The Enhanced Games Were A Predictably Stupid Failure

The Enhanced Games, a marketing stunt for direct-to-consumer steroids dressed up in a thin Olympic disguise, were held this past weekend, on the far north end of the Las Vegas strip. The event was a miserable failure on every front it supposedly contested, serving as neither an effective marketing stunt nor a worthwhile athletic competition. If anything, it was a testament to the limited power of steroids.

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?"