The enhanced games are like the Olympics
on steroids and everybody saying that
they're [music] insane and dangerous. It
normalizes doping, could be dangerous,
[music] and risks harming the integrity
of sport.
>> By saying everything that is legal under
the law you can take, you could also
have a risk of athletes severely abusing
substances and [music] going massively
into overdosing. But what if the
enhanced games are more honest, safer
for athletes, and [music] better for the
sport overall than even the regular
Olympics?
>> It's here. It's happening. I believe
this stuff is the future. And so, like,
my hope is that this pushes the rest of
the world in the proper direction, which
is, hey, we got to stop taking advantage
of these athletes and start caring for
them financially, medically, all the
above.
Before we dive in into the meat of the
controversy behind the enhanced games,
let's wind the clock back a little bit
to look at the history of sport and
figure out before we judge what sport is
even all about to begin with. [music]
Sport has been around for a long time
since time immemorial.
Native [music] peoples did it. The
Greeks and the Romans did it and sport
got a really really big boost around the
year 1900 when the industrial
revolutions finally made [music] enough
people wealthy enough and gave them
enough leisure time so that on moss more
and more people could participate in
organized and especially international
sport competition. There are many
reasons that people engage in sport. A
lot of it is to sort out dominance
hierarchies. A lot of it is to keep
athletes actually to keep warriors
[music]
trained to be ready for a state of war.
A lot of the reason for sport is just
for fun and to satiate our competitive
impulses. But the number one fundamental
underlying reason for sport, especially
in the modern time, is for just one
thing, entertainment. That is the only
reason a [music] sport governing body at
the end of the day chooses one action or
one policy over the other. Making the
fans and will they watch or will they
not watch a sport the ultimate arbiters
of [music] what is presented as ethical
in sport and what is cast aside as
somewhere we won't go.
[music] Let's talk about the history of
enhancement of performance by any means
necessary in sport over time. Ancient
Greek athletes reportedly used wine,
herbs, mushrooms, and even animal organs
in the hopes of boosting strength,
endurance, and even aggression. Roman
gladiators and chariot competitors who
you saw live in the movie,
who you saw in the documentary film
Gladiator and the even better
documentary film Gladiator 2, used all
kinds of stuff. They used stimulants,
tonics, herbal mixtures, and the like
because fair play wasn't exactly on the
Roman agenda. As organized sport grew
through the 1800s, athletes experimented
with enhancements we now recognize more.
Particularly, alcohol, which believe it
or not increases confidence and has been
used for a long time as a performance
enhancer. Caffeine was on the agenda. Of
course, cocaine was in. That's a strange
one. And other safe things like
nitroglycerin and other stimulants. By
the early 1900s, the Olympics were back.
And Olympic athletes and cyclists were
using a whole host of secret
formulations and mixtures long before
anti-doping rules were in full effect.
Skiers, skaters, rowers, and sled
athletes improved rapidly as their
equipment shifted from basic wood and
metal sort of screwed together to
lighter, more specialized designs. In
the midentth century, sport entered the
steroid era, where testosterone and
various derivatives were manufactured
and invented and perfected by various
staterun drug programs, changing the
landscape of strength, speed, and
recovery and completely upending the
record books. The Cold War during this
time became where nations tested their
metal against one another in sport
competition. And this arms race included
coaching, nutrition, altitude training,
biomechanics, steroids, a whole new host
of stimulants, and of course, all
gambling for national prestige. The late
20th century saw the dissolution of the
Soviet Union, but not the dissolution of
radical attempts at continual
enhancement. We added blood doping,
eriththropoetin use, better recovery
science, the enhanced use of sports
psychology, and even exotic exotic
exotic approaches like the use of wind
tunnels, synthetic tracks, and
increasingly optimized equipment.
Swimming, cycling, skating, and
bobsledding showed that material science
itself was a huge cornerstone of sport
improvement. From low drag suits to
carbon fiber frames and even aerodynamic
helmets, modern elite endurance sport is
now such a big deal that top tier
performance involves reliance on
altitude camps, heat training, lactate
testing, glucose monitoring, nutritional
periodization, and obsessively
engineered equipment to get that last
fraction of a second down off of race
times. Today's highestend sports include
$25,000
racing bikes, custom shoes, carbon
plates, entire ecosystems of sensors to
monitor and improve athletic
performance, aerodynamic skin suits, and
datadriven training plants. The modern
drug frontier is no longer just some
shady guy with a trench coat on who's
letting you look at needles behind the
GNC parking lot. It is a huge endeavor
with carefully managed protocols around
hormones, peptides, blood markers,
masking drugs, recovery and detection
windows.
The long history of sports performance
is one of humans using as many
enhancements as they can to elevate
their abilities.
