A new competition is heading for one of Los Angeles’ most well-known arenas — complete with a livestream, stats, leaderboards, instant replays and betting galore. But you need a microscope to see the competitors.

It might come as little surprise to many that the organisers of what is billed as the world’s first competitive sperm race are teenagers.

A startup called Sperm Racing, run by four teenage entrepreneurs from the US, said it had raised $1.5 million to stage the event at the Hollywood Palladium on April 25.

Eric Zhu, the company’s 17-year-old co-founder, said the inaugural event would pit samples taken from two healthy young university students against each other on a racetrack 20cm (8in) long and modelled on the female reproductive system.

Zhu said the goal was to have fun while raising awareness about male fertility. “We want to turn health into competition,” Zhu said. “Sperm is surprising as a biomarker. The healthier you are, the faster sperm moves.”

Two students from rival universities, the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, were found to have “matching biomarkers” and selected to take part.Once the samples are taken they will be placed in a pipette and injected into a “microfluid device” in the centre of the palladium, a famed concert venue. A live video feed, magnified 40 times to display the 0.05mm spermatozoa, will track the samples’ progress.Sperm typically swim at about 5mm per minute, meaning each race will take at least 40 minutes. Whichever crosses the finishing line first, as “verified by advanced imaging”, will be declared the winner.The event will be run over three races in front of a crowd of 4,000 spectators, and feature play-by-play commentary, instant replays and leaderboards, according to Zhu.The screen could look like this — and the crowd could look like the one that turned out for a Jay-Z performance, belowRANDALL MICHELSON/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGESZhu said the startup has attracted interest and investment from at least one billionaire, Joe Liemandt, the founder of Trilogy Software, along with prominent members of the biohacking community. Nucleus Genomics, a DNA testing company, is sponsoring the event, and spectators will be able to place bets on Polymarket.“We’re taking a topic no one wants to touch and making it interesting, measurable and weirdly changing this paradigm,” Zhu wrote in a manifesto promoting the event.About 7 per cent of adult men experience infertility, with causes including low sperm count and poor sperm motility and blockages. In approximately 50 per cent of cases, the cause is unknown. Lifestyle factors such as smoking, alcohol, regular sleep patterns and maintaining a healthy weight are believed to affect fertility.According to a 2022 study published in the Human Reproduction Update journal, male sperm counts have declined by more than 50 per cent in the past five decades.• Tests showed my sperm count was low. Could anything raise it?“Male fertility is declining … a lot,” Zhu wrote. “It’s happening quietly, steadily, and nobody’s really talking about it. And sperm motility — how fast your sperm moves — turns out to be a massive factor in fertility.”Zhu founded Sperm Racing with Nick Small, 16, head of the business management consulting firm Stealth; Shane Fan, chief executive of the NFT pricing platform Waterfall; and Garrett Niconienko, former content strategist for the YouTuber Mr Beast.