Last Monday, Shane Ryan, a 31-year-old swimmer who has competed for Ireland in three Olympics, announced that he would be coming out of retirement in order to compete at an event called the Enhanced Games, to be held in Las Vegas next May. (Though Ryan is American by birth, his Irish lineage allowed him to compete for Ireland in the 2016 Olympics, having failed to make the US team.) The announcement made headlines, and was condemned by various Irish sporting bodies, because the Enhanced Games is, as the name suggests, a competition predicated on allowing and indeed encouraging the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
When I first read about the planned Enhanced Games early last year, I was sceptical that the games would ever actually happen. The whole thing seemed very obviously harebrained. It struck me as having much less to do with sport per se than with a desire to use a sporting competition as a shopfront for a strange, and profoundly ideological, vision about the human future. (If you wanted to be especially cynical, you could, I suppose, say that we’ve had an Enhanced Games for decades already anyway, and that it’s called The Olympics.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people behind the venture have backgrounds not in sport but in technology and finance. Its co-founder and public frontman is Aron D’Souza, an Australian venture capitalist and tech entrepreneur.
D’Souza is a long-term inner-circle associate of the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whose investment helped get the Enhanced Games off the ground. Other investors include the venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan, who has famously advocated for Silicon Valley’s secession from the United States and, more recently, Donald Trump jnr. Don Jr’s involvement might seem to place the Enhanced Games in a context of Maga-world triumphalism. “This is about excellence, innovation and American dominance on the world stage – something the Maga movement is all about,” as he put it in the press release announcing his investment.
But really the whole notion of an Enhanced Games is pure Thiel. Although he was the first major Silicon Valley figure to support Trump’s political career, Thiel’s agenda goes far beyond Trumpism. He has for many years now been a prominent advocate of what’s known as transhumanism – the use of technological and medical innovations to push beyond the boundaries of the human condition, achieving radical extension of the lifespan of humans (in particular the human called Peter Thiel).
The promotional copy used by Enhanced Games in its early launch phase caught my interest partly for the way it hinted at this transhumanist context, but even more for the incongruous way in which it co-opted the language of social justice to articulate its supposed aims and values. “You have full choice over your enhancement regime,” went its pitch to prospective athletes. “We also welcome you to compete as a natural athlete. Your body, your choice.”
The website even featured, amazingly, an entire section on how the “prejudice” against doping in sport had its origins in colonialism.
Why has Irish swimmer Shane Ryan signed up for the 'Steroid Olympics'?
“The term originates from the colonialist Dutch forces’ description of the performance enhancements used by the defending West African tribes,” it read. “Doping,” it went on, “is a colonialist slur that reeks of symbolic and historic violence against both the black and enhanced populations, and needs to be removed from our vocabulary.”
The was also a section devoted to “coming out” as enhanced, which attempted to appropriate a language of queer liberation and equal rights to talk about athletes taking performance-enhancing drugs.
The whole thing read like a precision-tooled absurdist parody of mid-2010s-era corporate wokeism, but it was intended to be taken entirely seriously.
Needless to say, given its funding from Don jnr, the organisation has since had a major rethink of its promotional materials, and this cod-liberatory language is no longer part of the pitch. (One other recent tweak: according to the Financial Times, Enhanced Games made an announcement last year specifying that class A drugs like “heroin and cocaine would no longer be allowed during competition”. From the point of view of pure spectacle, this does seem like kind of a shame, because I personally would find it hard to resist, out of perverse curiosity, tuning into an 800 metre freestyle swimming race that began with the contestants injecting a controlled dose of heroin.)
We can safely assume that this business of choice and equality was never the entire motivation for the competition to begin with. So what is the motivation? Well, in one sense, it’s that most banal of incentives: money. Although it seems unlikely that the competition itself will be a particularly lucrative endeavour – at present, according to the Enhanced Games website, the athletes involved are limited to swimming and weightlifting, neither of which commands a large audience – the founders see the event as providing a showcase for the benefits of (at the risk of using a term tainted by its colonialist origins) doping.
But they also hope that, if successful, the games will be a kind of proving ground for human enhancement, for potentially transformative – and highly lucrative – biotech innovations.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine, D’Souza spoke about anti-ageing research, long a particular obsession of Thiel’s. “To see a 60-year-old run a sub-10-second 100 meters, that would be tremendously impactful to our culture,” he said. It would prove, as he put it, “that the compounds work”; that experimental pharmaceuticals are effective in reversing the effects of ageing. In the US, he went on, a massive amount of money is spent “to make sick people less sick. But if medicine and scientific technology were available to make healthy people extraordinary, how much would that market be?”
In an interview with the Financial Times last February, D’Souza’s co-founder Christian Angermayer, a German investor with a background in biotech, suggested that the spectacle of a successful competition would spur a free market race to deregulate, with countries changing their restrictive laws in order to attract athletes. In a Substack post last year, he put the Enhanced Games in an explicitly transhumanist context; the event was part of what he called a “New Human Agenda”, which will “usher in true superhuman abilities through the seamless integration of technology into our bodies”.
So yes, it is about money. But there is a deeper motivation at play. The same expansionist ideology that lies beneath the pervasive Silicon Valley fantasies of Mars colonisation and artificial superintelligence – a dream of capitalism unencumbered by state regulation or finite resources – can be glimpsed in the desire to find biotech solutions to the human condition. What athletes like Shane Ryan have signed up for is to become human test subjects for a profoundly anti-human project. Whether they win or lose is irrelevant; the relevant result is more life, and more profit, for people like Peter Thiel.
