SOME NEWS THIS week: PayPal founder and tech bro-prophet Peter Thiel has invested in the Enhanced Games, a self-styled “better version” of the Olympic Games at which the athletes are allowed dope to their enlarging hearts’ content.
Now, sez you, an Olympics featuring PEDs… ain’t that called the Olympics?
And yes, the Olympics’ pursuit of the dopers has had a Wile-E.-Coyote-chasing-Road-Runner quality to it, where WADA play the Acme Corporation role.
But the Olympics are not completely swamped with steroids and they have not yet given up on the war.
The Enhanced Games are not an entirely nihilistic operation; it’s not a movement of disenchanted crusaders whose mission statement is ‘look, sure they are all at it anyway’.
No, this is almost evangelical, portraying athletes taking PEDs as an exhibition of progress.
On their website, the Enhanced Games dismiss WADA and the Olympics as “enemies of science”; their out-of-competition drug testing regime hysterically described as “oppressive” and “Orwellian”.
In a flourish of classic right-wingerism, they claim a ban on doping is a violation of one’s bodily autonomy. This is because they don’t see anything wrong with doping, claiming it is natural by presenting a timeline claiming the Greeks and the Romans took enhancements back in ancient times. (They omit to mention the fact the Greeks also inscribed pedestals with the names of those caught cheating at the ancient Olympics to make permanent their shame.)
They would more accurately be described as the Euphemism Games. Cheaters are called ‘enhanced athletes’, PEDs are replaced with ‘performance enhancements’, and cheating is referred to as ‘demonstrations of science’.
One section of the website titled ‘Enhanced World Records’ states they recognise all of the world records previously thrown out by WADA, meaning Lance Armstrong is listed as having achieved ‘the highest recorded pace in tour cycling’.
They claim ‘doping’ is a slur and in a grotesque piece of appropriation, they take language used by the LGBTQ+ community to supposedly end the “stigma” around doping, publishing a seven-step guide to “coming out” as an enhanced athlete. They also claim the whole policy of anti-doping is racist anyway, saying it is “colonialist”, drawing baseless parallels with America’s war on drugs.
As for the potential health impacts of taking steroids, there isn’t a whole lot of detail. They promise to create a safe environment for drug use, claiming a health screening for athletes is in development. Under a mythbusting section of the website, the claim that ‘steroids are bad for your health’ is met with a woolly answer as to how it’s good for performance. They also add the disclaimer that any ‘enhancement regime’ is best done in consultation with a doctor, and they don’t provide medial advice.
Given he once claimed that “competition is for losers”, Peter Thiel doesn’t seem an obvious supporter of, well, a competition. But he does have a link with the Games’ founder, Aron D’Souza, whose personal website claims he led Thiel’s litigation against Gawker.
The Games also scratch the itch of Thiel’s interest in transhumanism, which is committed to using science to extend human life.
“I want to see a 40-, 50-, 60-year-old break world records because performance medicine is the rod to anti-ageing”, D’Souza said last year. “It’s the route to the fountain of youth. Nothing will improve the productivity of our society more than preventing ageing.”
The Enhanced Games, therefore, appear as less of a sports competition than another grand libertarian experiment in which anti-doping rules are just another instance of meddling, limiting regulation. Imagine how rich we can become if we can make people work for longer!
To the transhumanists, death has always been the ultimate in irritating, status-quo regulation. So in the future, when the richest 0.1% are living forever and downloading their consciousness every 80 years into a renewed bodily host, perhaps the Enhanced Games will be standard recreation.
But the Enhanced Games shouldn’t allow us change what we think about the present. They have done us all a favour by presenting us with such a bleak vision of collective surrender to doping. They are honest in this respect: this would be no celebration of human achievement, but a celebration of science.
In this context, why are we supposed to be impressed if a man can run the 100 metres in seven seconds? If speed was all that mattered, we’d be asking why he didn’t just drive it.
The point of sport is its limits, because the limits makes things interesting; they give us all a context in which we can understand, celebrate, and be moved by human achievement.
Yes, WADA’s banned list can appear arbitrary, undermining anti-doping by shifting the paradigm of doping as something morally wrong to something that’s wrong just because an institution says so.
And yes, the proliferation of TUEs has medicalised sport and greatly blurred the line between what is acceptable and what is not.
And, yes, national federations and international governing bodies appear to have more defeats than win.
But that’s no reason to give up on the war, because the alternative is that which is envisaged by the Enhanced Games: a mass exhibition of science.
And, honestly, what is the point of that?