Damn these vampires
The wealthy "biohackers" behind the Enhanced Games admitted they don't even really like sports. That might be why they misunderstood the whole concept so completely.
I know I’ve cultivated a certain kind of social media algorithm for myself because back in May I was essentially force-fed video clips and updates from the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas. If you missed this because you are normal, the whole idea behind these Olympic-style events was to see what human beings could actually do if they were allowed and encouraged to engage in the kind of doping that most sports go to great lengths to prevent and punish.
Weightlifting. Swimming. The hundred-meter dash. Basically the events that most people totally ignore except when there are Olympic medals on the line, this is what the Enhanced Games focused on with the goal of proving that world records could be broken left and right if we’d only consent to unlock the full steroidal power of human potential.
It did not succeed. These games produced only one new world record (not officially recognized, of course) in swimming. Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev got a $1 million bonus for breaking the previous record in the 50-meter freestyle, but he was also allowed to wear one of the so-called “super suits” that are banned in the Olympics, so who can say whether it was the dope or the suit that did it?
Even the weightlifting events, where you’d think records would be the easiest to break with some help in a vial, saw zero new records. Thor Björnsson, who you might remember as The Mountain on “Game of Thrones,” failed to break his own world record in the deadlift, despite having previously announced his intention to juice his brains out for this. Fred Kerley, the runner who won the 100-meter sprint, said he was competing clean. He also finished first with a time that would have put him in last place at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
(How about enhance your way into a better suit, brah)
This had to be disappointing for Aron D’Souza, the businessman and self-proclaimed philosopher who founded these games. But then, as he told The New Yorker for a story on the Enhanced Games, he’s not even really much of a sports fan. None of the wealthy investors — a group that includes cartoonishly evil billionaire Peter Thiel and his German billionaire buddy Christian Angermayer — really seem to care about sports much at all.
One person who attended a talk by D’Souza at an academic conference where he pitched the idea for the Enhanced Games told The New Yorker: “He did not talk so much about sport. He was talking about a future where we would not die because we have found medicine that would allow us to live eternally.”
Basically this whole thing was really about a) pushing their biohacking, live forever bullshit, and b) selling “peptides, supplements, and testosterone over the counter and by prescription, to the public” via their newly launched company Enhancement Group. They might have felt like they needed sports as the vehicle for all this because maybe someone finally told them that rich dorks playing chemistry set with their own bodies does not exactly inspire the rest of us.
Consider Bryan Johnson, who attended the event. You might know Johnson as that live forever asshole who’s super weird about tracking his own erections and also gets infusions of his son’s blood. Apparently another part of his whole deal is avoiding the sun, which led to this visual image:
“Bryan Johnson had signed up to do the color commentary. The temperature was in the mid-nineties. Johnson held an umbrella and had on sunglasses that looked like the goggles scientists once wore during nuclear tests.”
So, just to recap, the guy who took his son’s blood now avoids sunlight while enjoying an opulent lifestyle that he hopes will enable him to live on indefinitely. Soooo Dracula, basically. The man is aspiring to become a modern-day Dracula. Cool, cool.
I acknowledge that a certain segment of the population would hear that and go, ‘yes please tell me how I can also turn into a Dracula.’ But most people probably don’t look at his cyborg-ass face or his “meticulously calibrated breakfast of pills and vegetables” and think it sounds like fun. The shit seems freaky, and not in the good way.
(Throwing this in here just for the sheer goddamn hell of it)
That’s where they’re hoping sports will come in. People look up to elite athletes, right? Everybody knows who Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps are even though they mostly do not care about their respective sports at all. So maybe if you show them juiced-up athletes being even more awesome than other athletes, they will be more willing to pay enormous sums to become juiced-up everyday humans themselves. Failing that, maybe they’ll at least stop making fun of you for being just another rich asshole who bought himself a set of steroid biceps but still comes across like a desperate poser.
The first problem with this is that the enhanced athletes did not turn out to be more awesome. The Mountain wasn’t even more awesome than previous versions of himself. The second problem is that these people have completely missed the point of sports. They just don’t get it.
