The Peter Thiel-backed sports organization that is building “the Olympics of the future” for athletes using steroids (and other enhancers) is employing the language of inclusivity, oppression and libertarianism in its push for acceptance in the broader athletic world.
“After all, if it’s your body, it should be your choice,” the organization states on its website.
Videos by VICE
The so-called Enhanced Games has been at the center of a firestorm of media coverage in recent days after announcing that it had closed a multi-million dollar seed round that included funding by Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and government contractor, and venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan, who is currently also engaged in a project to build new libertarian “network states” that run on Bitcoin.
The for-profit organization—which is the brainchild of its president, Aron D’Souza, best known for his role in the Thiel-backed lawsuit that brought Gawker Media down—bills itself as a “modern reinvention of the Olympic Games” that embraces performance enhancers and scientific progress.
“In the era of accelerating technological and scientific change, the world needs a sporting event that embraces the future,” the organization states on its site. “It is time for the sports world to seriously reconsider its stance on performance enhancements.”
‘Elevating humanity’ with lots of drugs
The organization’s goals are many, but a primary one is “elevating humanity to its full potential” by making athletes as strong and fast as possible—using whatever enhancers are made available to them—and pushing back “against the anti-science dogma” and “oppression” that it believes proliferates throughout the sporting world.
Christian Angermayer, a venture capitalist and investor in the project, said in a statement that the program aligned his “vision for the Next Human Agenda” and could lead to “scientific breakthroughs and otherwise nurture “human advancement.” D’Souza told Motherboard he hopes people will come to see the Enhanced Games like they currently view Formula 1, but instead of the “athlete and the engineer” working in concert, it will be an athlete and a scientist.
“It’s time to see what humanity is truly capable of,” the organization states on its site.
Enhanced argues that since many elite athletes already use performance-enhancing drugs in Olympic competition, legalizing the practice would allow it to create a more level playing field and a safer event. (“Sports can be safer without drug testing,” the organization’s tagline on its website.) This is not as radical an idea as it may sound to some; the conventional wisdom within the sports world is that drug tests tend to be more like IQ tests, or tests of how much money an athlete or program has. Enhanced describes the Olympic drug-testing regime as “dishonest,” “ineffective,”“oppressive,” and “invasive”—with some good reason, considering that some testing protocols require athletes to be ready to surrender urine or blood 24 hours a day on no notice. It also notes that past studies commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency have found that almost half of “WADA-compliant” elite athletes used banned supplements.
By comparison, Enhanced said it plans to implement a “sophisticated safety protocol” that includes testing before and after competition, which will additionally check for pre-existing conditions in part through genomic sequencing.
‘Doping’ is a slur
Throughout the website, Enhanced employs the political language of inclusion in an attempt to reframe steroid users as an oppressed class, saying it takes inspiration from the “brave fight” of the LGBTQIA+ movement and going so far as to call itself “the most inclusive sports league in history,” as it welcomes people regardless of if they are “natural, adaptive, or enhanced, an amateur or a former Olympian.” (The site has a tab that offers tips on “how to come out as enhanced.”)
“I think enhanced athletes today are very much like being gay 50 years ago,” said D’Souza, who told Motherboard he is openly gay. “It’s conducted in secret. It’s something you have to hide. You’re always fearing the police and the authorities. But it’s underground and it’s kind of fun.”
The organization, at various points, says it is “protecting our athletes’ rights to bodily autonomy” and that the term “‘doping’ is a colonialist slur that reeks of symbolic and historic violence against both the black and enhanced populations.”
The organization additionally offers alternatives to what it views as anti-steroid language, saying people should avoid using terms like “performance-enhancing drugs” (use “performance enhancements” instead), “cheating” (“demonstration of science”), “unnatural” (“enhanced”) and “doping” (“As with other slurs, there is no acceptable alternative”). Doing so, the organization said, would allow people to “avoid marginalizing members of the enhanced community.”
The organization argues—with, again, some good reason—that pro-steroid ideas are far from fringe, noting that one online survey found three-quarters of regular male “gymgoers” have considered taking steroids at one point and that stimulants and supplements including “caffeine, creatine, or amphetamines” are widely used to “increase mental and physical alertness” and “combat fatigue.”
“Don’t assume that everyone is natural (that is, they don’t use science to enhance themselves), or that this is the norm,” the organization states in its “Inclusive Language” section. “This profiling devalues the identities and lives of people who identify as enhanced.”
