Why the Enhanced Games allow athletes to use drugs

HostWe grew up with the idea that sports are about what the human body can do on its own, with just hard work and talent. But lately, there's this new plan for a sports meet where the rules on drugs are basically thrown out the window.

HostIt feels like the opposite of everything we have been told about fair play, so what's the real goal behind letting athletes openly use boosters?

GuestThe people behind this, like the businessman Aron D'Souza, think the current way we do sports is a bit of a lie. They call it the Enhanced Games. Their whole point is that we should stop hiding the fact that people use science to get faster and stronger. They want to see what happens when you take the brakes off. Instead of testing for drugs to kick people out, they want to use science to see how far the body can actually go. They think that if we stop calling it cheating and start calling it an upgrade, we can reach new levels of speed and strength that we have never seen before. It's backed by some very rich people from the tech world, like Peter Thiel, who are big fans of using technology to live longer and perform better. To them, an athlete is like a piece of high-end gear that can be tuned up.

HostThat sounds like we're turning people into fast cars or something, which is a bit weird to think about. But if you take away the rules, does it even count as a sport anymore? I mean, how do they keep it from just becoming a contest of who has the best chemist?

GuestThat's the big worry. But they argue that the current Olympics are already a bit of a mess. They say lots of athletes are already using stuff and just getting better at hiding it. So, their fix is to make it open. They want to pay athletes a lot more too. They're offering a million dollars to the first person who breaks a world record at their event. They actually got a pretty famous retired swimmer from Australia, James Magnussen, to sign up. He said he would take whatever he needs to break the world record for the fifty-meter swim. He's retired, so he doesn't have much to lose with the official sports boards, but he wants that million-dollar prize. It's a huge carrot to dangled in front of someone to see how much they can push their own heart and muscles.

HostA million dollars is a lot of money to put your health on the line. I keep thinking about the danger here. If you tell a bunch of young, hungry athletes they can take whatever they want to win a pile of cash, some of them are going to go too far. How do the people running this claim they can keep anyone from, well, dying?

GuestThey say they'll have a very strict medical team on site. Instead of drug testers, they want to have doctors who do heart scans and blood work all the time. They call it clinical monitoring. The idea is that if a doctor sees your heart is under too much stress, they pull you out. But here is the friction. The groups that run the real Olympics and the world anti-doping teams say this is a total death trap. They say you can't just have a doctor watch someone take dangerous stuff and call it safe. They think it sends a terrible message to kids that you need a needle to be a champion. There's also the problem of where these games would even happen. No big city wants to be known as the place that hosted the "Doping Olympics" because the pushback from the sports world is so heavy.

HostWait, if no city wants them and the big sports boards hate them, is this even a real thing that will happen, or is it just a big talk to get attention?

GuestIt's a bit of both right now. They have the money, and they have at least one big name in Magnussen, but they're hitting walls everywhere else. They don't have a stadium yet, and no big TV channel has signed up to show it. Most of the sports world sees it as a circus. But the people running it aren't backing down. They keep saying that people want to see superheroes, and you only get superheroes with the help of science. They think that once the first record falls and someone gets that million-dollar check, the fans will show up. It's a gamble on the idea that we care more about seeing a human run faster than any human has ever run before than we do about the old rules of "natural" talent.

HostIt feels like we're at a point where we have to decide if we want our heroes to be people we can relate to or just the best results money and labs can buy.

GuestThe real test will be whether anyone actually shows up to watch a race where the winner is the person with the most expensive doctor.

HostThe image of the lone runner on the track starts to look very different when you realize there's a whole lab of scientists running right there with them.