But the main story of the night doesn't
concern the spirit of competition, but a
man who's judged to have [music]
cheated.
>> Are the Olympics drug-free?
Well, they're supposed to be drug-free,
and for very many athletes, they
absolutely are. But the incentive
structure is such that unfortunately,
especially for state sponsored drug
programs, the attempts to win are kind
of coming in at all costs. Who doesn't
cheat in life? [music] Everybody cheats
in taxes. Everybody cheats in
everything.
>> And when you have literal state capacity
in manufacturing and invention and
masking protocol design, you're going to
have a lot of athletes from large
nations coming in to compete with their
nation behind them and their nation
behind their actual [music] use of
performance-enhancing drugs. There's
actually research that shows that 43% of
Olympians admit to using ban substances,
but only 1% is getting caught. So you
ask yourself with all the testing that's
going on, [music]
how is only 1% of the cheaters getting
caught? Reason being the athletes that
cheat, they resort to taking newly
developed drugs that are not well
researched and they take additional
drugs, masking agents on top of that to
hide what they're taking in the first
place. So that every athlete that
competes clean at the Olympics, often
athletes from the free nations of the
world whose governments [music] do not
sponsor the drug programs, knows one
thing that many, if not all, but many of
their competitors are using not just
enhancements, but state sponsored state
engineered enhancements, and they have
to compete against those people. Yes,
many Olympians are drug-free, but many
Olympians are cheating on drugs in plain
sight.
Throughout this discussion, we've kind
of been alluding to the idea that it's
totally fine for the enhanced games to
compete right alongside the Olympics so
that we can both have untested and drug
tested sport.
>> This is a a platform of sport, a
platform of entertainment for people
that can happily coexist with
traditional sports. It's just under a
different rule set. Just like in
softball, the ball is thrown differently
like in baseball. It's it's the same
sports. It's a little bit different
because the rules are different and um I
would love for that to be happily
coexisting.
>> This sounds like a new thing, but
there's actually precedents for this. In
the worlds of bodybuilding and
powerlifting respectively, you have
numerous countries that have numerous
federations or even separate divisions
of the same sport governing federation
in which one arm allows people to use
all the drugs they want. in essence
doesn't test at all avowedly and another
arm or another federation absolutely
tests for every kind of drug that they
can. [music] What's interesting is that
in these federations, cheating is very
rare compared to cheating at the
Olympics. Why? Because if you're going
to the Olympics and you know there's no
alternative for you to compete, if
you're drugree or want to stay drug
free, you're going to look around and
say, "You know what? All these other
competitors of mine are on drugs. It's
not a level playing field unless I
[music] take them. But if you're
competing in drug-free powerlifting,
using drugs and drug-free powerlifting
is kind of strange because if you want
to use drugs, you just go [music] to the
place in powerlifting, an open
federation where everyone's using drugs
anyway to really test your metal. The
other thing is this. If your fellow, not
competitors, but if your fellow
teammates and people at your gym when
you're training find out that you're on
drugs and that you're going to be
competing in either drug tested
powerlifting or bodybuilding, they will
shun you for it because it is nominally
easy for you to just register to compete
against people in your own class. And a
really interesting bonus, if an athlete
currently at the Olympics gets popped
for a banned substance, they have to
balance fairness with punishment. And so
because sometimes the tests are wrong or
because athletes are, you know, sort of
made to do this against their will, they
get several month bans, they get several
year bans, but then they're allowed to
come back to competition. If you have
tested and untested divisions, as soon
as you get popped in the tested
division, you don't have to get kicked
out of anything. you just can't compete
tested [music] anymore. You don't even
have to lose your ability to compete at
sport, but now you have to compete
against also folks that are using the
enhancements. It's a sort of increase in
the fairness and it's good for the
athletes, it's good for competition,
it's good for the fans, and it's amazing
for the sport as a whole.
Enter [music] the enhanced games. Their
first games are coming right up really,
really soon. And the concept here is
this. Allow athletes to compete with
enhancement, but tightly control two
things. The kind of enhancement the
athletes are allowed to use and the
safety of the athletes using the
enhancements.
>> So the enhanced games are a new sporting
platform where athletes can compete in
three sports, track, swimming, and
weightlifting. And it's basically like
you know those sports from a traditional
sporting system, but with the added
difference that [music] there's no
banned substances regulations. We have
actually adopted the view that the law
is the highest regulator of what is
allowed and what is not allowed.
>> Now the enhanced games so far sound
really really awesome. But the big
question is this. Are they safe? How can
you give athletes enhancements which
have known downsides and at the same
time claim that you're taking care of
athlete risk profiles? Every athlete at
the enhanced games, [music] whether
enhanced or not, will undergo medical
profiling, monitoring a broad range of
biomarkers to determine whether they are
healthy and [music] safe to compete. I
had to go through the most comprehensive
health screening I've ever had in my
life. They they basically scanned in
various ways like every vital organ, um
joints, ligaments, everything.