They seem to think that the reason people decide to give a shit about Olympic swimming every four years is because they’re dying to see how fast human beings could possibly hurl themselves across a swimming pool. That’s not it at all. If one person got a propeller surgically implanted in his ass maybe he could go much faster than everyone else, but we would not care. (At least, we wouldn’t care in any positive sense.) If a dude came along with a forklift and smashed all the weightlifting records, we would want him escorted from the building. The times and the results are not really the point and never have been.
One time I was in Vegas covering a fight and I got on an elevator with two dudes who, via casual conversation, realized they were both Cincinnati Bengals fans with season tickets only a few rows apart from each other. They started talking about the team’s prospects for the upcoming season, did a little speculating on the health of Joe Burrow, then reminisced together about how much worse it was to be a fan back when this team was a perennial loser. Now they had hope, was the gist of it. Now they could dare to get excited each season.
“It’s just nice to care, you know?” one man said as the elevator doors opened.
Well, I remember thinking, that’s it right there, isn’t it? That is what the fans are in it for. They want to feel something. Ideally they want to feel it in the company of others who are feeling the same thing, even if those people were strangers five minutes ago.
I’ve been at University of Montana football games, jumping up and down and hugging people I didn’t know when the Grizzlies scored the game-winning touchdown in overtime of a playoff game. But if the Griz announced they were replacing all the human players with lab-grown cyborgs who were much, much better at football, I don’t think we’d be out there slapping five in the stands even if they dominated every single game against their puny meatsack opponents. I think we’d find this to be a pretty hollow experience as fans. It would strip away the collective empathy that brings the sense of communal joy and emotional investment.
I guess that’s what annoys me about the live forever people in general. I do not much care what anyone else puts in their bodies. If they want to get all jacked up on peptides or HGH or heroin or colloidal silver, that is their business. But this fixation on prolonging life and on injecting the right mix of compounds to essentially turn into a different species (and you know they aren’t planning on making it affordable enough for everyone to do it; that would be a real star-belly Sneetches scenario), strikes me as insane and dumb. It seems like they are missing the point of being human the same way they have missed the point of sports.
“People see this as the start of the biotech salvationist movement,” D’Souza told The New Yorker. But what is that movement supposed to be saving us from?
Our lives are precious to us in part because they are finite. We are a thinking animal on a rock in space and we have just enough intelligence to wonder why and how. Spending your time here trying to conquer your own biology and mortality seems like a waste. It’s like sitting down to a delicious meal and focusing all your attention on taking the teensiest, tiniest bites in order to make it last as long as possible.
Eventually it will still end. You will still die (and living your whole life guided by the fear of it frankly makes you seem like a scared little bitch). You have been given this gift you never asked for: A lifetime as a human being — one of the best things to be! (aside from maybe a dolphin) — and instead of trying to enjoy and understand and marvel at it, you are just trying to cling to it. You are missing the point.
I think sometimes about Richard Hugo, whose portrait hung in the main workshop room back when I was in writing school at U of M. In it he was standing in what looked to be someone’s backyard, holding a cocktail in one hand, his gut hanging over his belt. This was not a man who appeared to be interested in biohacking or humanmaxxing. He did not eat pills and vegetables for breakfast. He died when he was 58. Maybe he could have gotten more years with a different lifestyle. Maybe not.
But would he have traded that for this one day with his poet friends at a bar Dixon, Montana? They drank there one day and then all decided to write different poems with the same title: “The Only Bar In Dixon.” His always felt to me like it captured a moment and a day that was somehow both a snapshot in time that was also weirdly endless and eternal. It goes like this:
Home. Home. I knew it entering.
Green cheap plaster and the stores
across the street toward the river
failed. One Indian depressed
on Thunderbird. Another buying
Thunderbird to go. This air
is fat with gangsters I imagine
on the run. If they ran here
they would be running from
imaginary cars. No one cares
about the wanted posters
in the brand new concrete block P.O.
This is home because some people
go to Perma and come back
from Perma saying Perma
is no fun. To revive, you take 382
to Hot Springs, your life savings
ready for a choice of bars, your hotel
glamorous with neon up the hill.
Is home because the Jocko
dies into the Flathead. Home because
the Flathead goes home north northwest.
I want home full of grim permission.
You can go as out of business here
as rivers or the railroad station.
I knew it entering.
Five bourbons
and I’m in some other home.