In the summer of 2023, Aron D’Souza scandalized the sporting public with the announcement of the Enhanced Games. The pitch was simple: let athletes use performance-enhancing drugs openly, honestly, and safely so they can push the limits of human achievement for the entertainment of sports fans everywhere and for the good of sports science. It would be the Olympics—on steroids. As the Melbourne-bred and Oxford-educated D’Souza tells it, the Olympics are in fact the enemy of sports: a bureaucratic and elitist institution that does more to inhibit the development of athletic talent than to promote it, both through its iniquitous drug and also through the strain its events put on public budgets and infrastructure, to say nothing of the exploitation of athletes scraping out a living. “The IOC [International Olympic Committee] has effectively been a one-party state running the world of sport for 100 years,” D’Souza told the Australian Associated Press. “And now the opposition party is here. We are ready for a fight. I know they are going to play dirty. I know they are going to threaten us. But ultimately we know that we are morally correct.” This is the Silicon Valley “disruptor” script, by now familiar to the point of cliche. As Uber was to Big Taxi and Airbnb to Big Hotel, so the Enhanced Games are to Big Sports.
The establishment backlash was as swift as it was predictable. “It’s a joke, to be honest. Unfair, unsafe—I just don’t think this is the right way to go about sport,” said Anna Meares, former Olympic gold medalist and Australia’s chef de mission for Paris 2024. According to the organization UK Anti-Doping, the Enhanced Games would be “unsafe, dangerous to athletes’ health and wellbeing, and flies in the face of fair play.” D’Souza’s plan is “clearly dangerous,” said World Powerlifting’s director Robert Wilks. There has been a “plethora of deaths in recent years, as drug use has increased” in bodybuilding, he noted. “Someone will die,” predicted Australian Sports Commission chief executive Kieren Perkins. “It’s all bollocks, isn’t it?” said Sebastian Coe, double Olympic gold medalist and president of World Athletics, the controversial governing body of track and field. “There’s only one message and that is if anybody is moronic enough to officially take part in it, they’ll get banned for a long time.” Even the International Olympic Committee weighed in: “If you want to destroy any concept of fair play and fair competition in sport, this would be a good way to do it.”
When he first started generating headlines in July 2023, D’Souza was predicting that the Games would take place by the end of the following year. That didn’t happen, although this May, D’Souza announced that the Games had finally secured a venue in Resorts World, a hotel and casino on the Las Vegas Strip, which will purportedly host short-distance swimming, sprinting, and weightlifting events in 2026. The venture has expanded significantly since going public, and its leadership now includes former executives from the U.S. Olympic Committee, Nike, and Red Bull, while a slew of impressively credentialed sports science, biotech, and genetic researchers populate its “Independent Medical and Scientific Commission.”
The pitch was simple: let athletes use performance-enhancing drugs openly, honestly, and safely so they can push the limits of human achievement for the entertainment of sports fans everywhere and for the good of sports science.
This body will oversee athletes’ use of performance-enhancing drugs, or PEDs. “The Enhanced Games do not endorse the indiscriminate use of restricted substances,” their website says. “We advocate for the safe, responsible, and clinically supervised use of performance enhancements.” In other words, the Enhanced Games won’t be the “doping free-for-all” that some feared. Some substances—including some performance-enhancing substances—will still be banned; any PEDs used will be FDA-approved and prescribed by a doctor. The Enhanced Games now seeks to present itself to athletes and the public as even safer than other competitions. Given the pressures that drive athletes to explore PED use, D’Souza argues, outright prohibition puts them in greater danger than a more open and scientific attitude might.
The Games also proposes to pay athletes, although it’s still unclear whether they will receive a salary, appearance fees and prizes, or be remunerated in yet some other way. One version of the website promised that “top tier athletes will receive a six-figure base salary” while another only made mention of fees and prizes. D’Souza has said elsewhere that they would be offered equity in the business itself. Several former Olympians have taken up the Enhanced cause and are now employed to help with recruitment. In a splashy documentary released alongside the Vegas announcement, thirty-one-year-old Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev can be seen beating the world-record fifty-meter freestyle time—set in 2009 by a swimmer in a now-banned polyurethane suit—by 0.02 seconds. As Gkolomeev was both following a PED regimen and wearing a supersuit, swimming’s governing body, World Aquatics, will not recognize the record, calling the Enhanced Games a “circus.”
