Infacet the Enhanced Games: Transhumanism, Doping, and Actuality

After a lot ballyhoo, the Enhanced Games wrapped very early on the morning of May 25. By noon, cherry pickers and semis have been breaking down the frilly area constructed within the car parking zone of the Resorts World Casino on the Las Vegas strip. The eight-lane observe; the six-lane pool, the deadlifting platform the place “Thor” Björnsson, aka The Mountain, tried a world report, all in numerous phases of decomposition. The struts and rafters have been being moved into storage for potential future use. Rented as they have been, the intense lights that had shone on the 42 athletes and a couple of,285 invited sponsors, buyers, household, associates, and content material creators have been being returned to their distributors. The load out can be a two-week course of. That’s lengthy sufficient for the mud to settle.

In the historical past of sport, most likely no extra ink has been spilled preemptively or with as a lot ethical panic on a contest than there was for the Enhanced Games. On one hand, the competitors was a regular, nearly modest, sporting occasion. Forty-two athletes competed in three disciplines—swimming, observe, and weightlifting—over fifteen occasions. But because the identify suggests, the schtick was that the athletes competing might “enhance” themselves utilizing performance-enhancing medication (PEDs) banned by all main sporting organizations. We’re speaking testosterone and anabolic brokers (similar to anabolic steroids); stimulants similar to Adderall and modafinil; Human Growth Hormones and different peptides; metabolic modulators like Anastrozole and endurance-enhancing ESA’s (Erythropoiesis-Stimulating Agents) similar to Erythropoietin. The medication aren’t unlawful, per se, however they’re unlawful in sports activities. The total premise drove normie sportspeople to insanity. “A dangerous clown show,” mentioned Travis Tygert, head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, in a launch. On the opposite hand, hadn’t the unique gladiatorial video games begun as panem et circensis for Roman residents? That is to say, haven’t sports activities at all times been a circus, simply with nominally cleaner clowns?

But, because the Enhanced Game CEO and co-founder, a manically affable German named Maximillian Martin, tells me, the clowns have been by no means that clear to start with. “Even if you go back to ancient Greece, people have been taking: They’ve been drinking blood before events. They’ve been eating bull testicles to pump themselves up and get enhanced in competition.” In their very own lore, the Enhanced Games is just telling fact to energy. (The fact being everyone dopes; energy being the anti-doping businesses.) According to Dr. Aron D’souza—the founding father of Enhanced Games and the person maybe greatest recognized for representing Hulk Hogan in his Peter Thiel-backed case to take down Gawker—“We’re building something revolutionary—sports without hypocrisy, where the best can actually be the best.”

Since its founding in 2023 by D’Souza, Enhanced Group Ltd., the mum or dad firm of the Games, has raised over $1 billion by males like Peter Thiel, the founding father of PayPal and surveillance firm Palantir. Other backers, like Donald Trump Jr., have embraced the Enhanced trigger as a part of a broader win-at-all-costs populism. “For over 100 years, elites in charge of global sports have stifled innovation, crushed individual greatness, and refused to let athletes push the limits of what’s possible. That ends now,” Trump Jr. mentioned in an announcement asserting his agency 1789 Capital was investing thousands and thousands within the firm, “The Enhanced Games represent the future—real competition, real freedom, and real records being smashed. This is about excellence, innovation, and American dominance on the world stage—something the MAGA movement is all about.”

In vital methods, the heated dialog about performance-enhancing medication in sports activities is just a extra concentrated model of a bigger battle between transhumanists on one facet and what you would possibly name naturalists on the opposite. Men like Thiel and Martin (and for that matter, eugenicists like Francis Galton and Adolf Hitler) see man’s pure state as a stepping stone, one that may, and certainly ought to, be perfected by harnessing know-how to enhance it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this obsession with dwelling longer and higher (possibly perpetually and the very best) is in style amongst tech billionaires. As Mark O’Connell wrote within the New York Times, fairly merely, “The rich and powerful want to live forever.”

Though the Enhanced Games themselves had drawn monumental consideration, a lot of it destructive, the true objective of the corporate was a lot broader in scope. “The biggest metric for me,” Martin advised me, “is we want to change millions of people’s lives. We believe that fundamentally that through precision medicine and enhancements, we can impact anyone’s life from a 25-year-old woman that’s training for a marathon to a 65-year-old guy that’s looking to have a little bit more energy to take their grandkids to the playground and play with them.”

