Peter Thiel and the Holy Grail: how a drug-filled Vegas Olympics is connected to the quest for immortality

In late May, Las Vegas hosted the first ever Enhanced Games, involving 42 athletes competing in three sports; weightlifting, track and field, and swimming. The contestants were encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs for this competition, in the hopes that this would allow them to break the existing world records.  

Yet despite the mélange of metabolic enhancers, only one unrecognized record-breaking took place. Why? 

A number of the athletes who participated were not motivated by the quasi-transhumanist desire to improve their performance at all cost, but rather by a financial incentive. Shane Ryan, the 11^th athlete to announce his participation, disclosed that his primary motivation was the US$250,000 in prize money he would win if he won one of the swimming events he had signed up for. 

Despite the heavy financial incentives, the turnout of a pathetic 42 athletes reveals that no amount of drugs and money can motivate people to turn up, especially if it means getting put on a doping watchlist for the rest of their careers. 

The whole endeavor was essentially a publicity stunt by the company Enhanced, a manufacturer of the same kind of performance enhancing drugs used in the competition. 

But was the event anything more than an ad for steroids? Well, to some of the event’s billionaire backers, a club that includes names like Peter Thiel and Christian Angermayer, it was less of a sporting event and more of a dry run for their new ideas on how to “fix” humanity. 

Transhumanist Ideas 

Thiel has a long-documented history of flirting with transhumanist ideas in pursuit of biological immortality, even going so far as to say he wants a new species, something more than human, to inherit the world. Transhumanists believe that “Humanity” is more than the biological species Homo Sapiens and also includes our eventual successors, and that it’s our duty to usher in the age of said successors as fast as possible. 

Biological immortality is one of the driving forces of this movement, and the original idea was to have everyone undergo a mind upload into robotic bodies. This has been the plan for the past few years, ever since LLMs exploded in popularity. Sam Altman famously at the time wanted his brain to be uploaded as soon as possible. 

However, with the stagnating capabilities of AI, it is becoming increasingly clear that the original plan for digital immortality is out of our reach for the foreseeable future. 

Superbabies made from drugs and gene editing are next up on the agenda.  

If these games had been a rousing success instead of a dismal failure, it would have worked as a proof of concept for using these drug cocktails for life extension and the like. Instead, they turned into another setback for the men spending billions of dollars in an attempt to transcend death itself before their time is up. 

Why they failed: 

The Enhanced Games only managed to attract second-tier talent, despite the absurd amounts of money being flung around by it’s wealthy backers. Doping is still seen as a shameful practice, and no prospective career athlete would want to wreck their future by getting involved in a doping scandal. As a result, the contestants all fall into one of two categories; retired athletes hoping the drugs will reinvigorate them, or the financially desperate who want a cash injection more than a steroid injection. But in the end, all they showed was that no amount of drugs can turn second-tier into first-tier talent. 

In all, only one highly dubious world “record” was set in swimming. Greek athlete Kristan Gkolomeev finished the 50 meter freestyle in only 20.81 seconds. That’s 0.07 seconds ahead of the current record at 20.88 set by Cameron McEvoy at the 2026 China Open.   

Was this record recognized by World Aquatics? No. It was illegal from the instant he stepped into the water, due to his illegal buoyancy swimsuit. 

Image Credit: Greg Doherty