The Enhanced Games Were A Predictably Stupid Failure | Defector

The Enhanced Games were staged as a direct-to-consumer steroid marketing stunt disguised as an Olympics-style event. The stated goal was to let athletes dope freely to shatter world records and demonstrate that pharmacological enhancement matters more than human physiology and talent. The event attracted Olympic-level athletes in performance-only sports, supported by a large prize pool and investors. The founder framed the effort as creating “Humans 2.0” through enhanced age products such as testosterone and peptides. Despite the doping premise, results did not validate the claims. In the 100-meter race, Fred Kerley won with 9.97 seconds, outperforming doped competitors, and the overall event was described as a failure for both marketing and athletic value.

"The pitch for the Enhanced Games (TEG) was that allowing athletes to dope as much as they wanted would facilitate the mass shattering of putatively clean world records, proving in the process that human physiology and talent were ultimately less important for athletic performance than pharmacological enhancement. Is an athlete a body or are they the sum of their inputs? In an attempt to prove the latter, TEG attracted a decent crop of Olympic-level athletes in pure performance sports (i.e. nothing with a skill element, which you can't dope your way into), thanks to a massive prize pool and the support of investors like Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr."

"TEG is open about its intentions, which are to sell testosterone, peptides, and more right-coded versions of the stuff you can find on any direct-to-consumer telehealth service. "What I'd like to be remembered for is not bringing the Enhanced Games to life, but bringing the enhanced age into existence," founder Aron D'Souza-who has been credited with piloting Thiel's anti-Gawker legal strategy and also runs an AI-based media bias detection company-told the Wall Street Journal's Josh Robinson last October. "Who would want to be a Human 1.0 when you can exist in the world of Humans 2.0?""

"The problem is, Human 1.0 kicked ass this weekend. In the 100-meter race, two-time Olympic medalist Fred Kerley dusted the field to win with a time of 9.97 seconds. Kerley is currently serving a two-year ban for missing drug tests, though he competed at TEG clean, beating a field of dopers and talking shit afterwa"

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