The objective was to make use of the Games as a launching pad for Enhanced’s vary of client merchandise. Martin is banking on a public—athletic or not—availing themselves of a spread of pharmaceutical dietary supplements. To that finish, Enhanced provides a spread of dietary supplements from injectable testosterone ($169/month) to anti-aging dietary supplements like NAD+ ($143/month) to microdosed GLP-1 ($159/month.) According to Martin, Enhanced will supply three “stacks” of dietary supplements: “One is focused exclusively on longevity, that is called the Live Longer Stack. One is focused on strength and recovery, that’s the Live Strongest Stack, and then we have the Live Enhanced Stack, which is personalized to you as an individual.”  In Martin’s view, the entire world ought to be supplemented. “We know that enhancements are relevant for everyone,” he mentioned.

Everything was driving, subsequently, on these 5 hours—and never simply 5 hours however fractions of seconds therein. For if the promoting level was that these dietary supplements might make you carry out higher, enhanced athletes—and never all of the athletes had determined to take dietary supplements—must run quicker, swim quicker, and carry heavier than they’d earlier than. World data wanted to fall, in different phrases, or the attract of Enhanced’s product is likely to be dimmed. In a means, it was all in. The firm, valued at $1.2 billion, had simply gone public a couple of weeks earlier than, on May 8, and this was its first check.

Ahead of the video games, 36 of the athletes ensconced themselves in Abu Dhabi—“the best longevity medicine in the world,” Chris Jones, the pinnacle of Enhanced communications, advised me—for a three-month-long medical trial.  They have been poked and prodded and underwent a battery of MRIs, mind, liver and kidney scans, and musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, and psychological well being assessments on the Sheik Shakmout Medical Center. Meanwhile, most of them balanced coaching with the administration of PED’s.(Two athletes competed naturally; one other 4 didn’t take part within the research in any respect.) Though the corporate is holding the person protocols of every athlete confidential, on combination 91 p.c used testosterone or testosterone esters, 79 p.c used human progress hormone; 62 p.c used stimulants, 50 p.c used metabolic modulators, 41 p.c used EPOs 29 p.c used anabolic steroid brokers, and 5 p.c used hormonal help therapies, similar to hCG.

That’s the place I lastly reached Taylor Anderson, a 31-year-old track-and-field athlete who competed within the Games. Andreson was a standout sprinter on the University of Connecticut, the place she gained titles within the 100m and 4X100m relay. As an expert, Anderson competed within the U.S. Olympic trials however retired in 2024 after failing to make the group.

“We are being treated like kings and queens,” mentioned Anderson, smiling, “I have never experienced anything like this in my career.”  It was slightly after 9 A.M. in Abu Dhabi and Anderson was having fun with her time. She was staying in a luxurious lodge, consuming on the identical buffet because the Crown Prince. Anderson, who answered questions within the firm and underneath the watchful eye of Enhanced’s Jones, was as disciplined in her messaging as she is on the observe. “It is the coolest thing ever to be athletes taking our bodies, which we’re already primed and prepped, to enhance our abilities not only for track and field, but after our longevity and our wellness of our bodies and to be able to enhance that and not only for us,” she mentioned. “But just for regular people as well and just showing them that you don’t have to be scared or afraid to want to be better for yourself, to enhance yourself, to live a better life.”

There have been two courses of athletes competing within the sport, Martin advised me. “A certain category of athletes is going to break world records. We’re going to break five to six word records, is my guess,” however, he continued, “we also want to see a lot of personal bests from athletes that have never been healthier before and never been performing better.”

Swimmers like Greek Kristian Gkolomeev and American sprinter Fred Kerley have been potential world report breakers; Taylor, together with different retired athletes, belongs to the latter camp. “She’s not going to [break a record],” mentioned Martin, “but that’s fine, but she can become the best that she’s ever been, right?”

