The Post-Human Games
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licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Last week, Wired published a substantial, deeply reported article on a topic that has been hyped for decades:
The Definitive, Insane, Swimsuit-Bursting Story of the Steroid Olympics
by Amit Katwala
At first it was dismissed as a crazy joke. Making the Enhanced Games a reality needed a Peter Thiel posse, a couple of retired swimmers, some MAGA money, and a whole lot of drugs.
There is a quite a history behind this. On All Fools Day 2004, Wired published a straight-faced story by G. Pascal Zachary with a simple message:
Steroids for Everyone!
Drugs make athletes better. So why ban them? Let’s regulate instead.
It is still on the website and does not seem to have been a prank, though Zachary had some fun with his writing. As he noted, even then none of this was really new. “Goldman’s dilemma” (published in 1992) involved asking elite athletes whether they would take a drug that would guarantee them success in sport, but cause them to die after five years; roughly half would, though 2012 research gives much lower numbers. Even earlier, Dr. Gabe Mirkin had asked world-class runners if they would take a pill that would guarantee a gold medal and also kill them a year later, and more than half accepted that deal.
Enter D’Souza and Thiel
Zachary’s article reportedly struck a chord with Aron D’Souza, then an Australian law student at Oxford, though it took him several years to act on it. In 2009, D’Souza was introduced to Peter Thiel, the eccentric tech multi-billionaire, by a mutual friend. Not long after that, D’Souza came up with a scheme by which Thiel could get revenge on Gawker, the online magazine that had outed Thiel as gay. (D’Souza is openly gay but has been criticized in OutSports for repurposing the phrase “coming out” to refer to steroid abusers.) Thiel’s money financed Hulk Hogan’s much-publicized lawsuit against Gawker, which essentially drove it out of business. D’Souza had become a made man.
So he looked for bigger fish to fry. Presumably remembering the “Steroids for Everyone” article, he thought of the Olympic Games, which ban performance-enhancing drugs. So, why not set up a drug-enhanced competitor?
This was not an entirely unprecedented idea. At the height of the baseball steroids scandals in the mid-2000s, Joel Garreau in the Washington Post asked whether there would be “two kinds of leagues in baseball, basketball or football – the Naturals and the Enhanced?” Ronald Bailey in Reason strongly agreed:
Steroids, Schmeroids. Why Not Enhanced and Unenhanced Sports Leagues?
Twenty years later, none of those schemes have come to pass.
Developing the Enhanced Games
D’Souza announced the Enhanced Games in June 2023, with a website and an X account; the first X post was a splendid portrait of George Church, the next six featured academics, former athletes and D’Souza himself. The venture capitalists now listed on the website as investors are Thiel, Christian Angermayer, who has interests in drug development, and Balaji Srinivasan, who made his bones with Andreessen Horowitz, prominent venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. D’Souza claimed to have 500 “sleeper athletes” ready to compete, “breaking world records in their basement and sending us videos of it.”
That always seemed extremely unlikely, but with billionaire backers, maybe something could happen. CNN did publish a long article on the subject in November 2023, which really should have led to the project being shut down before it got underway. But D’Souza is tenacious.
His original timeline then was to put on an exhibition in December 2024 and a full event in 2025. This did not happen. He did persuade two swimmers, both Olympic finalists, to join his program and offered a million-dollar reward to the first to break a world record. (Technically, it would not be officially ratified.) They both swam the 50-meter freestyle, for which the world record, set in 2009, is 20.91 seconds. The first “enhanced” swimmer put on 30 pounds of muscle in four months while following a drug program, so he actually lost speed. The other eventually swam 50 meters in 20.89 – 0.7 seconds faster than he had in Paris, where he came 5th, and 0.02 seconds faster than the official world record.
Monetizing the Games
At the end of the Wired article, Katwala confesses that he had almost missed the commercial potential of the Enhanced Games:
[I]t all clicked into place when D’Souza announced the launch of Enhanced Performance Products ... The model isn’t the Olympics or the World Cup. It’s Red Bull.
He may be underestimating the ambitions of those involved. The Red Bull comparison is not inaccurate but it is incomplete. From the Enhanced website:
Your Path to Superhuman Starts Here
Most TRT telehealth just manages decline.
We build your second prime.
We don't guess, we measure. From at-home blood testing to ongoing progress monitoring, every decision is backed by hard data. Our clinical team uses this information to continually optimize your treatment, ensuring maximum results with uncompromising safety.