Rewriting the history of steroids
In contrast to the more familiar story of baseball players with grotesquely swollen skulls and mustached Communists in the 1970s bursting with all the muscles of a comic-book villain, Enhanced rewrites the history of performance-enhancing drugs on its website as a positive one, depicting communities going back centuries that used a large variety of substances not as villains, but as heroes trying to “reach their full potential.” The organization notes with admiration, for example, that ancient Greeks and Roman gladiators used performance enhancers, stimulants, and hallucinogens, and that anabolic steroids restored “the health of the survivors of Nazi concentration camps.” (At another point, the organization celebrates that physician Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard once injected testicular fluid into himself.)
In this telling, the dark period began in 1967, when the International Olympic Committee banned permanence enhancing-drugs (“stifling scientific innovation”). Nevertheless, “brave athletes” continued on, incorporating “scientific advancements” (i.e. taking steroids) and breaking world records “despite the risk of prosecution.”
As part of its push to legitimize steroids, Enhanced includes a section of its site where it “formally recognizes any and all world records challenged by the World Anti-Doping Agency and reinstates them as Enhanced World Records.” This includes the achievements of any athletes— such as cyclist Lance Armstrong—who have been shamed by journalists and others.
“These brave natural and enhanced athletes, as a result of association with performance enhancements, allegations of misconduct, or accusations of defying the anti-science World Anti-Doping Code, have suffered unfair reputational damage,” Enhanced states.
‘Embrace Capitalism’
The first VC-backed global athletic competition takes its economic ideology—if perhaps not its ideology on identity politics—from the people that fund it. “Embrace Capitalism,” the organization states on its website, where it elsewhere describes nonprofit sports federations as kleptocracies. The influence of Thiel is clear.
“Peter is always challenging institutions,” D’Souza said of his investor. “He knows that when you have a calcified, bureaucratic incumbent controlling a large market, that’s a real big opportunity for disruption.” (He added that Thiel, who has denied injecting himself with the blood of young people, was interested in anti-aging science.)
Enhanced plans to run its games like a Silicon Valley startup attempting to disrupt a bloated industry. Compared to what it describes as “the inherent wastefulness” of the nonprofit Olympics, the for-profit Enhanced plans to create a “cost-efficient” event funded with private money and other “incentives” to fund the games and turn a profit without spending billions or “burdening taxpayers.” (D’Souza said the organization is “open” to tax incentives but not planning to rely on them.)
“Ultimately, the Enhanced Movement believes in operational efficiency,” the organization states.
One of the ways it hopes to turn a profit is by focusing on the most popular individual Olympic sports—such as swimming, gymnastics and running—and cutting out the rest, including all team sports and ball sports, which the organization said will allow it to “focus on speed, strength, and endurance” and “eliminate wasteful infrastructure spending.” Enhanced additionally plans to bring in popular non-Olympic sports, including mixed material arts, and will emphasize “strength” and “combat” sports. (The modern pentathlon, biathlon, and curling likely won’t make the cut, D’Souza said.)
“Just as the ancient Olympics were revived and renovated in 1896 for the Victorian world, the Enhanced Games is once again renovating the Olympic model for the twenty-first century,” D’Souza said in a statement tied to the seed round.
Doing so, Enhanced claims, will allow it to pay all competing athletes a salary, on top of any prize money they earn. (On its website, Enhanced details the stories of former Olympians who struggled financially after competing in the global competition.)
Whether the world’s top athletes will choose to compete remains unknown, though D’Souza said he’s had “literally hundreds” of athletes reach out to express their interest.
‘We Think That This Is a Very Important Social Movement’
D’Souza told Motherboard he had been thinking about the idea had been “percolating” for decades, but he got serious about it in 2022, when he was at a Miami gym. In between sets, he watched a video on Instagram of a bodybuilder talking about people who were enhanced.
He was struck by the honesty and went around the gym, asking a number of “jacked guys.” if they were natural or enhanced. Many were open about the fact that they were taking enhancing drugs, which made him realize the cultural conversation might be changing.
Now, D’Souza’s mission extends beyond just one event. He sees himself as part of a broader political movement that he didn’t start but perhaps will help unify.
“We think that this is a very important social movement, where we can literally end the oppression of science in sports and unlock human potential on a whole other level,” D’Souza said.
In certain corners of the site, Enhanced’s ambitions to spearhead a broader political movement become more clear. The organization suggests supporters “securely” share tips about Olympic corruption with Enhanced, and alert it “to the use of discriminatory or noninclusive language, particularly at schools and universities.” Additionally, the organization asks for help editing Wikipedia “to remove anti-science hate.”
D’Souza’s team is made up of political advisors, former Olympic athletes, the chief revenue officer of Tough Mudder, Wall Street investment bankers, biopharma executives, and one artist (“specializing in abstract and neo-expressionism”).
Among the medical advisors is George Church, a geneticist and professor at both Harvard and MIT who counts Elon Musk among his fans and founded a startup with hopes of resurrecting the wooly mammoth.