Whether it’s a world report or a private greatest, Anderson, like the remainder of the athletes, was taking a look at a considerable payday. Organizers had promised $1 million for each world report damaged and $250,000 for each private report damaged. For Anderson, that was a lifeline. “To keep it 100 percent with you, it’s very hard. I was living paycheck to paycheck, working multiple jobs, putting myself through,” she advised me. Anderson wasn’t alone in operating for pennies. A 2012 research from the Track and Field Athletes Association (TFAA) discovered that “Approximately 50 percent of their athletes who rank in the top 10 in the USA in their event make less than $15,000 annually from the sport.”

Little has modified. A tiny fraction of athletes, mentioned Anderson, obtain the type of model offers and sponsorships that put their faces on billboards and cereal bins and their balances within the pink. The remainder of them make do. Anderson, for example, is a highschool coach and a private coach. She sells seamoss and cobbles collectively a dwelling by way of minor sponsorships for native companies in her hometown of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.

According to Enhanced Games’ head Jones, “Track athletes, swimmers, and Olympic weightlifters are among the worst paid international athletes in the world. It’s actually in every country; this is not an American problem.” Anderson was paid, Jones advised me, a “salary that is typically three to five times more than what a national federation stipend would pay her.” For them, like many people, a million-dollar payday can be a game-changer.

To earn 1 / 4 million {dollars}, all Anderson needed to do was run 100 meters quicker than she had ever run earlier than, that’s, in lower than 11.20 seconds. To earn $1 million, although far-fetched, she’d have to shave that right down to 10.49, the report set by legendary observe star Florence “Flo-Jo” Griffith-Joyner in 1988.

Anderson lined up in lane two of the custom-built observe in Las Vegas. Earlier within the night time, viewers had watched Björnsson try a world report, deadlifting 515 kilograms. The bar bent; the Mountain grimaced, however the try failed. They had witnessed one other athlete, Beatriz Piron of the Dominican Republic, try a 100-kilogram snatch and fail. They had watched each the boys’s 50-meter swimming races and a efficiency by Norwegian DJ Alan Walker. What they’d not seen, nevertheless, was a world report damaged. In truth, the night time couldn’t have gone extra poorly for the evangelists of Enhanced. Finally there have been solely 4 occasions left. Anderson’s amongst them.

The stadium was quiet. “Set,” mentioned the announcer. At the sound of the beginning gun, the athletes took off.  Flo-Jo’s report, 10.49 seconds, was nonetheless the one to beat. Anderson obtained a sluggish begin, however when the entrance runner, the Jamaican sprinter Shockoria Lilly Wallace, pulled up brief with what appeared like a foot damage, it appeared Anderson had her likelihood. In the again 25 meters, it was a three-woman race: Shania Collins, who, like Anderson, had been on a routine of dietary supplements; Anderson herself; and the Barbadian sprinter Tristan Evelyn, who had declined dietary supplements. At 11.25 seconds, Evelyn crossed the end line. 0.18 of a second later, Collins did. Coming in third, at 11:48, Anderson lastly had run her race. After the end line, Anderson and the remainder of the sprinters broke their momentum with an enormous advert for Enhanced on the finish of the observe that learn “Because You Know There’s More.” The digicam minimize to the winner, Evelyn, who mentioned in her victory speech that successful was “more than just chemistry.”

As for Anderson, who barely figured into the printed, her efficiency wasn’t a world report. It wasn’t even a private greatest. But it was adequate for third place and a $75,000 paycheck, greater than she’d made at every other single track-and-field occasion.

In the tip, there was just one world report damaged, within the remaining occasion. Kristian Gkolomeev, the swimmer, broke the report for the 50-meter free swim. Wearing a banned swimsuit, Gkolomeev earned $1 million. As for the opposite winners, out of the 15 occasions, three have been gained by non-enhanced athletes, together with Kerley who roasted his opponents within the 100m in his victory speech saying, “get on that shit a little bit more.”

But the aftermath is just the start, and the long run, one feared by the world’s sporting group however appeared upon with glee by the founders of Enhanced, appears as distant as ever. As the final remnants of the Games have been being disassembled, Enhanced’s inventory value had fallen by 40 p.c, wiping out $800 million in market worth. And after I known as to see whether or not I might communicate to Anderson, I used to be advised she couldn’t be reached. A PR consultant advised me, “The athletes are all taking a bit of a break post-Games.”