February 2, 2024 - 4:00pm
For years, Peter Thiel has made no bones about trying to extend the length and quality of his life by any means necessary. Now, with the announcement of plans to bankroll the proposed Enhanced Games — an “Olympics on steroids” in which athletes can use performance-enhancing drugs “out in the open and honestly” — the billionaire entrepreneur will be able to study the effects of uncontrolled experimentation on the human body in a controlled athletic setting.
On the surface, the Enhanced Games — should they gain a footing and prosper, even in the modest “freakshow” way in which professional bodybuilding and slap fighting currently draw viewers — would mark a welcome step toward greater openness about drug use by athletes. No longer forced to beat drug tests or concoct excuses for failing them, competitors could instead focus on their real objectives: getting bigger, stronger, and faster in order to set new records. Not only that, retired athletes who still insist on being “all natural” to preserve their valuable brands might finally feel comfortable admitting that they’ve maintained their impressive physiques late into middle age thanks to PEDs.
Yet the Enhanced Games might also produce a less salutary result — the reduced participation of poor and working-class people in high-level athletics. Years ago, when I was working on a story with the help of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), one of their spokespeople noted that drug testing, for all its faults, not only reduces the overall incidence of drug use but also levels the playing field in sports like track and field, thus enabling impoverished youths with tremendous genetic talent from places such as Jamaica and the Bahamas to consistently outclass runners from richer European nations.
Additionally, as the example of the systematic doping practised by the East German regime in the 1970s and 1980s made clear, anabolic steroids offer a much greater relative boost to women’s performance but also carry far worse side effects. These range from virilisation to infertility, putting female drug users at greater risk.
Once a better understanding of doping is established — the science involving heavy usage is so limited because research institutions aren’t able to gain funding for tests — it will be far easier for wealthy parents to boost the performances of their offspring. At present, those advantages are primarily concentrated in sports which require lots of expensive equipment and lessons, such as tennis and golf, but could easily be extended to sports that are light on equipment but heavy on fast-twitch ability, like sprinting and basketball.
Interestingly, Thiel’s effort could restore what was for a long time the status quo. For much of recorded history, including much of the modern Olympics, most fields of athletic endeavour were dominated by members of the leisure classes. Aristocrats were the ones who had time to learn skills related to horse racing, sword fighting, and other tests of martial ability; they also had the resources needed to maintain this equipment, which separated them from the lower strata of society.
The working class began to participate in sports when aristocratic patrons, desirous of better results on the field of play, discovered that poorer individuals with tremendous natural talent could be enticed via monetary inducements to help give their local and national teams an edge. The century or so since has thus been characterised by the mass participation of lower-class and emerging-world athletes in a host of sports.
Once scientists observing the Enhanced Games have devised the appropriate “secret sauces” for athletic success, all of that could fall by the wayside. A slum child from the favelas of São Paulo, once on an equal footing on the pitch if not the classroom, may find himself unwelcome anywhere.
Meanwhile, the consolidation of material wealth and physical prowess — always strongly correlated — would at last be complete. In that respect, class distinctions could be written into the entire bodies of the rich, programmed to dominate in all aspects of life. A wealthy biohacker like Bryan Johnson could conceivably dial up the appropriate drug and gene-editing regimen to dominate in a given sport. Viewed in that light, for a venture capitalist interested in the further success of those who have risen through merit to the top of the heap, the Enhanced Games seem like a safe bet.
Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work
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SubscribeI would rather the wealthy do this to themselves than pay less wealthy people to take ‘enhancement’ drugs.
If someone is even remotely Olympic-level, he/she will find access to PEDs no matter their socio-economic status.
The enhanced games is all well and good until the athletes enhance themselves so much that they end up seriously damaged
Based on the logic of this argument, let transgender individuals compete with everyone then. Why stop there?
Indeed – let transgender people compete in an ‘open’ section
The Olympic Games should be performed GYMNOS – Stark naked, as originally intended.
Not only would it increase interest but it would make ‘genetically or steroid ‘ enhanced bodies easier to detect.
No more (East German Girls) with b* lls the size of grapefruits.
We can always trust you to grab the low-hanging fruit!
Humans are the survivors of millions of years of random changes in DNA. It is highly unlikely that any laboratory will find an enhancement to one trait without making other traits worse. The end results will be grotesque.
I think one of the benefits poorer countries have is that they don’t give a fig about international sporting competitions, other than the world cup. This lack of concern for trivialities such as this filters down into much more relaxed societies in general, where taking time to socialise is prioritised over getting in that 10k marathon prep run, or indeed taxiing your kids to umpteen different clubs to find which one they might become world champ. I think our competitive societies are intrinsically linked to the loneliness epidemic.
Wow this is a plausible way the novel Red Rising could come to life.
I see this in a far more dystopian perspective – this type of experimentation with drugs would be in flagrant violation of the Nuremberg Code if the administration were not up to the contestants and their amoral medical “advisers”.
The ban on PEDs has at least led to a level of use that is controlled, hoping to beat the testing. If there are no limits, we’ll see not rich people being able to afford the treatments, but desperately poor people willing to sell their bodies and their health to medical experimenters who care everything about understanding the effects of their products and nothing about the long-term health of their guinea pigs.
This is insane.
So please tell us how ‘cheating’ with drugs is morally any different to using hi-tech running shoes, super-streamlined bikes or training at 5000 metres?
Good point but it is morally different as long as hitech shoes etc are permitted but PEDs are not. Otherwise….
How about the fact that streamlined bikes don’t permanently affect the human body in ways that a probably detrimental to the user in the long term?
Look at Florence Griffith Joyner for example – pumped full of PEDs, became a freak, won a load of races then dropped dead at 38. This is not the same as wearing some bouncy running shoes.
Poorer talent will be spotted and enhanced. Competition demands it. Enhancement will spill over into other institutions too, like education. Why not enhance the brain too? The titans are coming like it or not. Greed and twisted ideas of man make it inevitable.