What a week indie-disco darlings The Killers have ahead of them.
Somebody told me they were playing the closing party at the Enhanced Games this Sunday in Las Vegas. And then, for reasons unknown, they head to Budapest to do the opening ceremony at the Champions League final next Saturday.
So, that is one gig at a completely unnecessary addition to the sports calendar, created by corporate interests for the sole intention of flogging products to people who do not really like sport… and another at the Enhanced Games.
I am joking, of course. Opening ceremonies for football finals are not that bad and, if you really dislike them, you can skip them and start watching when the actual sport starts.
The Enhanced Games — or the ‘Doping Olympics’, as it has been christened — is the other way around, as the pseudo-sport comes first and then the serious business of selling muscles and eternal life to looksmaxxers and tech bros begins.
For those who have no idea what I am talking about, the Enhanced Games is a multi-sport event that will be held on Sunday evening in a temporary venue built in the parking lot of Resorts World Las Vegas, a huge hotel and casino complex. A fitting location, then, for games of chance.
When it was first announced in June 2023, its co-founder Aron D’Souza, an Australian venture capitalist, said the plan was to challenge the hypocrisy of the “corrupt” Olympic Games by letting athletes take performance-enhancing drugs so they could take risks with their health for our entertainment… sorry, no, that was what everyone else said. D’Souza said it was about pushing the boundaries of human potential, the power of science and defying ageing.
Anyway, the original plan was for the first edition to take place in 2024 with hundreds of top athletes competing in combat sports, gymnastics, track and field, swimming and weightlifting. That timetable slipped slightly, as did the scale of the event. Sunday’s great leap forward will involve 42 athletes trying to break world records for big cash prizes in eight events:
- Strongman: deadlift
- Swimming: 50m and 100m butterfly; 50m and 100m freestyle
- Track: 100m
- Weightlifting: clean & jerk; snatch
In terms of names you may have heard of, getting Australian swimmer James Magnussen to come out of retirement was an early coup, as he won three world titles in the early 2010s, but American sprinter Fred Kerley is probably the biggest signing, as he won the 100m at the 2022 world championships in Eugene, Oregon.
There are some other fast swimmers involved, including British Olympic silver medalist Ben Proud, but nobody most of us would recognise out in the wild.
Fred Kerley is one of the Games’ most high-profile signings (Andrej Isakovic/AFP via Getty Images)
Actually, that is not quite true — many of us would do a double-take if we saw Thor Bjornsson in the supermarket, as the Icelandic strongman also played Ser Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane in Game of Thrones. In his Enhanced Games role, he will be trying to break his deadlift world record of 510 kilograms. Do that and he earns a bonus of $250,000 (£186,000).
Bar a couple of athletes who are taking part in the proceedings without “enhancement”, presumably to act as the control group, the competitors have spent the last couple of months in Abu Dhabi, where they have been training, eating healthily, sleeping well and taking a cocktail of drugs that includes blood-booster EPO, human growth hormone, various peptides, lots of stimulants and testosterone.
Will it work? Well, we know it has worked hundreds of times before when taken illegally, so we can be fairly sure that doping is effective, although this is not doping, of course. Doping is cheating and these guys are not cheating. Not cheating the rules of this competition, anyway.
And, as the Enhanced Games’ organisers repeatedly point out, they are only taking drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the relevant U.S. regulator, and they are doing so under medical supervision.
We also know that the Enhanced Games’ short cuts can work because Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev beat the then-world record for the 50m freestyle at a private event last year. His time of 20.89 seconds was 0.02 seconds quicker than the previous best set by Cesar Cielo, the Brazillian.
Enhanced Games athlete Kristian Gkolomeev broke the 50m world record (Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images)
Australian star Cam McEvoy has since lowered that mark to 20.88 seconds but the reigning Olympic champion expects someone will go even quicker on Sunday, particularly as Gkolomeev and his enhanced friends will be giving themselves an extra boost by wearing the hi-tech swimsuits World Aquatics banned in 2009.
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald recently, McEvoy said: “Within the Enhanced Games camp, I’m sure they will think of it as a world record. Outside of that camp, no one is going to see it in that light.
“It’s in the same ballpark as throwing on a set of fins and doing some crazy time. That double whammy (drugs plus polyurethane) is going to basically make any time not really accessible to any recognition outside of the Enhanced camp.”
McEvoy is right. There is the type of sport that the rest of the world cares about, and then there is what will happen in front of an invited audience of 2,500 influencers and investors on Sunday. One attracts sponsors and broadcasters willing to pay for the product, and the other does not.
If you do want to watch the juiced-up races and Mr Brightside, it will be streamed live, free of charge, on Roku in the U.S. and Kick, Rumble, Twitch and YouTube everywhere else.