As Gkolomeev’s example demonstrates, the gains seen from PED use in elite sports are understood to be fractional—although among top athletes, fractional differences make all the difference in the world. Their more profound effect on athletes’ performance may be in speeding up recovery time. In the Games’ promotional documentary, former Australian gold medalist James Magnussen describes how, after he began his “enhanced protocol,” he went from training once a day, six days a week to twice a day, seven days a week. “As a former professional athlete, you always think you’re healthy and virile, but this another level,” the thirty-four-year-old Magnussen says. “I feel eighteen again.”
An understanding of PEDs as fundamentally therapeutic is part of what has allowed their illicit use to flourish in both professional and amateur sports, even at the highest levels of competition. It is what permits medical professionals, trainers, and coaches to collaborate (or collude) with athletes in their use and distribution. It may also be what piqued Silicon Valley’s interest in this venture to begin with. Inspired by the idea “that we can overcome our weak, feeble, biological bodies,” D’Souza describes aging as “a disease that we should be able to treat, cure, and eventually solve.” Performance medicine, he argues, is “the route to the fountain of youth.” As the Enhanced Games’ business cards put it: “Our mission is to safely transition mankind to a new super-humanity.”
Amateur Hour
Competitive athletes—and even some not-so-competitive athletes—have experimented with various performance-enhancing substances since antiquity. Olympic athletes in ancient Greece, seeking to improve endurance and mask pain, apparently mixed brandy and wine with hallucinogenic plants. Early in the twentieth century, strychnine was popular with marathoners and cocaine with long-distance cyclists. The broad stigma against “doping” developed slowly, in the contradiction between aristocratic amateurism and capitalist professionalism that produced organized sports as we know them today.
Modern sports are largely (though by no means exclusively) a creation of nineteenth-century England, shaped as much by the Victorians’ propensity for rulemaking and codification as by their place in the development of industrial capitalism. This was a society marked by intense class struggle, in and over sports no less than on the factory floor. Throughout the early and mid-1800s, the British ruling classes organized and standardized various folk games played across the country, developing laws and establishing hierarchies to govern competition. This made it possible for competition to take place across greater swathes of the home nations—England, Wales, Scotland, and, at the time, Ireland—as well as throughout the rest of the empire. They also strove to exclude the growing proletariat from that competition, hoping to protect organized sports (and leisure more broadly) as a domain of the elite through the valorization of the amateur. The strictest versions of Victorian amateurism not only prohibited athletes from competing for money but banned anyone from competition who earned a wage as a mechanic, artisan, or laborer—effectively, everyone who worked for a living.
As the Enhanced Games’ business cards put it: “Our mission is to safely transition mankind to a new super-humanity.”
On the continent, a cosmopolitan French baron named Pierre de Coubertin, still stinging from his country’s humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War, saw in the “muscular Christianity” of the Victorian aristocrats a counterbalance to the militaristic physical culture of the victorious Germans. Amateurism would become a cornerstone of de Coubertin’s Olympic Movement, and it remained embedded in the modern Olympic games even as amateurism became increasingly unsustainable as a practice. Despite their obsession with standardization, the Victorians had failed to arrive at a single definition of the amateur athlete that obtained across sports, leagues, and competitions; de Coubertin and the International Olympic Committee were no more successful. Rather than simply diffusing outward from Britain, amateurism was in fact shaped by athletic cultures around the world as modern organized sports globalized.
As early as 1908, clear differences between national sporting cultures had emerged, often mediated through conflicting ideas over what constituted the “amateur.” The London Games of that year saw intense competition between the hegemonic power of the British Empire and the rising force of the United States, each of which sought to demonstrate its physical prowess on the international stage. While aristocratic British teams and athletes were reluctant to engage with new training methods and techniques, the capitalistic Americans found an edge by applying the principles of Taylorism and scientific management—key to the rise of their domestic industry—to sports. Between this and U.S. universities’ practice of financing student-athletes’ studies and cost of living, British observers were scandalized and accused the Americans of “shamateurism.” As sports historians Matthew P. Llewellyn and John Gleaves put it, “From a legalistic perspective, U.S. athletes were Olympic amateurs, but they did not ‘play the game’ as the British understood it.” And yet, motivated in part by rising tensions with Germany, the high-minded British would soon begin investing in professional coaches and state-of-the-art training facilities ahead of the 1916 Games in Berlin, although these were canceled after the outbreak of World War I.
Protecting the ideology of amateurism compelled the Olympic movement to take a comprehensive position against doping in 1938. “Doping cut to the very heart of what sport meant, the power struggle between two opposing views,” April Henning and Paul Dimeo write in Doping: A Sporting History. “The dichotomy was obvious: dirty, artificial, professional, working class as opposed to clean, natural, amateur, middle/upper class.” As far as the International Olympic Committee was concerned, professional athletes had no problem experimenting with substances and drugs that might either elevate their performance or aid their recovery. Aristocratic amateurs, meanwhile, represented a higher ideal: a better, more refined world free from mundane concerns like how to make rent or pay for food.
