you hoped for is the manifesto of some coked-up fools who think they're on to something. And it is very literally a manifesto, or at least the part on the "manifesto" page is.

The "too good to be true" appears to be a paraphrase of the site's own copy, making me wonder if the Free Press thinks journalism consists of doing a few bumps with the subject.

[Mr. Bumble]

...and in other racing news:
Sovereignty beat Journalism to win the Kentucky Derby.
A metaphor for our time?

[ReaderY]

Let’s just say it’s happened billions of times before in humans alone, probably trillions counting every species that has sperm.

[TwelveInchPianist]

I know. People are talking smack as if this weren't the whole purpose of all are lives.

[TwelveInchPianist]

How do they get the numbers on?

[Frank Drackman]

They don't have any trouble getting them to stick (rimshot)

[Bored Lawyer]

Stupidity has existed as long as human beings have been alive.
But it seems that the internet magnifies stupidity by a factor of 1000.

[Noscitur a sociis]

The article is actually pretty interesting, and the operation a pretty brazen scam.

[Michael P]

Yeah, it seems like they could be in trouble with anyone who place bets on Polymarket in the last hour before the "live" event -- and that they deserve to be banned from other prediction markets.

[santamonica811]

I come just for the bad puns. Other people just, um, come.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"I come just for the bad puns."

Whatever floats your boat, although I could see where that could be awkward in some situations.

"OK, honey, I'm ready! Tell me the one about the horse with the long face!"

[darkknight9]

The only sperm race I was aware of was keeping track of how many receptive candidates/how many places I could think of leaving it in my 20's.

In my 30's I became much more refined and selective about possible depositories, narrowing down my list to about 100,000 or so.

[Sam Bankman-Fried]

You sound like Hegseth aka General Rawdogg!

[Mark In Florida]

I feel sorry for all the women who missed out on me.

[Daddyhill]

At first I thought this has got to be a parody, a send-up, or some other kind of joke. Now I'm not so sure about that. Seems like an almost inevitable product of end-stage capitalism, part of a larger trend of would-be zillionaires desperately searching for some Next Big Thing they could cash in on. Provided, of course, that they can actually count on men 1) being mostly ignorant about reproductive physiology, and 2) being dumb enough to want this anyway. It's pandering to those folks who believe that men are in crisis and that part of the solution involves magically boosting fertility rates (among the zillionaire class at any rate).

As an aside: there's been an ongoing attempt among scientists (and now politicians too) to show that sperm counts are declining world-wide. The impetus for this originally was fairly valid concern in the 1990's about the effects of so-called endocrine disruptor chemical pollutants on a wide range of human health issues, e.g. breast cancer and sperm counts. A seminal (ahem) report claimed that sperm counts were declining world-wide, but the authors (one of whom I deliberately insulted in a conference session) famously overlooked a few things. They didn't account for the variation in sperm quality assessment between countries, and their key graph depended on two clusters of data, one from 1970's and one from the 1990's. They ended up with what stats folks call a barbell curve, anchored by the two data clusters, but with almost no data from before 1970 and almost none between 1970 and 1990.

Part of their claim was that sperm counts may have been declining more or less continuously, on a fairly steep slope, since who knows when. Of course they had little to say about why their curve shouldn't/couldn't be extrapolated back in time, using the same negative slope. They were offended, offended I say, when some of us pointed out that such extrapolation could account for the observation that Moses fully retained his masculine vigor at age 100 and beyond, such that his sperm might have been spilling out from unusual orifices, his ears perhaps. Were we being silly and baiting these political/scientists with an irrelevant supposition (based on no actual data)? Absolutely. Nevertheless, the beat (ahem) went on, and it could only have been a matter of time until somebody figured out how to monetize male anxiety. Or try to.