The vision for the Enhanced Games is more bleak than you initially thought

MUCH MORE INTERESTING than the Enhanced Games are the people backing it.

The Games’ co-founder and president is Aaron D’Souza, who lists among his most notable achievements the fact he led Hulk Hogan’s legal case against American outlet Gawker, which was heavily financed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. 

Thiel has been the world’s leading figure in the realm of transhumanism, which seeks to harness science and technology to extend human life. D’Souza is a paid-up member of Thiel’s Church, as he elucidated last year in an hours-long interview with Joe Rogan. 

“Ageing is a disease that we should be able to treat, cure and eventually solve,” said D’Souza. 

You therefore won’t be surprised to hear that Thiel is an investor in the Enhanced Games, which are a symptom of transhumanism: the Games are intended as an exhibition of the benefits of taking more drugs and medicine.

“We are building the Apollo mission for the 21st century,” said D’Souza. “The Apollo mission showed us we were so much more capable as a human species: we hit a new threshold by using science and technology to overcome our limits. This is what the Enhanced Games is all about.” 

In that interview with Rogan, another Enhanced Games investor, Christian Angermayer, decried American society’s conservatism when it comes to prescribing and taking drugs – another of his crusades is to legalise psychedelics in the US, the banning of which by the Nixon administration he calls a “scam” – and linked the breaking of the taboo of PEDs in professional sport with facilitating a wider permissiveness when it comes to prescribing substances to the elderly. 

(Now don’t be thinking this is a purely ideological endeavour from all involved – the Enhanced Games’ website is currently selling testosterone to anyone willing to click through.) 

Among the people who have admitted to taking testosterone as part of an anti-ageing regimen is US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, to whom Angermeyer points as an example of someone who is “openly enhanced”.

“Robert Kennedy,” said Angermeyer, “is doing pull-ups at an age Joe Biden could hardly walk up a flight of stairs.” 

Hence the Enhanced Games is not a sporting competition at all, but an exhibition of science. They should be more accurately known as the Enhanced Expo, at which one-time athletes set out their stalls, and doctors hand out their business cards. 

To quote once more from D’Souza’s interview with Rogan, “If Lance Armstrong had come out and said, ‘Thanks to my sponsor EPO. EPO made it possible for me to go from cancer patient to the best cyclist in the world’, everyone would have gone to their doctor and asked about EPO.’” 

To set out our own stall, this column is in favour of anything that extends human life, even allowing for the increased risk of seeing another few Ireland/Armenia games. 

But the life-lengthening evangelising of the Enhanced Games’ wealthy disciples would be a little easier to swallow if it didn’t come at a time when life expectancy in America is getting worse.

And it’s not like the Games’ backers are poor or apolitical or without power to improve that indictment of a fact, given Thiel has contributed financially to Donald Trump’s election campaign, while Trump’s own son, Donald Jnr, is an investor in the Games.

Plus, the Olympic Games already showcase a magical, life-extending substance.

It’s called exercise.  

The Games, for all they have been tarnished by cheating and politicking and corruption, are still an unprecedented showcase of the range of exercise on offer for people of all shapes and sizes. Hence the justification for taxpayer funding of these sports and their elite athletes is to encourage others to participate in sport. And call us old-fashioned, but it’s a lot healthier to be inspired to contact your local cycling club rather than ringing around to find someone to extol the benefits of EPO. 

But sufficient exercise is an economic problem. For the middle class, exercise is chiefly an issue of motivation, but in poorer areas the problems are more of finding time and facilities. If you have to work long days away from home while raising a larger family, where do you find the time to do the exercise necessary to extend your life? Or to cook healthier meals?

A 2022 study by the Association for the Study of Obesity in Ireland found a correlation between socio-economic status and health outcomes. They report that people living in deprived areas are more likely to be overweight/obese and to report a chronic health condition than those living in more affluent areas. Further to that, they found that half of those aged under 35 and living in deprived areas are overweight/obese, compared to 37% of those in affluent areas.

All major Western nations, most obviously the US, have the wealth to spread resources more evenly, to allow people work fewer hours but be better-paid, and to be undergirded by a proper health and welfare system. This would give poorer people the time to exercise more regularly, and invest in extending lives. The people backing the Enhanced Games have the money and clout to push US government policy in this direction. 

But, of course, they have not done so, and instead the Games’ backers want to further medicalise anyone willing to pay for these products, one of which they are themselves selling.

When these people talk of extending human life, they really mean extending their own life. 

Professional sport continually shows us the extent to which the ultrarich have already monopolised power and space. The spurious creed underpinning the Enhanced Games shows they are now coming for time, too.