UTK Special 2/1/24

Enhance This

Peter Thiel and partners have announced something they’re calling the “Enhanced Games.” Think the Olympics, without all the annoying drug testing. It sounds more like a SNL skit than something a bunch of billionaires and bro-hackers are putting together, but it appears to be real.

In fact, it appears very real. There’s money and merch, but where this worries me is that Thiel’s group appears to be trying to make this a movement. Instead of vilifying doping and accepting the WADA code, Thiel appears to be adopting the language of DEI that many on the right are so against.

If successful, Thiel’s movement and games don’t just make for a Slap Fight style tv spectacle, but gives a proving ground for new enhancements and incentive to athletes to try them. Imagine being a top level track athlete, but you’ve been stuck behind Shelly-Ann Frasier-Pryce for a decade. Pryce won gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics in the 100m sprint, then has kept winning up to today. She finished third in the 2023 World Championships and is set to go to Paris. I wasn’t able to find the list of all the people who have finished out of the medals behind Frasier-Pryce and others, but there has to be someone who’s thought “I can’t beat them.”

There are obviously sports where enhancements will help and others where we may find that they don’t. Will we see EPO in marathons? East German-era steroids in weightlifting? Beyond the PEDs, will we see tech advancements? Someone out there could beat Michael Phelps if he had flippers, or maybe an engine installed in his ass.