‘Enhanced’– it’s such a slinky word. A ‘boob job’ sounds like a gimmick on a stick and a ‘breast augmentation’ implies cantilevers and mathematics – but a ‘breast enhancement’ sounds like something highly agreeable that everyone is going to benefit from. It’s with this bias towards the word that I consider ‘The Enhanced Games.’
Let’s be honest – it’s also because until I gave them up ten years ago. I was crazy about drugs, especially ones that enhanced my performance. Yes, I liked taking them in order to interact with other people on drugs – all of us no doubt yelling boring, repetitive rubbish – but most of all I loved to be alone with a gram of cocaine and a deadline, getting to work on drugs. Especially when writing my 1998-2000 columns for the Guardian (how surreal that sentence looks now!) I was fuelled by the white stuff, and got a great deal of very high-quality writing done very quickly indeed. I also wrote a young adult novel, Sugar Rush, in six afternoons after good luncheons at pleasant restaurants where drink was taken; just one ‘line’ when I got home and I was ready to go. It went on to be made into an excellent television series, which won an Emmy. Should I have had my Emmy removed because the initial work which the show sprung from was carried out with the aid of chemicals? I think not!
So my interest was naturally piqued by the Enhanced Games, in which athletes may partake of pharmaceuticals in order to be the best they can be at what they like to do best. It’s due to take place in May, in Las Vegas, featuring swimming, weightlifting and track and field events, and has a lovely website, which informs us that ‘The Enhanced Games is a global annual competition that celebrates human potential through safe, transparent enhancement, offering fair play, record pay, and unmatched athlete care.’
I love that last bit. ‘Unmatched athlete care’ tells us very firmly that there won’t be any of the nasty business we associate with East Germany and the way it treated its female athletes from the 1960s right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The state-sponsored dosing with testosterone – without their knowledge – of thousands of athletes being groomed as Olympic competitors – including minors – was a terrible crime. At the time, when I was a kid, it was seen as somewhat curious and amusing, with the phrase ‘East German shot-putter’ being shorthand for a highly unattractive female bent on doing our dainty British girls out of their place on the podiums. But it was a serious and vicious act by the East German state, and a strange harbinger of the continuing argument today about the efficacy of giving drugs to young women which will interfere with the development of their biological sex. East German girl athletes grew up to suffer from liver tumours, infertility and cardiovascular problems; some grew beards and some saw their clitorises grow into penises (small ones, which makes it better or worse depending on your point of view) while depression and suicide were frequent. Heidi Krieger, the champion shot-putter, was doped from the age of 16. Her testosterone levels reached 37 times that of an average woman at the ‘height’ of her sporting career and she eventually saw no other option but to have a ‘sex change’ in 1997. Why were thousands of young women abused in this heinous way? To win a few stupid trophies. To make it worse, it turns out that West Germany were at it too, the rival puppet states of the super-powers involved in a ‘doping race’ which lasted for decades.
The Enhanced Games, thankfully, couldn’t be further from this nightmarish scenario which was carried out so cruelly in the healthy and apparently harmless name of ‘sport.’ The competitors – some from the UK – are very visibly mature and healthy types, who it seems laughable to imagine being puppeteered by some white-coated rotter. There are only 50 of them, though, which belies the controversy surrounding the event, and the predictable tut-tutting from the sports establishment about how naughty it is to take performance enhancers. The Games was founded by an Australian businessman named Aron D’Souza ‘because he believes that athletes are entitled to do what they wish with their own bodies, and that the International Olympic Committee is corrupt for exploiting them.’
There’s already been quite a bit of ‘fun and games’ involved in bringing this chemically-altered sporting smorgasbord to fruition. In December a judge dismissed an $800 million lawsuit from the EG which posited that both swimming organisations and the World Anti-Doping Agency had been conducting campaigns aiming to dissuade athletes from taking part. Some of the competitors – currently training in Abu Dhabi – seem unsure, or shy, about whether they will be helping themselves to the chemical buffet available. For example, the former Team GB sprinter Reece Prescod said recently that he would not be having a nibble of any banned substances and that his motivation was financial, but now appears to have more of an ‘open mind’ on the subject, telling The National: ‘What I said was, at that current time, I hadn’t taken anything or partaken in anything… I’ve obviously got great medical supervision from doctors. I’m going to train to a certain level. I will have a conversation with the enhancement team and just see what that potentially could look like for me.’ I think that may be a ‘Yes’ from Mr Prescod, then; after all, what’s the point in attending an orgy while wearing a chastity belt? On the other hand, the Olympian swimmer, Australian James Magnussen, quoth brazenly that he would happily ‘juice to the gills’ in order to take away the $1 million purse for breaking the 50m freestyle world record.
Most of us would admit that ‘cheating’ sport is usually more fun to watch
Mr D’Souza has all sorts of high-falutin’ rationales about how the current anti-doping attitudes are ‘anti-science’ and stop athletes from being the best that they can get. The Enhanced Games will thus show us ‘the ultimate demonstration of what the human body is capable of’. Perhaps, but it’s the honesty of the EG which is one of the aspects of it that appeals to me. So much of top-level ‘natural’ sport can be economical with the actualite – nearly half of top athletes have admitted when questioned anonymously to partaking of banned substances, though only 2 per cent get nabbed, according to a survey carried out by the World Anti-Doping Agency. And if we are honest, most of us would admit that ‘cheating’ sport is usually more fun to watch. Look at how obsessed people got with Lance Armstrong, because he basically broke another record every time he went out. Watching ‘real’ cross-country cycling on television is a little dull for most people.
And now at the Winter Olympics, such a grand and respectable spectacle, no sooner has the echo of Mariah’s last trill died away than ‘Penis-gate’ is upon us, in which Wada is trying to establish whether ski jumpers are giving their wedding tackle a good dose of hyaluronic acid in order to grab themselves larger ski suits after a 3D body-scanner has measured their dimensions, including crotch height. Apparently some athletes involved in this sport allegedly used to put clay in their underwear, which shows that drugs are by no means necessary in order for human ingenuity to get ‘one-up’ on the next man. An expert, Dan Dwyer, told the Guardian that a ‘slightly larger ski suit has a larger surface area which can then generate a small amount of extra lift.’ As well as making one more popular with the lady ski jumpers, one imagines.
It’s interesting that hyaluronic acid has previously been associated with facial injections, in a bid to reduce wrinkles. I’m very cynical about the benefits of being ‘natural’, and this goes for sport as well as beauty; the list of most frequently injuries sustained during ‘natural’ sport, both temporary and permanent, is chilling, from ruined knees to sciatica to concussion. So as one who fondly remembers the very pleasurable and productive drug-enhanced years of my career, I’ll be curious – and just a tiny bit envious – to see how this transgressively honest sports event pans out.
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