Here and there, it’s been a good month for humanity—or “magnificas humanitas,” as Pope Leo XIV calls us poor featherless bipeds.
On May 25, the pope published his encyclical letter “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” It made a stern but loving case against AI fatalism, reminding humans of our intrinsic worth and cautioning against seeking transcendence in tech rather than grace.
But the human person got another boost in late May. It came from a less holy figure too: Peter Thiel, net worth $28 billion.
As the founder of omnipresent MAGA AI surveillance machine Palantir and longtime student of the Antichrist, Thiel didn’t mean to help out humanity. Benevolence is not his strong suit. He’s out to live forever and build a master race. But by failing to make the case for transhumanism with his much-hyped Enhanced Games, a pro-doping sports event, Thiel accidentally showcased what’s magnificent about humanity.
What makes Thiel’s Enhanced Games different from other competitions is that at his games, which wrapped May 24 in (where else?) Las Vegas, elite athletes were permitted to juice to the gills. They were highly incentivized to break world records, albeit with an asterisk, on the promise of six-figure purses. The Enhanced Games, in other words, were expected by one and all to showcase the possibilities of transcendence through tech and money.
“Like most bad ideas,” wrote Mitchell Duran for Yahoo Finance, “Enhanced Games was born from a mix of grievance and the belief that, with the right amount of tech, financing, and new-age, untested science, any human being can transcend any and all natural limitations.”
Tech and money sure do make a lot of damn winners in this life. In fact, in our corrupt and oligarchic era, tech and money are styled as the one true path to glory. The unaugmented are suckers and losers. It’s surprising how few people dispute that. In fact, from the time that the Enhanced Games were announced in 2023, lavishly capitalized by Thiel and one Don Trump Jr., no one doubted that a doped athlete chasing a huge purse would smash the world records of noncheating, clean ones.
After all, why else has doping been so closely policed, unless it gives an athlete a giant advantage? A chess player with an extra queen would win every game.
But not so fast.
Here are the results. They undercut the case for tech-and-money supremacy so radically that humankind should consider this a big win. Maybe—maybe—the pope’s faith in us is not misplaced.
In short, no doped athlete at the Enhanced Games broke even one record, except a swimmer who won in a buoyant polyurethane supersuit that corseted him into an underwater missile. (The supersuit has been banned by World Aquatics for 15 years.) The other doped swimmers, runners, and power lifters could barely get it together to win, let alone break* any records.
“They were nowhere close to world records,” said the online track influencer Coach Rob. “They were nowhere close to personal records.”
More surprising still: Several athletes who competed clean beat their juiced opponents. Among these are the Olympic gold medalist sprinter Fred Kerley. Kerley, who was banned from the sport until 2027 for missing drug tests, has always maintained he doesn’t dope. He was determined to run clean in the Enhanced Games too. (“I’m inclined to believe him,” said Coach Rob. “The time he ran is consistent with that.”)
Kerley says he ran for the money. But he clearly wanted to prove something too. Indeed, he proved it. When he won the 100 meters with a respectable but not earth-shaking time (9.97 seconds), he trash-talked the rest of the field—and it was hard to blame him.
“They gotta do better than that,” he said. “Train a little harder.”
The event, in the end, was deeply depressing. It was a ratings flop, and Thiel and Junior lost a lot of money; the Enhanced Games start-up lost 70 percent of its value overnight. The bet on drugs over humanity simply didn’t pay off. Sport, which should highlight the triumph of the human spirit, is unwatchable when it’s geared to highlight the triumph of lab-made biochemicals. Why not just have robots race?
But there was politics at the Enhanced Games too. In 2025, Bloomberg called the pro-doping event “the ultimate MAGA athletic competition.” It was hard to miss the point. At a time when Trump is hell-bent on cheating at elections and chases filthy wins to spite the rule of law, the defeat of MAGA Thiel’s dirty athletes by clean ones suggests that humankind’s better nature might, one day, reassert itself. Even in our fallen world.
“God gave me fast feet for a reason,” Fred Kersey said before the race. “I’m here to showcase my talent. You still have to work. Drugs aren’t going to give you an advantage if you’re not putting the work in.”
Fast feet, hard work, and of course God—the pope would approve.
