The enhanced games: revolutionizing athletics

As we bid farewell to the Paris Olympics, I would love to take the opportunity to share my fascination for an upcoming project and movement that is set to upend the status quo of competitive individual sports by leveraging science, and free market for-profit capital to push the limits of human performance and well-being.

To those well-versed in my predilections, it’s no secret I’ve harbored a whimsical passion for applying biohacking techniques for enhancing and extending performance—not only to humans, but also to the swift and sturdy athletes of the animal kingdom: equines and camels. My dream? A unique spectacle where daring owners can bypass the conventional doping codes to reveal the true potential of their noble companions. Thus, you can imagine my exhilaration when I stumbled upon a revelation from Christian Angermayer, paired with the distinguished Peter Thiel, taking my quaint idea into the stratosphere with the athletes of humankind. Announced via LinkedIn, their audacious blueprint, dubbed The Enhanced Games, promises to revolutionize the Olympic landscape. Truly, a leap from the fanciful fringes of my imagination to a groundbreaking global stage!

The modern Olympics: enhanced bureaucracy, unenhanced athletes

Through its modern copy, the Olympics has despised and penalized the use of any compounds deemed to boost performance or increase tolerance. The whole spectrum of such interventions is lumped under the “doping” banner, and as we all know, failing doping tests leads to disqualification, regardless of how willing the athletes were to engage in the doping practice. Systemic doping, like in the case of the Russian Olympic Committee scandal, has seen individual athletes pay the highest price in ruined careers, while the officials and bureaucrats behind the doping remain mostly unscathed.

This ostensible “doping ban” gives continued justification to a multibillion-dollar Olympic bureaucratic complex consisting of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the various national Olympic committees. Meanwhile, many Olympian medalists that once made millions proud are forced into poverty, and in some cases, homelessness, in their later years.

Wave your flag and neglect your athletes

Unfortunately, the bureaucracy apparatus behind the Olympics has been overstepping way beyond doping into political issues, with the athletes paying the ultimate price for the mistakes of their national Olympic committees. Russia being a prominent example; with the systematic doping by the ROC leading to a 4-year indiscriminate ban of Russian athletes. The current ban of the ROC over the Ukraine invasion will luckily still allow Russian athletes to compete as individuals in the Paris Olympics. Whether this will be practically possible for them in light of the lack of local funding, is another matter.

I originally come from Syria, whose athletes in the diaspora were given a priceless chance to shine underneath the international banner of the Refugee Olympic Athletes, most prominent among them the Mardini sisters, the inspiration behind the award-winning movie “The Swimmers” and also internationally recognized by Time Magazine.

These unique examples should change our perspective on whether the exception should become the rule here. In other words, why should athletes compete under the banner of national flags that obscure their individual talent and characteristics, in the name of “patriotism” but for the actual benefit of an endless Olympic bureaucracy whose history is far from clear from corruption, bias, and yielding to political pressure.

Even when all goes well, it could be argued that “nationalization” robs the athletes of much of the spotlight as media and layman viewers focus more on medals per country than on the unique traits of individual Olympians, many of whom, including new record setters, are forgotten within weeks of the Olympics, often never to have a chance of hitting the limelight again.

The enhanced games; for the athletes

The Enhanced Games stand to disrupt this “Olympic Stagnation” in favor of the athletes, modern science, and free capitalism.

The first is achieved by unshackling the athletes by offering real prize money that should allow them to build a viable career around their pursuit of athletic excellence. Shockingly, Olympic medals come with no monetary prize, and even when the national Olympic committees decide to honor a medalist with such a prize, the amount is meager compared to other sporting events. UK medalists receive no money prize; US gold medalists are somewhat luckier, receiving a $37,500 prize, which still fades away compared to prizes and salaries given in other professional sports, including tennis, football, motor sports, and many others.

The Enhanced Games will put an end to this unfairness towards Olympians, by offering a real salary to competing athletes and, most prominently, a whopping $1 million prize for each World Record Breaker. This emphasis on breaking world records and pushing the limits of human potential brings us to the second point: science.

The enhanced games; promoting science

With the world-renowned geneticist Prof. George Church leading its Scientific and Medical Commission, The Enhanced Games has a vision for bringing science back to its place at fueling human performance and competition towards unprecedented heights. The current ban on “doping” shockingly goes against the ethos of then ancient Olympics. As indicated on the Enhanced Games website, the Ancient Greeks were no exception to other ancient world civilizations in using medicinal plants to boost sport performance.

Science is at the base of every human endeavor, and sports should not be an exception. Beyond benefits to athletes and sports in general, science can benefit immensely from competitive spots as an arena to test, prove, and improve methods and interventions to improve health, performance, and the human condition altogether. Measuring human performance holistically, as opposed to cherry-picking biomarkers or variables, will offer medical and biological sciences an unparalleled venue of stress-testing and proving hypotheses on humans in a real life setting. Hence, turning sporting events into an ultimate experiment with millions of observers and a bulletproof record.

Enhancement beyond steroids

While the Enhanced Games website dedicates an entire section to dispelling the stigma around steroids, and while the supervised and safe use of anabolic steroids will undoubtedly factor in the enhanced games, it should by no means be the sole focus as an enhancement technique. Especially for athletes focused on preserving their bodies for a prolonged career, more holistic interventions way beyond anabolic steroids will be worthwhile to explore.

I am therefore thrilled to also notice that it also mentions further enhancements, including gene transfers, which makes me positively hopeful about the potential of the Enhanced Games to become a real testing field for gene enhancements to boost performance in the long term, and allow longer athletic careers, making them a great proxy to testing longevity interventions.

This is especially exciting due to the immense overlap between sport enhancements and longevity interventions. A recent example from the biohacking world would be follistatin gene therapy, which both promotes muscle growth, is reported to successfully improve overall health and metabolism, and shows preliminary signs of slowing down the aging process in human candidates.

The “Centenarian” Olympics

The renowned longevity physician Dr. Peter Attia has coined this catching term to describe the endeavor of reaching beyond the 9th decade of life in perfect health and with full functionality. While this remains a pivotal challenge, the next wave of treatments promises to delay the onset of age-related diseases to allow more people to navigate past any genetic predisposition reaching the 9th decade of age. This will bring age related frailty to the forefront as the next biggest challenge, since preventing age-related diseases does not automatically translate to preventing age-related decline. By aiming at prolonging athletes competitive careers, the Enhanced Games are set to provide the most relevant venue for testing the most anticipated approaches to preserving the body as we age and preventing frailty and age related decline. Hence becoming a likely embodiment, of the “The Centenarian Olympics” concept, hopefully in its most literal sense as well.