Gay billionaire Peter Thiel is investing in The Enhanced Games, a modern reinvention of the Olympic Games that allows competitors to use performance-enhancing drugs. Thiel and other venture capitalists funding the project hope it will revolutionize competitive athletics. Notably, the project also co-opts LGBTQ+-inclusive politics to make people rethink anti-drug stigma in sports and discredit the International Olympic Committee.
The venture’s website states that performance-enhancing drugs and other medical advancements have long played an “integral” role in “unlocking human potential” in sports. The site calls athletic drug testing a “racist” and oppressive form of “imperialist Neo-Luddism” — a resistance to modern technologies — pushed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the U.S. and World Anti-Doping Agencies.
“Sports can be safer without drug testing,” the site says. “Since the IOC’s ban on performance enhancements in 1967, scientific progress has floundered, and the athletes who strive for peak performance and the scientists who want to unlock athletic potential have been vilified, discriminated against, and oppressed.”
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The Enhanced Games’ founder, gay lawyer Aron D’Souza, said, “We see this as the civil rights struggle of our generation, which is the liberation of science.” He compared discrimination faced by athletes taking performance-enhancing drugs to the stigma of being gay “50 years ago.”
The idea isn’t entirely new. The X Games, for example — which features skateboarding, BMX, motocross, and skiing events —doesn’t drug test its athletes, but it doesn’t widely advertise this fact.
“We fundamentally believe that the choice to use enhancements is a personal one,” the site continues. “Words like ‘enhanced’ and ‘doping’ have negative connotations…. These terms have been reclaimed in recent years and are becoming increasingly used, particularly by younger athletes, as an empowering way of describing oneself…. Embracing science… is not ‘cheating’; it is heroic.”
However, it’s unclear if the Enhanced Games would allow competitors to use some drugs that remain illegal in the U.S. and abroad, and it’s also unclear if it would allow transgender athletes to compete. Though the IOC has allowed trans athletes to compete under certain guidelines, some international sports governing bodies have increasingly banned trans competitors or moved them into undersupported “open categories.”
Regardless, the Enhanced Games’ website includes a section on “inclusive” and de-stigmatizing language around drug use — calling the term “doping” a slur. It also has a section advising athletes who want to “come out” about their drug use.
“We thank the LGBTQIA+ Movement for their brave fight for inclusion and equal rights,” the site says. “We acknowledge that we have been inspired by the valiant efforts of this community.”
While some performance-enhancing drugs, like steroids, can harm the body, the Enhanced Games’ creators say they intend to create a “full-system medical pre-competition screening protocol” to ensure participant safety. The medical screening will involve an electrocardiogram, blood tests, genomic sequencing, and magnetic resonance imaging of athletes’ brains “to build up a full picture of the athlete’s health, and allow athletes to make an informed decision about whether they are safe to compete,” its website states.
The investors seek to create “a high-impact yet cost-efficient games” that are entirely privately funded (rather than subsidized by taxpayers), feature only events that are most popular among social media users, and make use of pre-existing athletic facilities (rather than requiring host cities to spend millions building new ones). The games’ profits would then be shared with the athletes, its website says, though it won’t release financial details about that until later this year.
Athletes don’t get paid just for attending the Olympics, according to Sporting News. While athletes can sometimes receive funding from patrons and sponsors, they typically don’t get paid unless they win a medal: A gold medal can earn an athlete $37,500, a silver medal can earn them $22,500, and a bronze $15,000.
The Enhanced Games’ site encourages people to help de-stigmatize athletic drug use by pushing for drug-inclusive policies in collegiate and professional sports, updating Wikipedia entries to remove “archaic and harmful” anti-doping language in sports articles, and establishing an Enhanced World Records of athletics achievements made on performance-enhancing drugs.
“The Enhanced Games hereby formally recognizes any and all world records challenged by the World Anti-Doping Agency and reinstates them as Enhanced World Records,” the site states.
However, the Enhanced Games website also reveals a second agenda: delegitimizing the Olympics and the IOC. One section entitled “Leak to Us” says that “misogyny and sexism are rampant within the Olympic apparatus” and that the IOC has been “subject to numerous bribery investigations.” It encourages people to “submit all forms of content that reveal the IOC’s dysfunction.”
Thiel is infamous in the queer community for suing the gossip website Gawker out of existence and funding anti-LGBTQ+ Republican political candidates like former President Donald Trump. But he has also long invested in revolutionary “disruptor” technologies: He was an early investor in Facebook, co-founded PayPal, and funds developments in the fields of artificial intelligence, life extension, and seasteading (living permanently on the ocean, outside the reach of nations’ laws).
As such, his investment in the Enhanced Games may also reflect his desire to profit off of an expansion of performance-enhancing medical advancements and the creation of an alternate “enhanced” world of professional and collegiate sports, gradually building a competitive empire that can rival the anti-drug Olympics.