Obviously, tons of different cardiac
screenings. Um and then they did that
again at the camp in Abu Dhabi. And then
I had that done again just a week ago
now that I've been on protocol for
however many weeks. I never had any of
this done in the traditional world of my
sport.
>> Now, when an athlete then considers
about getting enhanced, they get
recommended a personalized protocol
based on who they are as an individual
and what the specific event is that
they're doing. With these games, what
we're trying to do is showcase to the
world that enhancements under right
clinical and medical supervision [music]
can be not just very beneficial for your
performance, recovery, and injury
prevention, but also safe.
>> I'd never had blood work. I I never had
a DEXA scan. I'd never had um a lot of
just like basic stuff that I'm now like
way more aware of honestly because of
this process.
>> All of the substances that make you
perform better, recover quicker, and
protect yourself from injuries are
already clinically approved substances
that doctors prescribe to patients every
single day. And so that's a big
misperception that we're triing any new
drugs and experimenting with athletes
because it's outright wrong. [music]
>> Now, everyone knows that professional
sports often pay really, really good
money. But did you know that technically
Olympic sport is always an everywhere
amateur competition? [music] And to that
end, the Olympics and all of the
athletes associated with them and the
governing sport bodies behind them in
most cases dole out and get paid
profoundly small amounts of money. The
reality is most Olympians are living
paycheck to paycheck. Um, in my sport,
if you're top 12 in the world, you make
a salary, and that salary is like
$36,000 a year before taxes. We had a
female swimmer, she won gold for Germany
at the Paris Olympics. [music] And she
was like, "It's ridiculous that I'm
getting like dedicating my lifetime to
this sport, represent my country on the
highest level, win gold, and get paid
€20,000 for it that barely covers
training, travel, etc. If I went on Love
Island, I would make at least triple
that just because I'm on the cast. Why
are we not capable of paying a lot of
money to the athletes on by the way on
which [music] they're backs we're
building this entire sporting spectacle?
>> The enhanced games are not different
from the Olympics just because they
allow enhancement. They're hugely
different in how much money they are
paying out to the athletes. you know,
winning one event at the enhanced games,
um, you make the the prize money is
about the same as winning like 13 world
championships [music] in the traditional
world of swimming. The prize pool
available to athletes is a total of $25
million. And we have a little bit of
shine of 50 athletes. So, you can do the
math and um the pockets of payment that
are available for athletes are three
main ones. One is event driven prize
money that is per event. an event like
the 100 meter sprint, the 50 freestyle
in the pool, a total prize pool of
$500,000 per event with the winner
taking home 250. Then we have world
record bonuses, $250,000 per world
record, but a million for the 50
freestyle in the pool and the 100 me
sprint on the track. And then lastly,
team salaries and appearance fees. So
every athlete that rocks up at the games
is is minimum compensated either through
team salaries or appearance fees. the
the finances behind it was a was a huge
a huge decision for sure. It's nice.
>> Of course, it's awesome. Journalistic
framing gets you guys excited, gets me
excited [music] to say enhanced games
versus the Olympics, but to me that's
not on the agenda. The reality and the
vision I have for this is as follows.
It's both. I personally want to see the
glory of drug tested sport with the
Olympics. And I also want to see how far
the human body can be pushed safely but
with a lot of enhancement to see what's
really going to go on. To me, I want to
see enhanced games and the Olympics side
by side. This is something different and
it it gets people excited about our
sports, sports like mine in a new way
which we've never had before. And so,
you know, that's what I hope is that it
that it just it continues to grow and um
allow athletes like me and my friends to
prosper and just do cool stuff.
>> This is a a platform [music] of sport, a
platform of entertainment for people
that can happily coexist with
traditional [music] sports. I hope that
through the games and by seeing athletes
that have never been performing better
than they ever have before while being
healthy and [music] safe, seeing that
there must be something going on here
that is a little bit different than how
we perceived this was going on. And so
maybe that sparks some [music] interest
in understanding what is actually
happening to then ultimately seeing
people that what we're doing is actually
not as [music] controversial as one
might think. My hope is that this pushes
the rest of the world in the proper
[music] direction, which is, hey, we got
to stop taking advantage of these
athletes and start caring for them
financially, medically, all the above.
So, are we going to get an enhanced
games side by side with the [music]
Olympics, flourishing for sport? Only if
it's safe, and it seems to be, and if
the fans like [music] it. So, the real
question is, will the fans find the
enhanced games compelling? You and I are
both [music] going to find out.