Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel invests in controversial doped Olympics
www.independent.co.uk
The Enhanced Games promises to lure athletes away from the Olympics with vast payments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11485138

Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, has joined a multi-million dollar investment in the controversial Enhanced Games, a proposed Olympics-style mega-event without drug testing.

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The idea is the brainchild of Dr Aron D’Souza, the Australian lawyer who helped mastermind Thiel’s proxy war against news media organisation Gawker, which led to Gawker’s bankruptcy in 2016.

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But in a recent interview with The Independent, D’Souza was defiant, and outlined how he hoped the Enhanced Games would not only shake up the world of sport, but would provide a public platform for life-extending science to thrive.

“This is the route towards eternal life,” D’Souza said. “It’s how we bring about performance-medicine technologies, that then create a feedback cycle of good technologies, selling to the world, more revenue, more R&D, to develop better and better technologies.

“And what is performance medicine about? It’s not about steroids and getting jacked muscles. It’s about being a better, stronger, faster, younger athlete for longer. And who doesn’t want to be younger for longer?”

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    22·
    5 months ago

    all I’m reading here (admittedly between the lines) is that they have a whole bucketload of new PE/life-extending/… compounds they wish to test en masse but not on themselves

    I wonder how right that guess will turn out to be

  • 200fifty@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    5 months ago

    And who doesn’t want to be younger for longer?

    Oh, of course it’s about this. Is it ever not about this with Thiel?

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      5 months ago

      Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison among others proving that at least having billions of dollars doesn’t prevent you from experiencing the rather relatable human emotion of thanatophobia.

      Oh it must truly suck to be them~

        • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          5 months ago

          I have to admit I like Bryan Cantrill. He might be a Silicon Valley lost causer romantic and hopelessly liberal startup brained techbro, but I like his charismatic wit, appreciation for technological history and willingness to take lessons from it and emphasis on moral integrity. Also I have been burned by the cloud and I want an Oxide rack for hobbyist purposes.

          Is “problematic fave” a thing people still say? I hope he doesn’t turn out to be a sex creep or something. I hate having to loathe everyone famous in tech.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    5 months ago

    Lord knows I’m not a sports guy, but even I believe a big fascination with the entire field is that someone can get the combination of physical talent and mental fortitude to make it to the top. And even at the top, like top-level soccer where basically every player, even the substitutes, are way better than the average 5-a-side player, there are transcendent talents that people talk about for decades to come.

    Performance-enhancing drugs take away a lot of that fascination. It’s literally cheating which is why everyone, not just government killjoys but the fans themselves hate it with a passion.

    I believe there’s a short SF story about a future like this, where young poor kids are suckered into pumping themselves full of PEs and competing for the benefit of “research”, with their inevitable deaths and invalidity just confirming the experiments failures.

    To make this work, the organizers will have to have people competing who are already near the top, to deliver those jaw-dropping results for the TV networks, but these people would understand that it’s a one-way street. If the even flames out or is banned in multiple countries, they’re barred from ever competing in normal events again. It’s a libertarian pipe-dream, but then ofcourse Thiel backs it.

    • Mike Knell@blat.at
      12·
      5 months ago

      @gerikson @skillissuer They also completely misunderstand a whole aspect of this (surprise) – nobody who’s won an Olympic gold is going to come out and say “Woohoo, it’s the doping games for me!” because top athletes actually care about their reputation and their legacy in a way the likes of Thiel would never be able to parse.

      Doping is something to be _ashamed_ of doing, which is why people who get caught doing it fight so hard to get let off. Appear at these games and your career as a legit athlete is over. No Olympics, your sponsors will abandon you, no sporting dreams any more. Your record will be tarnished and anything you won in the past will have a “possibly doping” asterisk next to ot in the records. Nobody will sponsor this, there’ll be no lucrative TV rights. It’ll just be like a grim track meet at your county stadium.

      They might manage some grotesque spectacle where over-the-hill mediocrities will dope themselves up in order to compete because they didn’t win anything significant during their actual careers, but it will not be any kind of sporting spectacle.

  • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    5 months ago

    I mean I had this exact idea as a child and I thought it would be fun but I also already understood it was very unethical and I had too much self-respect to talk such nonsense to the press.

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    5 months ago

    Immediately what comes to mind is Bill Burr’s bit about drug use in cycling and how we should pit roided up guys against other roided dudes. So maybe the idea came from there.

    Also, important to point out that D’Souza is not an MD, just for context. (I mean it should be obvious from him pushing PEs in this way)

    “And what is performance medicine about? It’s not about steroids and getting jacked muscles. It’s about being a better, stronger, faster, younger athlete for longer”

    Ok but what physically makes you stronger or faster? It’s not, say, confidence borne from the magic juice you’re proposing. It’s the jacked muscles. Borne from said magic juice.

    “No one within athletics takes the Enhanced Games seriously,” said Lord Sebastian Coe, head of World Athletics, on a recent podcast.

    I mean that’s just because they haven’t thrown enough money into the pit yet. Hope you’re listening Pete!

    • Mike Knell@blat.at
      8·
      5 months ago

      @swlabr @skillissuer Not sure what a Bill Burr is but that’s a traditionally idiotic statement. Doping in cycling isn’t about steroids and hasn’t been for decades - it’s an endurance sport so these days when it occurs it’s all about the blood doping, all EPO and transfusions and stuff to get your red cell count as high as possible. This is a really dangerous thing to do if you want to avoid joining the list of young cyclists who dropped dead of mysterious heart problems in the last 20 years, and if you suddenly start saying *that* is okay there will be a lot more kids having cardiac arrests because their blood resembles Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      5 months ago

      It’s like they refuse to understand why we banned PEDs. Like I’m generally in the “destroy your body if you insist” camp, but they will destroy your body if used at performance enhancing levels. There’s three healthy human ranges for testosterone, male, female, and between them. If you’re in the wrong healthy range it’ll fuck with your brain, but if you go much above male your body is going to start suffering for it. And that’s the one that all of us produce for all of our lives. Other PEDs can do some real bad shit to you. It’s part of why wrestlers don’t live long

  • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    5 months ago

    sounds more like an alternative to the WWF/WWE than something that would “shake up the world of sport”

  • Truck_kun@beehaw.orgEnglish
    5·
    5 months ago

    Sure, go for it, whatever.

    Nothing achieved will be as impressive as pure un-enhanced human performance (finding/setting the natural human limit); for record purposes, everything should be Olympic style based, but if you want to put on roid rage Olympiad, go for it, it’s a nice waste of money.

    Definitely keep a separate set of records, and permanently disqualify any participants from regular Olympic participation. This is a good way to build a list of people that shouldn’t be allowed in the Olympics.