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?”
Anti-steroid propaganda was probably the only effective messaging from the war on drugs, but like all drugs, it’s relative, and not that simple.
Not to go on too long of a tangent here, but the complete restriction of these classes of drugs actually can cause a lot of unnecessary harm to athletes. For example, in helping athletes heal and recover from injuries, or surgeries.
Recovery time is really important in pro-sports where the ability to earn money is limited to a relatively short window e.g. professional fighting. Often time fighters will return before they’re fully healed, because they need to earn a living. In many of those cases, steroids could have significantly shortened their recovery time and reduced the risk of further injury.
I’m not here pretending that steroid use can’t also cause undo harm to athletes, just that it’s not as black and white as many people believe.
Edit: to be clear, steroids are some of the most complicated drugs to use correctly in order minimize long-term health effects, such as destroying your endocrine system. Professional or amateur, they should only be used under the close supervision of a specialized doctor.