The same reactionary wingnuts who used to fret a lot about hormones and sports have abruptly pivoted. Not long ago, figures like Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr. were hell-bent on keeping testosterone, the elixir of their gods, in its gendered lane. Now they want athletes of all sexes to surge with male hormones. They’ve become pro-doping.
Thus the Enhanced Games (yep, that’s the name), nominally a steroids-addled sports event but in fact a eugenics experiment venture-capitalized with max virility by Thiel and Don Jr.. For extra manly pow, the event’s CEO is Aron D’Souza, a Thiel pal who spearheaded Thiel’s crusade against Gawker Media for the crime of press freedoms.
At the Enhanced Games, which are scheduled for next May in Las Vegas, athletes are urged to take as many performance-enhancing drugs as their mortal flesh can bear. The founders, as WIRED reported in June, believe their experiment aligns closely with RFK Jr.’s MAHA initiative.
But what can we humans bear? This is an open question. Performance-enhancing drugs, which are mostly anabolic-androgenic steroids, have been linked to a gruesome array of disorders: cardiovascular, psychiatric, metabolic, endocrinologic, neurologic, infectious, hepatic, renal, and musculoskeletal. Also, of course, death. A recent study of 1,189 young Danish men who had been sanctioned for doping revealed that 33 of them died after 11 years.
No matter. D’Souza, Thiel, and Don Jr. are betting that what does not kill their steroid-swollen guinea pigs will make them stronger. And faster. The doped athletes will compete in swimming, track, and weightlifting. Throughout, the athletes’ bodies will be subject to scientific study. Until or unless their organs burst (can the enhanced autopsy business be next?), they’ll be Übermenschen.
The games are not “a sporting project,” says D’Souza. “This is a whole-of-humanity project.” Indeed, the games are a flashy pretext for an experiment on humans that S.S. doctor Josef Mengele might have dreamed up. Peter Thiel, who, like RFK Jr. and Joe Rogan, takes hormones to build muscle mass, shows enthusiasm for the Enhanced Game’s transhumanist goals, which include, in D’Souza’s words, the need to “overcome the weakness of our feeble biological forms and become something more.”
How is fascist history repeating itself again? “A hundred percent the reason [the Enhanced Games] are happening in the U.S. is because Trump won,” Christian Angermayer, a German biotech investor and co-founder of the Enhanced Games, told WIRED recently.
But there’s a hitch. It turns out to be hard to get elite athletes in their prime to surrender their bodies and reputations for the privilege of flamboyantly cheating in their best events. The value proposition to them, after all, is ambiguous: a shot at a record that will come with a stigmatizing asterisk. Just as Newsmax hires disgraced journalists, the Enhanced Games early on approached doper cyclist Lance Armstrong about investing. He said no. So they were off to a rocky start.
Then, in late 2024, James Magnussen, an Australian swimmer and former world champion, agreed to “juice to the gills” in a quest to break the record* for the 50-meter freestyle. Coming out of a six-year retirement, Magnussen started shooting testosterone, of course, as well as peptides and other hormones. In February, profoundly swole, Magnussen swam a 50-meter freestyle. This exhibition was supposed to prove the concept of the Enhanced Games: Liberated from prohibitions on doping, its swimmers would be the fastest in the world. But Magnussen missed the record by almost two seconds. He didn’t even hit his personal, clean best.
In April, though, the Games notched a drugged win: Kristian Gkolomeev, a doped Bulgarian swimmer, did beat* the 50-meter freestyle record. His rigged achievement won him $1 million from Enhanced Games, which pays doped athletes for the risks they take to body and soul. Gkolomeev’s record* is not recognized by World Aquatics.
Last month, Megan Romano, an American world swimming champ, became the first female athlete to commit to the games. Like the rest of the athletes, she will be encouraged to take PEDs. She will then be chromosomally tested to see if she’ll compete in the XX or XY category. If she reaches the world record in the 50-meter freestyle, she’ll get $1 million. Last week, the Enhanced Games got perhaps its biggest get yet: Fred Kerley, the American world champ and two-time Olympic medalist in the 100-meter dash. Kerley was already facing a suspension for failing to provide his whereabouts and thus dodging drug testing; observers speculate that he’s motivated to join Enhanced Games by a cocktail of DGAF and money.
Transhumanism, as an idea, was first proposed in 1957 by Julian Huxley, a leading biologist in the British eugenics movement who encouraged “genetically superior” people to reproduce. Thiel, a pronatalist who has invested in fertility tech to optimize genetics, has many of the same ideas. So the Enhanced Games is just another of Thiel’s many transhumanist projects. But these days Thiel often seems to want to end humans as much as enhance them.
When asked by The New York Times whether he’d like to see humankind endure, he paused before saying, “I don’t know.” Then he added, sighing, “Yeah—transhumanism. The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body.… A transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, penis into a vagina. But we want more transformation than that. The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural, it’s: Man, it’s so pathetically little.”
Poor Thiel. Maybe it’s time he took a break from eugenics, race science, and the Antichrist. He could try the humanities, disciplines that—though Thiel dismissed them in The New Criterion as “transparently ridiculous”—exist entirely to explore human frailty. He’d find an excellent transhumanist cautionary tale in Tennyson’s “Tithonus,” in which a handsome Trojan prince wins eternal life but not eternal youth. He ages and decays forever: “only cruel immortality / Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms / Here at the quiet limit of the world.”