But a lack of commercial and media-rights revenue for this inaugural festival of superhumanity does not mean the Enhanced Games will not be a success. On the contrary, I suspect it is going to do very well indeed, but mainly as an online pharmacy.
This part of the story goes back to late 2022, when D’Souza first started talking about his idea to take on the Olympics with friends, the most significant being Peter Thiel, the German-American tech investor and libertarian who he had met during American wrester Hulk Hogan’s landmark lawsuit against Gawker Media, the owners of the eponymous gossip blog and several other websites.
Hulk Hogan played an unusual role in the development of the Enhanced Games (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Confused? It’s OK, none of this appears to make much sense at first… and then it all makes total sense.
Hulk Hogan, whose real name was Terry Bollea, sued Gawker for invading his privacy when it published parts of a sex tape featuring him and the wife of a radio personality called Bubba the Love Sponge. If you do not believe me, look it up.
Hogan filed the case in 2013 and won in 2016, with the court awarding him $140million in damages. That was more than enough to shut down Gawker, which filed for bankruptcy and reached a $31m settlement with the wrestler.
Thiel, whose run of tech-investment hits had started with PayPal in 1998, provided $10m to fund Hogan’s case. Why? Well, he later described it as “one of the greater philanthropic things I have done”, as he was no fan of Gawker’s output. It had outed him as gay in 2007.
The D’Souza connection is that it was him who brought the idea to Thiel to fund Hogan to get Gawker.
Got it? OK, fast forward to 2022, and these champions of truth are looking for their next dragon to slay. For D’Souza, that is the International Olympic Committee and World Anti-Doping Agency.
By early 2024, D’Souza had already attracted backing from Thiel, German biotech entrepreneur Christian Angermayer and Bitcoin miner Balaji Srinivasan, who were then joined over the next year by Donald Trump Jr’s fund 1789 Capital, Saudi royal Khaled bin Alwaleed Al Saud and Olympic-rowers-turned-crypto-investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.
Christian Angermayer is one of the Enhanced Games’ major backers (Greg Doherty/Getty Images for Enhanced )
But the real action took place earlier this month, when Enhanced Ltd merged with A Paradise Acquisition Corp in what is known as a de-SPAC transaction. This involves a private company (Enhanced), merging with a listed shell company (Paradise), to make the private firm public.
In this case, the new entity was renamed Enhanced Group Inc, re-registered as a Texas-based business and moved from the Nasdaq to the New York Stock Exchange. And, as is customary for a new entrant to the exchange, the Enhanced team, including D’Souza, German bitcoin exec Maximilian Martin, who replaced him as Enhanced’s CEO last year, and Kerley were allowed to ring the NYSE’s closing bell on May 8.
The stock, which trades under the ticker symbol ENHA, opened at just over $8 a share and immediately leaped 21 per cent to a high of $10.17, a price that briefly valued the company at $1.2billion. It then lost 60 per cent of its value over the next week, before settling at its price at the time of writing of around $5.50.
Not bad for a start-up sports competition with no broadcast deal, sponsors or ticket income. But that is not what will ever give Thiel & Co the returns they are seeking. The asterisked world records, content creators and Vegas after-party are the sprinkled nuts and whipped cream: the “direct-to-consumer digital telehealth platform”, as it is described on Enhanced’s website, is the ice cream.
And the store is open for business. If you are interested in “personalized treatments and guided pathways built around your unique biology”, step right in, the website has Enhanced-branded fat-loss jabs, testosterone and pills to make you sleep better, look younger and, so it claims, slow down the effects of ageing.
You can buy some of these products as easily as an Enhanced sweatshirt ($90) or cap ($35), but others will require a prescription. Hurry, though, there is a 28 per cent discount on a six-month course of testosterone injections ($169/month)
Martin was all over the business channels on May 8 delivering this message. In interviews with Bloomberg, Fox, MSN, Yahoo and others, the lantern-jawed exec explained that Enhanced is two businesses, the annual sports thing, with added sports stuff, and then the “second part of our business, which is the ‘live Enhanced’ consumer platform.”
That is the one that matters.
I probably should have mentioned earlier but every athlete, coach and doctor who has signed up to be involved in the Enhanced Games has been banned by their sport’s international federations. Burn the ships. There is no going back.
So, by all means, enjoy the entertainment on Sunday. I am sure co-hosts, former NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho and 48-going-on-18-year-old, bio-hacking, tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, will smile like they mean it. As will former Team GB hockey star turned TV presenter Sam Quek, who has signed up as a roving reporter.
But just remember, once you have witnessed all those things that they’ve done, we are all human, nobody lives forever and the NBA and NHL play-offs are on another channel.
