The 'Enhanced Games': a dangerous dosage?

Billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has invested in a "drug-friendly" Olympic-style competition that would allow competitors to take performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) to push their bodies to new limits. 

Styled as a "modern reinvention" of the Olympics minus the drug testing, the for-profit "Enhanced Games" will initially focus on "smashing world records" in athletics, swimming, gymnastics, weightlifting and combat sports, said Men's Health. But critics say it would not only go against the spirit of sporting competition, but could also pose a danger to athletes. 

'My body my choice'

The new Games is the brainchild of lawyer Aron D'Souza, who led the Thiel-funded lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker Media in 2013. Thiel is among a number of high-profile venture capitalists backing the project, according to D'Souza, who told the New York Post that he had raised "enough to produce the first Games".

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The contest will allow athletes to use whatever substances they wish "out in the open and honestly", he said. The Enhanced Games website references a 2018 study, published in the journal Sports Medicine, that found almost 44% of athletes used PEDs at the 2011 World Athletics Championship.

"Athletes are adults… and they have a right to do with their body what they wish – my body, my choice, your body, your choice," D'Souza told the Australian Associated Press.

This approach could turns athletics into "something closer to Formula One, where the human element is only part of the picture and technology is at least as important", said New Atlas, which argued that "the Olympics has never been fair, because everyone's genetic potential is different".

The Enhanced Games might even make other competitions more fair, said The Verge. Openly allowing drugs may "draw the PED users away from other sports", leaving the athletes "who prefer to work clean better able to showcase their own abilities".

'A dangerous clown show'

Some mainstream sports stars have spoken out against the new, drug-friendly contest.

"No one within athletics takes the Enhanced Games seriously," said Sebastian Coe, head of World Athletics, on a recent podcast. Travis Tygart, CEO of the US Anti-Doping Agency, told CNN that the Enhanced Games would be "a dangerous clown show, not real sport". 

According to the NHS, the risks of taking anabolic steroids include infertility, erectile dysfunction, hair loss and severe acne.

Another concern about the new Games is that as the monetary rewards mount up, "the race to dope, where inevitably more is better, will not be limited to medicines that have been approved for human use", said Catherine Ordway and Aaron C.T. Smith, experts in sport management and integrity at the University of Canberra, on The Conversation. 

Even leaving the health worries aside, the Enhanced Games "challenge the very essence of what sport should be about", they said. "Perhaps we're being idealistic, but what's the point of sport if it isn't at least aiming to be authentic?"

If it does get off the ground, the Enhanced Games will not be enlightening because "it will not tell us about our species, and by extension about ourselves", said Damian Reilly in The Spectator last year. "If I know for certain [athletes] are on drugs, then of what relevance is their speed to me? They may as well be on wheels."