I stop him, and clarify: “The same people? The athletes?”
“Probably. Yeah.”
“Are you sure?”
He goes on to describe, not the athletes, but people he knows personally who are “dosing themselves with experimental gene therapies,” including one that “allowed [a former colleague] to gain 3 kilos in his ass because that’s the site he injected.” When we get back to the athletes he says, “you have your nutrition, your standard supplements, then the substances the IOC prohibits. And then there’s the stuff that’s new and emerging—that even the Olympic Committee doesn’t know about and has no means of testing for. That’s what we’re really talking about.” He leans in. “There are two things the very wealthy have been trying to escape. One is taxes—they’ve already done that. The next is death. Many of the technologies being used in the Enhanced Games are advents of extremely wealthy people spending enormous sums in strange clinics on therapies for themselves. The Enhanced Games is just the demonstration—the implementation—of what they’ve already done to their own bodies.”
Roth was right about a lot of things but not the science. When I ask Pieles, he shakes his head and reads me the list of approved substances in the official protocol. (A spokesperson from the games says, “There is no experimental gene therapy going on at the Enhanced Games.”)
What Roth was wrong about—that athletes are undergoing even newer and more extreme experimental treatments like gene therapies—encapsulated the seductive power of the biohacking world and its natural overlap with that of tech start-ups. Both spaces are fueled by the desire for “this magic thing that few people have access to,” says Russian venture capitalist Masha Bucher, who notes that biohackers and entrepreneurs are “curious, big-time risk takers, [and] trying to find the holy grail.” These are people, she says, who often believe in miracles, who want to go against the grain, who have experienced the true power of risk.
For the entrepreneurs who made it big and have access to the funds to, as Roth says, solve everything except for the original human contract that we’re all going to die, medical tourism, fueled on the magic of the gatekept secrets of the fountain of youth, is a multibillion-dollar industry.
Many longevity doctors are less enchanted, underscoring time and again the lack of research, and the snake oil that fills the industry. “There’s a lot of experimental things that people are doing that might work, but I can tell you the story about the guy that injected some stem cells in his spine and got an abscess and almost fucking died,” says Shlain. “I can go on for every story that you hear in a chat group.”
“It’s a confirmation bias,” he continues. “Nobody goes in the group and says, ‘I did this and now I can’t fucking walk.’ ” For him and several of his peers, the Enhanced Games fits into that same experimental bucket that is nothing short of dangerous.
“There’s a whole society for longevity science that would run very far and very fast from the Enhanced Games,” says Shlain. He pauses. “That’s more of a carnival experiment.”
