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?”

  •  swlabr   ( @swlabr@awful.systems ) English
    8•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   ( @m@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.