Where’s the Thrill in the Enhanced Games?

Two worthy competitors, matched in every way, enter the sea. They have riled themselves up to this dangerous feat of strength, egging each other on just for the sheer hell of it. Who will emerge triumphant, having reached the agreed-upon destination first, seems impossible to predict. But the sea is not a controlled environment.

Breca could never
move out farther or faster from me
than I could manage to move from him.
Shoulder to shoulder, we struggled on
for five nights, until the long flow
and pitch of the waves, the perishing cold,
night falling and winds from the north
drove us apart. The deep boiled up
and its wallowing sent the sea-brutes wild.

Beowulf slays no fewer than nine monsters of the deep before tumbling, exhausted, onto the strand. He has in a technical sense lost the original contest with Breca — but only by accepting, and winning, a contest with the sea itself. He does not call for a rematch: his submission to the vagaries of chance conditions has opened up a new arena in which his valor rings out even more resoundingly. If this resolution places him in an equivocal condition, initially vulnerable to the slander of jealous Unferth, it leaves him perfectly well equipped to set the record straight: I’m the best that ever was, and don’t you ever forget it.

The boundary between the leisurely exercise of human strength for its own sake and its exercise due to besetment by horrible monsters is now more carefully guarded. The chlorinated indoor pool, not the open sea, is the theater of action. Sharks and serpents are turned away at the door. The conditions of the race are carefully equalized, and World Aquatics monitors and punishes any attempt to change them in a way that confers a partial advantage: for example, by using anabolic steroids, exogenous testosterone, stimulants, and so on.

Of course, one man’s squalid doping is another man’s calibrated biohacking regimen. Funded by Peter Thiel, Christian Angermayer, and Balaji Srinivasan, a new athletic organization with pretensions to the Olympic throne has swaggered onto the scene: The Enhanced Games. No longer will humanity be hamstrung by the fretful old-man moralism of the World Anti-Doping Agency and its ilk, irrationally flinching in disgust from the many beautiful performance-enhancing drugs science has given us. In May 2026, spectators can journey to Las Vegas to see athletes in swimming, track, and weightlifting compete with all the juice the doctor orders.

Those who, from the first announcement, derived a certain perverse aesthetic pleasure from a perfect marriage of extremes — Las Vegas, the-city-that-shouldn’t-exist glitz, Alexandria of artifice, Minas Tirith of mobsters, hosting a roided-up VC-backed battle royale — are likely to be disappointed. All the copy on Enhanced.com is at pains to demonstrate how reasonable, how moderate, how, above all else, safe and responsible everything is. Not since the invention of safe sex education has there been such a concerted effort to take the frisson out of bad behavior. An interactive tile display lists the CVs of the eighteen notable doctors and academics on the medical and scientific commissions when you mouse over it.

“At Enhanced, we believe that science and medical integrity are fundamental to enhancing human performance. That’s why we have invited world-leading experts in their respective fields to form external, independent commissions dedicated to medical and scientific oversight, reinforcing our commitment to athlete safety, rigorous scientific standards, and transparency.” This mantra appears, slightly rephrased, several times on the website. One page solemnly proclaims that “Science Is Real,” just like those multi-slogan lawn signs you see in good school districts.

Aesthetic disappointments notwithstanding, the Enhanced Games crew makes some reasonable arguments on the games’ behalf. A linked 2018 paper published in the journal Sports Medicine concludes that “Doping appears remarkably widespread among elite athletes, and remains largely unchecked despite current biological testing.” This tracks with a general anecdotal consensus: at various times, in various sports, widespread doping has been an open secret (until, as with Lance Armstrong’s downfall, a particular case blows up). Whereas: “At Enhanced, we provide transparency in elite competitions by embracing these realities and providing a safer way forward. The Enhanced Games permits the use of performance enhancements, ensuring our competitions are fairer and safer for our athletes.”