Institutionalising Human Enhancement
In February 2024, well before the record attempt, the Enhanced Games hosted “The First Conference on Human Enhancement” at the House of Lords in London. (Presumably D’Souza had connections in high places.) It urged the UK to appoint a “Minister for Human Enhancement” to modernize its economy. Zoltan Istvan, who once ran for Governor in California as a Transhumanist, attended and wrote an article about the conference for Newsweek which he used to promote the Enhanced Games. In November, D’Souza was featured in The New York Times, and said the Games are about pushing the boundaries of human potential, about defying aging, about “what it means to be human in a world where there are superhumans among us.”
On December 10, 2024, “the Second Conference on Human Enhancement reconvened fifty of the leading human enhancement experts at the University of Oxford to ratify the Declaration on Human Enhancement.” Keynote speakers were the ubiquitous George Church, the obsessive Bryan Johnson, who notoriously spends $2 million a year on his own healthcare and intends to cheat death completely, and Dave Asprey, who describes himself as the Father of Biohacking, The Science of Longevity and Human Optimization.
The Declaration itself has to be downloaded to be read in full and has to be read to be believed. There are 10 articles, each with sub-clauses, after a three-paragraph introduction that begins:
We, the pioneers of human enhancement, in order to unlock the full potential of human ability, promote fairness and opportunity, protect the right of individuals to become extraordinary, extend healthy human lifespans, and secure the benefits of science, innovation and freedom for ourselves and future generations, do now proclaim this First Declaration on Human Enhancement.
Sports Medicine
Meanwhile, sports medicine professionals seem to have mixed feelings on the issue of human enhancement. On June 16, Sports Medicine published an article with 61 authors representing 72 institutions on:
Given the timing and the number of authors, the very existence of this review in a reputable journal is a tribute to the amount of dust that TEG [The Enhanced Games] has stirred up. The article’s conclusions are:
While TEG positions itself as a revolutionary alternative to anti-doping policies, questions and concerns about the long-term health implications and the ethics of performance enhancement persist, as shown by our survey of medical professionals and performance and rehabilitation experts —a key group of stakeholders in this conversation. The recently published Declaration on Human Enhancement, which prioritises the health of the athletes over enhancement, and their commitment to promote only safe enhancements are a welcome start. As the dialogue on human enhancement evolves, it is essential to ensure that the safety of athletes remains a non-negotiable fundamental principle.
The Enhanced Games response to this on X was:
A groundbreaking Sports Medicine study confirms what we've known: 74% of medical experts are willing to treat enhanced athletes and nearly 1 in 3 sports medicine pros are OPEN to medically supervised performance enhancement if legal!
This validates the @Enhanced Games mission: a safe, medically supervised alternative to rampant traditional doping. We offer full screening, monitoring, & data sharing – reimagining elite sport for health, autonomy, & science.
Medical professionals will treat patients even if they had put themselves at risk! Doctors are reluctant (to say the least) to prescribe illegal performance-enhancing drugs. They are much more likely to do so if the drugs are legal! Whodathunk?
Design an Athlete?
How many athletes cheat at the Olympics is of course unknown but the number of those caught (and disqualified) has been going down fast, even as testing has become routine and much more common. In Paris last year, only eight athletes were disqualified and another three were “provisionally suspended before competing,” according to Wikipedia. The anti-doping effort has been going quite well.
Meanwhile, the 2026 Enhanced Games have been announced: Las Vegas, 21–24 May, 2026. They are scheduled to include four swimming events, two track races (no field events, even though that’s where steroid use became common), and a Snatch, Clean & Jerk Weightlifting competition. The Athletics promotional video features a woman but there is no mention of either separate events for women or mixed-gender events.
Steroids are dangerous drugs with valuable medical applications; use without a prescription is illegal. Genetic modification is not at present a temptation for adult athletes, but just in case the World Anti-Doping Agency has banned it since 2003:
The use of nucleic acids or nucleic acid analogues that may alter genome sequences and/or alter gene expression by any mechanism. This includes but is not limited to gene editing, gene silencing and gene transfer technologies.
However, it is depressingly easy to imagine someone wanting to “design” their baby to be a world-class athlete. And we know that some of the figures behind the Enhanced Games are also lining up to invest in a wide range of “designer baby” technologies