The worlds newest sport? Sperm racing
I would like to start with an apology: sorry.
You are probably reading this on a Saturday morning. A nice cuppa tea, a bit of brekky, crack open the paper. And, possibly against your own will, you're about to learn about sperm racing.
If you were too busy following the real news to catch this story in recent weeks, I have to regrettably inform you of the world's newest sporting spectacle: teenage boys have been racing their sperm. And no, if you are a parent to a teenage boy this isn't some weird thing they are doing in their bedrooms or the locker room that you have to have a Meeting At The School about. These sperm races have a stadium. Spectators. Commentators. They even have sponsors. It's probably better funded than 98 per cent of women's sports.
In the US, 17-year old Eric Zhu, whose previous claim to fame was making the news for being upset he was too young to have a LinkedIn account, and his mates raised more than $US1 million to stage this 'sporting' event. The sperm of two healthy young men were pitted against each other in a petri dish. The 'race' took place in Los Angeles in late April, with competitor Tristan Mykel proving victorious. He won $US10,000, a golden sperm trophy and a future of awkwardly explaining in job interviews that he did that a long time ago and has matured a lot since then.
'We're taking a topic no one wants to touch and making it interesting, measurable and weirdly changing this paradigm,' Zhu wrote in promotional material before the event and, possibly, on his Tinder profile.
They billed the event as the first of its kind, which is a bit of a stretch because in a way, aren't we all the winners of a sperm race?
In the week following the event, there have been some mutterings that the entire thing was a bit of a sham.
'The World's First Sperm Race Seemed Too Good To Be True. It Was,' declared online newspaper The Free Press. Is that what it seemed?
'For starters, it wasn't the first,' The Free Press went on. 'The winners were known in advance. And the 'race' was computer-generated.'
Honestly! Where is the honour in sport anymore? If you can't trust a bunch of teenagers who want to play with their bodily fluids with the financial backing of DNA testing companies, an online manifesto written entirely in lowercase claiming it's all to raise awareness of male infertility (questionable), and a couple of thousand of drunk mates willing to cheer them on, who can you trust? It's enough to make you think the sport of sperm racing is . . . full of dicks.
Sorry.
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