A failure to adequately enforce compliance with standards, even a longstanding pattern of failed enforcement, does not necessarily obviate the standards themselves. Likewise, the reasonable suspicions immediately raised in the minds of anyone reading the headline “New VC-Backed Steroid-Enhanced Games Are Safe, Website Assures” cannot speak to the basic legitimacy or illegitimacy of performance-enhancing drugs in sport. But the argument that creating a venue for doping to occur openly and within agreed-upon limits will help reform the system — both purifying mainstream competition and better safeguarding the welfare of athletes determined to juice — is at least initially minimally plausible. It is similar to the arguments for cannabis dispensaries. Take that as you will.

It is not really as a reform measure or concession, though, that the Enhanced founders are marketing the games. It is, instead, as a triumphant achievement, as the brilliant and courageous discovery and conquest of new frontiers: “At Enhanced, we are pioneering a new era in athletic competition that embraces scientific advancements to push the boundaries of human performance.” The title of the in-house documentary on Kristian Gkolomeev’s “world record” swim is 50 Meters to History: The First Superhuman.

The Enhanced Games, from its funding to its ethos, is a creature of Silicon Valley. Performance-enhancing drugs are part and parcel of the tech world’s modus operandi. Bumble and Instagram and Instacart and Spotify, apps we use in our daily lives as well as apps we have not yet imagined — apps for choosing the optimal coffee roast for your horoscope, apps for monitoring your dog’s REM sleep activity — all these are powered by legions of software developers dutifully typing away to the beats of their Adderall-elevated pulses. This is not an accusation of any illegal activity. Once you pass the tender years, the best way to get an Adderall prescription is to first acquire an impressive résumé, a lucrative job with generous benefits, and an REI membership.

For the off-hours and the adventurous, there are psychedelics. Psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, peyote, MDMA: they expand consciousness, enhance the spiritual benefits of Jhana meditation, and bolster empathy and loving-kindness. In practical terms, empathy and loving-kindness can shake out a few different ways. One is buying anti-malarial bed nets for a thousand children. Another is raising awareness of the welfare problems afflicting a few billion shrimp. Or: refraining from hurtful personal remarks when debating whether the low-IQ masses will have any role to play in the dispensations of the God-Emperor neural network we are shortly about to create. It all depends on how you want to play it.

A helpful timeline on the Enhanced Games website attempts to place the games’ incorporation of performance-enhancing drugs not in the context of Silicon Valley culture, but of human history. We start at “Time Immemorial,” that vague and dignified epoch in which, we are informed, West Africans chewed kola nuts before running competitions and Australian Aborigines chewed pituri. We then move along to a period starting in 776 b.c., when “Roman gladiators use stimulants and hallucinogens.” This is probably not a comparison any purveyor of sport wants to dwell on for too long. Beginning around 800 a.d., “Norse Vikings ingest the stimulant bufotenin in order to increase their fighting strength twelvefold.” Imagine what they could have done on Adderall.

Not all these historical artifacts of cultural praxis are the same. The Vikings probably came as close as anyone to making a sport out of war, but their final object was still acquisition: carry off some chalices from the monasteries, some women from the houses, some peasants from the fields; keep or sell in the bustling markets in human goods; repeat. They were in this sense as much operators in the economy of necessity as the mud-stained farmers they pillaged. Their practices were governed by effectiveness in pursuit of a specific useful end.

Athletics, on the other hand, are marked as much by glorious inutility as by any other feature. Anyone with common sense can see the point in breaking your back to build a house, or plant a garden, or defend a city. Why someone should train day in and day out to run up and down a length of wooden floor for 48 minutes endeavoring to throw an orange ball through a hoop is less clear.

There was recently a type of person online who liked to post about “sportsball”: “Oh, is a sportsball happening? I see the Americans are celebrating their yearly sportsball. Ah, sportsball: the time-honored practice of grown men fighting over who gets to hold a small cylindrical ball.” And so on. This type of poster is mostly antediluvian, gone with the Reddit atheist. But the highly-sarcastic-three-day-old-baby posture of the sportsball poster had perhaps a hidden wisdom. It was attuned to something real and important in all sports, a deliberately unanswerable question: What is this really for?