Clean sports and fairness became myths around which an entire regulatory apparatus was wrapped. But as any athlete (amateur or professional) knows, competition is not solely or even primarily about fairness but instead about finding and exploiting advantages while remaining on the right side of the rules—or at least appearing to. Singling out PEDs also rests on a narrow interpretation of what it means for a contest to be fair: as Ivan Waddington and Andy Smith write in An Introduction to Drugs in Sport: Addicted to Winning?, “while the rules of most sports govern what takes place in the sporting contest itself, they usually have little or nothing to say about equalizing the resources available to the competitors outside of the specific context of the competition.” Those resources might range from anabolic steroids to sovereign wealth funds.
Over the course of the twentieth century, various prohibitions that had excluded professional (that is, working-class) athletes from participating in the Olympics fell away—slowly at first, then suddenly, beginning in the 1970s, as the Games themselves were compelled by economic circumstance to commercialize. But while amateurism lost ideological purchase its legacy influences contemporary sports, including conventional wisdom about doping.
Rules are Rules
Developing prohibitions against PEDs was one thing; enforcing them was another. The first systematic drug testing of athletes began at the 1966 European Championships and the 1968 Olympics. As methods for detecting different PEDs were developed, different drugs were added to the prohibited substances lists, which expanded and shifted in emphasis over time. Unsurprisingly, every time a new test was developed, it would not be long before it was answered with a new masking agent or a new PED altogether. By the early 1970s, East Germany, the USSR, West Germany, and the United States were all running more or less formalized doping rings to maintain competitive parity on the world stage. Steroids presented a different challenge than stimulants, as an athlete could be tested for the latter immediately after competition, while steroids would be used during training periods, outside regulatory bodies’ jurisdiction. Rampant PED use was an open secret, though officials denied it even as they scrambled to develop an apparatus that could bring athletes, their coaches, and their teams into line.
The broad stigma against “doping” developed slowly, in the contradiction between aristocratic amateurism and capitalist professionalism that produced organized sports as we know them today.
The 1980s and 1990s saw greater cooperation between various international sports authorities and governing bodies, culminating in the formation of the World Anti-Doping Agency in 1999. WADA’s deterrence model individualizes the PED problem: if each athlete is engaged in a cost-benefit analysis over PED use, the role of organizations like WADA is to raise the cost of rule-breaking. Of course, this creates the same problems as other forms of prohibition, encouraging not only the development of new drugs and masking agents but also high-risk drug use: athletes who self-administer PEDs are significantly more likely to use more than is absolutely necessary to achieve the desired results, putting themselves at greater risk of harm. And no matter how high a cost WADA might impose on individual athletes who get caught doping, it will not counterbalance a century of commodification, commercialization, and now corporatization in sports that incentivizes the kind of athletic feats that are almost unimaginable without a little pharmaceutical assistance.
Seen from another perspective, PED use (and abuse) is not an individual problem at all, but an endemic feature of capitalist sports in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For one thing, the rewards for sporting success are many times greater than anything conceivable to athletes of the nineteenth century. Today’s elite athletes have more to win and more to lose. What’s more, the techniques of scientific management that Americans were experimenting with at the beginning of the twentieth century—so offensive to British sensibilities—have developed significantly: professional and high-level amateur athletes alike, both as individuals and as members of a team, are subject not only to intense training regimes but microscopic regulatory scrutiny. Today, the scientific and medical apparatus that supports athletic talent off the field is arguably at least as important as what happens on it.
As a systematic attempt to understand how to develop athletic capacity for its own sake, sports science is a relatively young field. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, researchers interested in human physiology approached athletes as outliers—freaks, basically. Before elite sports attained the prestige they have today, there was a much greater degree of ambivalence around the place of record-breaking and limit-pushing in competition. Even as the Olympics grew in popularity and competitiveness, de Coubertin himself was critical of specialized training methods and the “scientific tendency” to treat athletes like animals or machines. If sports serve as a celebration of humanity, seeking to overcome physiological limits on human potential—including through doping—is, in a certain sense, to dehumanize oneself. And yet today that dehumanization is all but complete, whether an athlete uses PEDs or not. Behind the physical performance of sports lies a whole world of capitalist exploitation and inequality, funneled back into the bodies of highly skilled workers for the production of spectacle.
Now, to overcome those workers’ physiological limits, the Enhanced Games proposes to transform them into something more than human.
