The Enhanced Olympics Are Allegedly a Supplement Hocking Scheme

If you’re unfamiliar, the Enhanced Games are what happens when someone who got caught cheating tries to convince everybody that cheating is actually good. Such a radical visionary that they’re ahead of the curve, to be honest.

That’s the Enhanced Games in a nutshell. A whole bunch of Olympic-style competition, where performance-enhancing drugs are not discouraged, but mandatory. Because that’s the whole point. What if everybody were not using their natural gifts but rather their own volatile chemical cocktail that could make their heart explode at any moment?   

In my initial rant about how morally bankrupt and soulless the Enhanced Games are, I brought up the fact that their association with a rogues’ gallery of MAGA-world grifters and fabulists made it obvious that the enhanced games were just a big con.

Now, thanks to a fantastic investigative piece by Amit Katwala in Wired, I stand here vindicated before you: the whole thing is basically one giant ad to sell Enhanced Games-branded supplements.

The Enhanced Games Are Less About Competition and More About Selling You Pills

The Wired piece acts more as a behind-the-scenes look at the shaky ground the entire doping Olympics idea stands on. The endeavor is the brainchild of Aron D’Souza, who helped tech villain Peter Thiel take down Gawker after the Hulk Hogan sex tape thing. There are some wonderful stories of steroid-based ineptitude, like the tale of retired Australian Olympic swimmer James Magnussen.

He was supposed to be one of the poster boys for this whole stupid event, but that idea started to go sideways when he got juiced on a cocktail of testosterone and human growth hormones, only to find that his newly and quickly acquired 30 pounds of muscle severely slowed his lap times.  

Considering the company the Enhanced Games keeps (did I mention that Donald Trump Jr. is a major investor?), it should be of no surprise that the biggest reveal in the Wired story is perhaps the real reason all of this exists in the first place.

D’Souza’s big “Apple-style launch event” happened at Zouk, a Vegas nightclub packed with musclebound doctors and transhumanists. The event had all the subtlety you’re accustomed to seeing from our modern brand of right-wing grifters.

Melodramatic footage of Greek statues as a voiceover hyped the crowd about finally being able to dream “beyond what we are allowed to dream,” a pitch perfect for a crowd of folks who feel like they’ve been persecuted their entire lives simply for being lying cheaters who cheat and lie all the time.

But the real climax wasn’t the announcement of the venue or even the announcement of the games themselves. It was the pitch for Enhanced Performance Products, supplements “inspired” by whatever the athletes are taking.

This is the real play. D’Souza even admitted to Katwala that selling supplements is what it’s all about and that the enhanced Games’ business model is lifted straight from Red Bull: buy flashy sports assets to sell high-margin products.

Create a grand display that shows off people doing incredible things, and then sell them products with the promise that you, the puny, pathetic home viewer, can become just as magnificent as they, these modern marvels of chemical engineering.

Behind the bold claims, there’s no real upheaval of the athletic establishment, just your run-of-the-mill snake oil hustle under the guise of a disruptive sports revolution. It’s a wonderful encapsulation of the United States since Trump first slouched his way down that escalator to announce he was running for president.

The enhanced games seem like they’re still on schedule for 2026, yet it appears that the mask has already been pulled off. The Enhanced Games are not about athletic performance. They’re about athletic performance products.