Some sports start out useful: rodeo begins in the real practices of riding, roping, and managing livestock. And sports, like many other activities, can help foster and preserve capacities that prove useful in different contexts. But whatever the lineage or the indirect social benefits of sports, by the time we get down to the level of a specific activity practiced by a human, it is useless. Its only end is itself. No calves will actually be branded when the tie-down calf-roping champion wins his title. The uselessness of this contest is crowned and emphasized by the very discipline and rigor practitioners will subject themselves to in its name. Its uselessness is its appeal. Its exertions are not just the price paid to attain some good, but are themselves the goods sought; the enactment and celebration of human freedom.

Of course, the question “what are sports for?” has a sociological answer as well as a philosophical one. You could be forgiven for mentioning the obvious: sports are for making lots and lots of money. The Dallas Cowboys are worth 12 billion dollars. Shohei Ohtani’s contract with the Dodgers has him earning $700 million over the life of the deal. Comcast NBCUniversal acquired the rights to broadcast the Olympics for a cool $3 billion. Money drives sports at all levels: from the poor saps who manage to parlay one free DraftKings bet into losses equivalent to a modest home down payment, to the parents driving younger and younger children to travel league games in hopes of someday securing them a college scholarship and — now that colleges have begun paying players — the chance of real money. The Enhanced Games are no different, promising appearance fees, prize money, and bonuses up to a million dollars for setting new world records.

Perhaps more to the point, there are ways for you to pay: Click “Get Enhanced,” and for as little as $19 you can secure a spot to access a testosterone protocol of your very own. After completing an online medical intake form and meeting with a telehealth clinician, “your prescription is shipped directly and discreetly to your door,” just like those Millennial-branded direct-to-consumer Viagra startups.

The massive monetary incentives on all sides distort sports by undermining the necessary gratuity at their heart; at the extremes, they destroy them. There is nothing more abject, more demoralized and demoralizing, than a boxer who takes a dive for cash. But on the other hand, in some cases, external incentives and scripted impurities become part of the form itself. Kayfabe is a defining feature of professional wrestling, that theatrical, hybrid, subspecies of a sport whose lineage stretches back to Plato’s gymnasium. You can remove external incentives from the Mesoamerican ballgame on humanitarian grounds, but if no losers ever have their heads cut off, is ōllamalīztli still ōllamalīztli?

There is a certain arbitrariness baked into the whole affair. The height of the hoop is ten feet, not eleven. If the ball goes here, it’s in play; if it goes an inch to the left, it’s out of bounds. It is hard to say that any given practice or set of parameters can’t be incorporated into a sport: in many cases, it can’t, until it can. Shots from a certain place on the court count for two points, until they count for three. To a child’s eye, softball is just baseball, except that it’s an entirely different sport.

So the Enhanced Gamers are right: there is no inherent reason supplemental testosterone can’t have a place in sports. There’s no reason we shouldn’t play football in mech suits. The question is, do we want to?

The Enhanced Game’s partisans have a refuge in the arbitrariness of sports, in the fact that we create the parameters for which physical contest needs to be legible. No one can tell them that there is a rule against doping handed down to Moses, because nothing about sports has ever been written in stone. But they seem unaware or unable to admit that this arbitrariness cuts against their own ambitions as well. In 50 Meters to History, Kristian Gkolomeev, after submitting to a training regimen that includes performance-enhancing drugs, beats César Cielo’s world record 50-meter freestyle swim by .02 seconds. He has made history. He has broken the record. The music swells.

Except, of course, he has done no such thing. The World Aquatics Organization’s furious disavowal of Gkolomeev’s record is also descriptive truth. Gkolomeev may have set a new record in a new variation of the sport of swimming, perhaps a legitimate and worthwhile new variation. But under the most generous reading, he has not broken any records set by previous swimmers, because those records were set under different parameters and must be broken under (as far as possible) those same parameters. We do not watch swimming to empirically discover the maximum speed at which the human body can move through water. We watch to see swimmers vie with each other.

Even more than uselessness and arbitrariness, what defines sports is competition. Sports are based on the desire to surpass another in excellence, even if that “other” is merely an earlier version of you. This is what distinguishes sport from art and other types of activity similarly characterized by uselessness. Art may be inherently social, like sports; it may require at least an imagined audience. But its end is beauty. You can draw connections between one object or oeuvre and another, you can endow prizes and watch artists knife each other to win them, but beauty ultimately defies comparison. Each act of creation is, to some degree, complete unto itself and stands or fails on its own terms. Sports, on the other hand, may be beautiful (basketball) or hideous (cycling), but beauty is not the organizing point. The comparison is the point.