Dreams and Nightmares
If drug use is a mostly disavowed part of the history of elite sports, it has long had a prominent role in Silicon Valley’s self-mythology: as the story goes, pioneering Bay Area computer scientists in the 1960s made important breakthroughs in digital design with the help of LSD. Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, chemically saturated festivals like Burning Man provided respite from (and lent a countercultural patina to) the hypercompetitive pressures of a growing tech industry. Today, tech executives and workers alike dose themselves with psychedelics and amphetamines: hallucinogens for propelling humanity into the future through access to higher planes of thought, and stimulants because there’s no other way to do that much coding on otherwise-impossible deadlines. Christian Angermayer, billionaire cofounder of the Enhanced Games, delights in telling reporters about the personal and social benefits of his experiments with psychoactive drugs, constructing an image of the enlightened entrepreneur: he claims to take mushrooms twice a year and has funded research that involves Israelis and Palestinians taking ayahuasca trips together. Whatever else this is, it’s marketing: Angermayer, along with Enhanced Games-backer Peter Thiel, is heavily invested in the development and legalization of psychedelic drugs for medical use.
PED use (and abuse) is not an individual problem at all, but an endemic feature of capitalist sports in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
For Silicon Valley’s reactionary futurists, human limits, whether psychic or physical, are to be overcome by any means necessary: take one drug to expand your mind, another to expand your lung capacity. In a Substack post from February 2024, Angermayer laid out the “Next Human Agenda” guiding his investment strategy. This is a theory of history contoured by “waves” of enhancement culminating in transhumanism, which “will usher in true superhuman abilities through the seamless integration of technology into our bodies.” He assures skeptics that “as these advances arrive, any dystopian notions will vanish once you and those you love can benefit from them.” The Enhanced Games, apparently, will play a key role in bringing this future to pass. Last July, one steroid-use researcher warned that if the Games were to proceed the consequences “could spill into society.” That is precisely the idea.
Like many tech founders before them, Angermayer and D’Souza pitch their enterprise as being about more than just profits, even actually constituting a social and political movement. Both are also deft at using progressive discourses to deflect criticism. In one interview about the Games, D’Souza drew on the language of bodily autonomy (“My body, my choice. Your body, your choice.”) and queer history. “I’m a gay man and so much about building this movement makes me think about the history and acceptance of LGBT people in the wider community,” he told the Guardian. “Think back fifty years ago, being a gay man was like being enhanced today. It’s stigmatized, it’s marginalized, it’s illegal in some senses. What changed? Well, Pride happened. A movement of people, a revolution of people who rallied around an idea of acceptance.” The initial version of the Enhanced Games’ website included pages on “Inclusive Language” and “How to Come Out as Enhanced.” The former featured an inset on “The Colonialist Origins of Doping” while the latter advised that “you don’t have to come out as enhanced,” but “coming out can be a really positive experience.” Enhanced athletes who are open about it “can be a positive role model to others around you who may be considering embracing science.” These pages have since been deleted; the Games declined a request to comment on this and other queries.
Angermayer, for his part, has specifically cited “the trans movement” as inspiring him in his mission to create superhumans. “The queer movement, for example, not only emancipated queer people from the confines of narrow norms but also enabled straight people to explore their sexuality more openly,” he wrote in his newsletter.
I believe that the effects of the trans movement are only just beginning to permeate society and impact different parts of it in unexpected ways. A primary aim of the trans movement is to grant individuals all rights corresponding to their self-professed gender identity—from changes to identification documents to preferred forms of address to, in some cases, gender-affirming treatments. While these fundamental rights primarily concern those who identify as trans, my prediction is that, once again, every person will ultimately experience greater personal freedom as a result of the trans movement.
Angermayer’s professed admiration for trans people did not stop the Enhanced Games from enlisting Donald Trump Jr.’s venture fund 1789 Capital to co-lead an investment round earlier this year.
Needless to say, the Silicon Valley-MAGA alliance is no queer ally. Why then have D’Souza and Angermayer used such floridly progressive rhetoric, repeatedly invoking social movements whose aim is universal uplift? One possibility, however unlikely, is that they really believe this stuff and now represent a dissident strain within the tech-fascist coalition. Another explanation is that these cartoonish gestures toward bodily autonomy, trans and gay liberation, and sporting decolonization are an artifact of a moment before the tech industry’s oligarchs rallied behind Trump’s 2024 reelection bid. They thought it was necessary to speak this language to generate media coverage, confuse critique, and win support. A third possibility, related to the second, is that they correctly identified contradictions in liberal ideas about doping, fairness, and equality in sports and ruthlessly exploited them using liberalism’s own language.
