There has always been a fascination with drugs and their effects on the human body, from druidic art to medical science, to grinding up half a chong of Clarky Cat; from experiments with human perception and opening the third eye, to the possibility of developing slightly more muscular upper arms.
In recent months, professional sport has presented its own vision of extreme tolerance. Chances are you’ve already heard of the Enhanced Games, if only because, despite not actually existing yet, it has a sensationally good PR department.
The premise is simple and reliably shocking. What if we removed all barriers to drug use in sports? What if we rewarded and celebrated drug-assisted achievement, explored the wild frontier of upgraded human potential, and introduced newer, friendlier language to destigmatize the unfairly marginalized drug-using community so that Anabaptists became “enhanced,” non-Abaptists “natural.” would be? ”, supporters and consumers “Allies”?
Related: Improved games: Drug-friendly sports leagues are gaining prominence, even as backlash increases
Well, that brings you to the Enhanced Games, billed (in itself) as the Olympic Games of the Future, the first edition of which still promises to take place sometime this year. The founder of the Enhanceds is someone named Aron Ping D’Souza, an American tech entrepreneur, personality capitalist and one of those businessmen whose rhetorical style involves boasting about their own extreme, brutal, groundbreaking honesty even while uttering the most incredible bullshit.
Since the initial announcement last summer, at least 900 athletes have expressed interest in Enhanced Competition, according to D’Souza, no doubt drawn by the cash prizes on offer, including at least $1 million (£788,000) on the table for “the first competition”. improved athlete to publicly break Usain Bolt’s [100m] world record”.
Two more important steps have now been taken. The first public crackdown came when retired Australian Olympic swimmer James Magnussen said he was willing to accept a $1.5 million offer to put a spike in his vein and attempt to break the 50-meter freestyle record to break a battle; while also, and the Enhanced Games really can’t emphasize this enough, breaking down the prejudices and false assumptions that have held you, yes you, back for so long. And this is the great thing about the Enhanceds, the deeply cynical marketing genius of the whole thing. How can you make this feel legitimate and necessary, rather than, say, grotesque and weird? How do you make people want to watch while still feeling good and not like some kind of Victorian freak voyeur?
Look through the crap and there’s stuff about how it’s actually healthier, not less, to use drugs. There is a timeline that shows even the ancient Greeks and Romans were squeezed to the gills during performance skag, but the Romans also washed their clothes in piss and were legally allowed to kill their children.
There is a certain amount of snarling hatred for the elites, those dear old forces that always hold you back. There’s a whole bunch of stuff about body autonomy, kind of a big-pharma standard.
But above all it is about freedom. Astonishingly, shamelessly and brilliantly, drug-addicted athletes are presented here as a marginalized minority group, victims of mass prejudice, the last frontier of social justice. It’s hard to express how disorienting post-truth this all is. It might be best to jump right into the part where Enhanced Games makes this statement. “’Doping’ is a colonialist slur that smacks of symbolic and historical violence against both black and improved populations, and must be removed from our vocabulary.”
Yes. This is real. What they’re saying is that doing drugs is pretty much the same as being black. They matter with doped lives. They compare the burdens of “the improved community,” that is, drugged athletes, to the struggle for civil rights, the legacy of slavery, to centuries of blood-soaked racial apartheid and its attendant scars.
This is of course deeply cynical and cheap. But at least it’s non-exclusive. Using drugs is not the same as being black. Using drugs is also the same as being gay. “Think back 50 years ago: being gay was like getting better today. It’s stigmatized, it’s marginalized,” D’Souza has said, and true to this view, the Enhanced website includes a detailed section on the trials of ‘coming out’, as expanded for your family, friends and colleagues ( who honestly don’t care, please put your shirt back on), with a lot of talk about allies, support networks and kindness.
This is the most astonishing nonsense; nonsense so bold and fresh and shameless that you feel like getting up from your chair and throwing flowers, clapping wildly, a hand raised to you, red and heaving decolletage. And at that moment it becomes clear what this actually is.
Related: British police and security services will help protect the Olympic Games in Paris
It’s a sales pitch. An aggressive, sharp tone for your consumer support. The reason Enhanced has gone from strength to strength in recent weeks is that significant investment has now come in through a series of charismatic big players, from the very wealthy, very anti-elites (again with this?) Balaji Srinivasan to Peter Thiel, a classic disrupter -rainmaker type who seems to talk a lot about “creating new spaces for freedom”, the kind of sentence that, no matter what voice you say it in, sounds like code for picking people up and taking them to buses and/or a bus to conduct. private addiction to some niche form of masturbation. These are people who have made their fortunes in the ongoing 25-year digital golden age because they are a ruthless half-madman with a vision, some start-up capital and a laptop; and especially people who know how to make money with something like that.
And just think of how much money there is to be made here, not just from TV rights and advertising, but from the actual drugs, the undreamed of high-end juices, all marketed through a live laboratory show. Four million Americans already use PEDs (performance-enhancing drugs), which isn’t really that many when you think about it. Those revenues remain unused, the market is wide open.
This is about the Enhanced. It can be grotesque, a way of completely misunderstanding the point of sports, and replacing things like story, emotional connections, human failure and human success with the most literal, results-oriented version, sports as reimagined by a particularly boring robot, sport as pornography of human performance.
But it also just feels like it’s going to happen, in part because there are plenty of actual, honest conversations to be had about where this stuff is going, about young people’s views on the old stigmas around substances (basically they don’t seem to care) about the culture of the pachyderm ancient legacy Games itself.
And also because things that seem absurd have a habit of happening now. You must have come to read this article in a state of bewilderment and disbelief. After a few hundred words it doesn’t actually feel absurd at all, just like one of those things that just happens, a logical next step.
Big Sport has opened the door to these types of disruptive new players, with its familiar playbook of false morality and greed, and almost total loss of legitimacy in the public eye. So why not just give in to his bogus beliefs, his glorious nihilism that lives on from Bahrain 2028 onwards, while a stunning Azerbaijani smashes his way across the line and destroys the semi-mutant 800m world record, while we all talk approvingly of his worthiness, his journey, his power. Join the movement. Click on the links. Get improved.
-
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? To submit an email response of up to 300 words to be considered for publication in our letters section, click here.