For real comparison, you need peers. You need people who can plausibly win against you, who stand on the same footing. You need a Breca, shoulder to shoulder, struggling on. Sport is like war only if war could be fought both with and against your friends, precisely because they are your friends. If you are in the superficially attractive but lonely and frustrating position of being peerless, you must provide your own peers: you wind up competing against yourself.

In an athletic competition, your primary peers are those of similar ability in the same sport: those against whose efforts you will succeed or fail. But you have a secondary group of peers as well. They do not actually compete with you, but provide a cloud of witnesses, a context in which your activity can be coherent. This group of peers comprises all those sharing your human embodiment. They are why, despite the arbitrariness baked into sports, it is unlikely that a competition based on who can press a button with their elbow the most times in an hour will ever get much traction. Sports are interesting insofar as they are elaborations based in common and basic human movements and bodily exertions — running, jumping, pushing, hanging, squatting, swimming, swinging, heaving, throwing. We all have human bodies similar enough that the achievements of great athletes are intelligible and thrilling to those of us who will never share them.

This is also why we organize sports into leagues based on the differences in embodiment collectively recognized as important to a human life: disability, youth, old age, maleness, femaleness. Even if the absolute performance advantage will almost always go to the young adult able-bodied male, we recognize that different forms of a shared human embodiment create different groups of peers who can compete for excellence in meaningful ways, and whose exemplars it is pleasurable to discover and worthy to honor. Sports are for everyone because they are by nature competitive, because peer striving is more fundamental to what sports are than absolute achievement.

Real competition between peers is in fact part of the reason drugs are banned, why they are definitionally considered a cheating mechanism. Steroids can only confer a relative advantage if not everyone is availing themselves, or not to the same degree. Once everyone is out and proud on the nad-shrinkers, you’re right back where you started. If the Enhanced Games really got what they say they want, if they became the premier world sporting organization, they would be left answering that perennial question in sports: What, exactly, has been the point of all this?

If the Enhanced Games really just wants to radically transform athletics into a quantitative rather than interpersonal affair — to place that .02 absolute gain at the heart of what sports are — well, good luck. I’m sure someone will find that interesting.

But perhaps there is another point.

In sports, a particular way of being human in a human body gives rise to a distinct athletic peer group. Perhaps the hope is that this process can be reversed. Perhaps by creating a new type of athletic peer group, the enhancers will be able to birth a new way of being human in a human body. For the enhancers to succeed, it is not just this or that swimmer who needs to adopt anabolic steroids or exogenous testosterone as part of their life. It’s you. Only if “enhancement” is a widespread physical condition do the Enhanced Games become something worth watching. You are the pool to be chlorinated.

“What can we do with our bodies?” will no longer be the question sports answers. “What can be done to our bodies?” will replace it. The Enhanced Games PR team would doubtless here point out that high-level sports is already a game of incessant and fussy athlete management. Well, how far should it be? Maybe we have already erred too far on the side of athletes as expensive technologies to be refined by their handlers and against the idea of athletes as exceptional emissaries from a shared physical life of action and striving in the world. Maybe we could discover something worthwhile in the ebbs and flows of that shared physical life: see that the strength of a father, poured out into the life of his people and limned by the waxing moon of his own mortal end, is different from the brash and beautiful strength of the young champion.

If we commit to the opposite route, if we decide to valorize this absolute quantitative advantage the enhancers are so desperately seeking and peddling as the height and end of human physical capacity, then what might once have been a measured intervention to preserve certain important goods, under certain adverse circumstances, will increasingly become the condition of life. Everyone will have the pills they need: pills for erections, pills for joy, pills for strength. We will be well taken care of, we will be duly grateful to the dispensers, and perhaps we will be happy. But we will not be able to say with Beowulf, facing the final dragon and his own doom as an old man undaunted:

I risked my life
often when I was young. Now I am old,
but as king of the people I shall pursue this fight
for the glory of winning.