Whatever the answer, the transhumanist movement’s ostensible commitment to bodily autonomy and freedom of choice in the pursuit of species-wide well-being in the future, exemplified by the Enhanced Games, cannot be reconciled with its contempt for humanity as it actually exists: flawed, limited, and mortal. However much its boosters might invoke liberal shibboleths and disavow the movement’s origins, transhumanism is just one of several ideological currents flowing through Silicon Valley and the contemporary tech industry that descend from the Anglo-American eugenicist movement of the early twentieth century; it is a ruling-class ideology that advocates the uninhibited development of human capacities, including the extension of the human lifespan, through technology. “For transhumanists,” the philosopher Susan B. Levin has written, “the rational course regarding aging is its utter defeat.” Such an idea may sound like science fiction to the average prole. “But if you surround yourself with billionaires and CEOs,” D’Souza said last year, “they get it.” Peter Thiel’s vampiric obsessions are by now well known; his relationship with D’Souza extends at least as far back as 2011, when the young Oxford lawyer presented Thiel with a detailed plan for what would become his clandestine legal campaign against the website Gawker. As entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan—not a billionaire, but an investor in the Enhanced Games nonetheless—has written: “Life extension is the most important thing we can invent.” In 2024, another venture capitalist psychonaut, Bryan Johnson—the uncanny face of the anti-aging movement in the United States—collaborated with D’Souza and other Enhanced Games supporters to co-author the dramatically titled First Declaration on Human Enhancement. According to the document, athletes and scientists not only have the right to pursue bodily enhancement but a “sacred” responsibility to do so.
For Silicon Valley’s reactionary futurists, human limits, whether psychic or physical, are to be overcome by any means necessary: take one drug to expand your mind, another to expand your lung capacity.
Dreams of immortality are not unique to Silicon Valley. There may be nothing more universally human than confrontation with death, although generally the takeaway has been that it is not to be cheated. Yet never before has such hubris been backed by so much capital. The tech oligarchs demand to be seen as innovators and disruptors, but their obsession with life extension is really about keeping things the same for as long as possible. What is the fear of death, ultimately, if not the fear of change? Transhumanists deny a fundamental truth: that we are here on this Earth for just a little bit, and we don’t know what comes next. This is why sports, at least in part, make for such fertile ideological ground. They are a performance of life, of human capacity despite the limits that confront every one of us, limits that can be overcome through practice and discipline but which constantly reassert themselves and in time prove insurmountable. Capital cannot abide such limits. There is no barrier it respects, no boundary it will not seek to overcome; it must spread and spread, consuming life wherever it is found.
Athletes who qualify for the Enhanced Games will be compelled to wear bio-tech monitors around the clock until the end of the competition, if it actually takes place as planned. In the meantime, it’s safe to assume they will all be made to sign strictly binding confidentiality agreements. These workers—likely a mix of aging and banned professionals and high-level amateurs attracted to the competition by a combination of money, notoriety, and sense of adventure—will be put through a range of sporting experiments: their value is not only in the spectacle that they may or may not ever produce for public consumption, but in the data they generate in training and recovery, under controlled conditions, using PEDs approved by their employer. Professional athletes are already subject to intense surveillance, producing biometric data that is not only of use to the sports scientists and medical staff responsible for their performance but also to gambling companies and video game developers. Data generated by the Enhanced Games’ athletes will, in turn, be used to advance the development of life extension technology, which will be promoted, eventually, at the Games themselves. This is not a dystopian conspiracy theory; it’s what D’Souza plainly intends: “We will gather extraordinary data from our athletes, then build products that can be marketed at the Enhanced Games.”
So-called life extension technology has already begun circulating as a luxury good available only to the very wealthy. (If you think the gerontocracy is bad now, just wait until the rich are living to 120.) In time, however, this technology will become cheaper to produce and cheaper to buy. When longevity treatments become available to the masses, it should finally become clear that this technology does not offer immortality but a longer working life. That is its primary use case.
The Enhanced Games represent a kind of cultural front for Silicon Valley’s revolt from above, which has set about remaking the world, from the balance of global trade to the composition of a human cell. Their vision is easy to picture. A stagnating American economy will pit more and more workers against each other in intensifying competition for jobs in industries degraded by union-busting bosses over decades. With labor and environmental regulations in further tatters, any new manufacturing that may take place in this country will happen in deathtrap factories that threaten workers’ lives, limbs, and lungs. And with social security gutted, those workers will need to sell their labor well past the current retirement age. But if at seventy-five you still have the body of a fifty-five-year-old, what difference does it make? Welcome to the future. Now get back to work.