The sporting world’s reaction to the games has been, unsurprisingly, negative. Anna Meares, Australian medalist in cycling at four Summer Olympics and delegation head at Paris 2024, called the games “a joke, unfair and unsafe.” The International Olympic Committee Athletes Commission called the event “a betrayal of everything we stand for,” arguing that the games “undermine the integrity of sport and the responsibility athletes hold as role models in society.”

The sporting establishment’s backlash hasn’t stopped organizers from luring a number of former Olympic medalists, including British silver medalist swimmer Ben Proud, American former Olympic record-holding swimmer Cody Miller, and American medal-winning sprinter Fred Kerley. While the threat of being banned from existing top-level competitions like the Olympics and World Championships over doping will ward off many potential competitors, the games have attracted aging stars and those on the periphery of Olympic glory. Hunter Armstrong, a two-time Olympic gold medalist still in his prime, is partaking without using performance-enhancing drugs and hoping to continue his Olympic career afterward, in a test case for regulatory agencies like World Aquatics.

Why risk slamming the door on the most vaunted competitions, to join in an upstart alternative in the blazing Vegas sun? Money. Organizers have freed up $25 million in total prize money for the fifty participating athletes, including $1 million bonuses for any record breakers in the 100-meter sprint or 50-meter freestyle. While the athletes are undoubtedly dedicated to pushing the envelope of human accomplishment, millions in prize money probably doesn’t hurt.

Though Enhanced presents both the games and its “health care” line with a glossy, cutting edge sheen, it’s also attempting to leverage interest in a market open to the crude masculinity unleashed by embracing performance-enhancing drugs. A two-hour promo session on Joe Rogan’s podcast won over the sharpest mind in the manosphere, with the host raving, “This all very exciting, I love the idea of it, I love the potential.”

Organizers are attempting to thread the needle between longevity-obsessed science and the skeptical wing of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. The open contradiction that the health care rabbit-hole right’s gruff rejection of modernity happens to be funded and platformed by some of the richest people on the planet hasn’t slowed anything down. As with much on the political right, real issues plaguing the corporate-dominated health care system have been met with a hyperindividualistic consumerist response that creates more troubles than it solves. You’re concerned about the health care industry’s overweening influence: so chug unpasteurized milk and eat heaping bowls of meat resembling what you’d feed your beloved dog before putting it down. The capitalist self-optimization pushed online through any number of wellness rackets all too often degrades into physically or mentally destructive behavior.

But the games aren’t just a reflection of the political right’s oft-contradictory positions on human health and self-betterment. As usual, it’s all about selling snake oil — in this case the range of peptides, testosterone, and other supplements designed to “support longevity and strength.” Spinning off into an online pharmacy for people obsessed with living forever has proven lucrative, with Enhanced recently valued at $1.2 billion.

While selling peptides may seem like cynically hopping on a trend to hawk largely understudied health wares to people tricked by their algorithm, $189 for a month’s worth of injectable peptides “supporting sleep, recovery & energy” is a total steal considering it includes an online consultation with a licensed doctor. It certainly seems a fair enough price when immortality-chasing Bryan Johnson is selling $40 bottles of olive oil that are literally called “Snake Oil.”

While organizers argue performance-enhancing drugs will let athletes unleash their true human potential, it also removes sports’ veneer of fairness and equality (and respectability). In a world where everyone visibly rips one another off and cheats at every opportunity, doing it as brazenly as possible, as opposed to trying to hide it, has become the point. And for an ultrarich set like Thiel (who famously argued that “competition is for losers”), it’s no small wonder that whoever can amass the most cash, or consume the most growth hormones, deserves to be crowned greatest.

Just as MAHA has arisen out of a bastardized response to real issues plaguing the health care industry, there are plenty of actual problems in the sporting world. Colossal sporting organizations like the IOC or FIFA largely exist to squeeze as much as possible out of beloved sporting events. Actually competing at the top level is a serious financial burden for athletes, many of whom are household names for a couple of weeks during the Olympics and return to obscurity and financial precarity for the rest of the year. This too makes Enhanced’s overflowing peptide purse more attractive.

And while openly taking steroids has obvious ramifications for competitive fairness, high-profile controversies around doping — from the Olympics to cycling — fuel a sense that many athletes are likely doping anyway. It’s even been confirmed by anti-doping authorities. Meanwhile, massive advances in sports science and equipment technology have blurred the line between individual greatness and the “right” kind of enhancements. Instead of trying to level the playing field, a libertarian approach to regulation only intensifies existing disparities.

It also opens up a new set of ethical questions around participant health. While the long-term ramifications of pumping yourself full of steroids and supplements aren’t yet completely clear, and the games market themselves as being under tight scientific and medical supervision, a wide array of institutions have sounded the alarm about serious health risks to athletes. The World Anti-Doping Agency has called the Enhanced Games “dangerous and irresponsible,” while researchers at the University of Birmingham found that performance enhancing drug use can have “unpredictable, potentially life-changing, or even fatal” effects.

This is where the Thiel set’s transhumanist obsession degrades into anti-humanism. The guy who struggled to articulate whether humanity should endure clearly doesn’t care about any humans besides himself. If hawking a bunch of drugs he’d probably never take shaves years off competitors’ lives, he couldn’t care less. What embodies freedom more than the ability to choose to pump your body full of poison for the chance to win a lot of cash? Organizers have managed to sell the idea that humans may indeed be able to live forever, despite it being fairly clear they only think this could — or should — be possible for a certain set of people. Using athletes as lab rats, regardless of what it means for their health, is par for the course for some of the most cartoonishly evil guys on the planet.

In an increasingly inequitable society with eroding social mobility, sports stood as one of the last bastions of meritocracy. The rich freaks are trying to ruin this, too — in a way that fits with how they’ve shaped the rest of our lives. There is no longer any shame in scamming your way to the top. It’s better to show it off, from Donald Trump’s pump-and-dump insider trading empire to an increasingly speculative global economy.

It’s no surprise that the billionaires that have brought us this era have no moral or competitive qualms with openly cheating. It’s what makes them elite, and — they reason — anyone who doesn’t take the opportunity to do the same deserves to fail. Far from just a weird curiosity, the Enhanced Games reflect our overlords’ idea of achievement in life. If you don’t like it, you’ll be left behind like the rest of the plebs.