
A professional boxer punches every six to nine heartbeats.
The diameter of the bullseye at the 10m rifle competition at the Olympics is 0.5 mm. The size of a grain of sand.
A gymnast exerts force roughly 8-14 times of their body weight while making a landing.
Millimeters. Milliseconds. The difference between greatness and anonymity.
Elite sport is the pinnacle of human potential. Also, an exhibition of its ceiling. What if we chose to break past it?
Welcome to Enhanced Games.
The ‘Olympics of the future’, where Lead Scientist Dan Turner is helping athletes achieve the improbable. With a little help from safely administered, performance enhancing drugs. Peter Thiel is onboard. So is Ridley Scott’s production company. A former Olympian has signed up to compete. And you can win a million dollars by breaking a world record.
Are you game?
Meet the Enhanced Movement
Competitive sport is where the mind and body peak. It demands ultra-human feats of endurance, precision, focus and strength. A cut-throat level where the difference between victory and defeat can be a benign ‘competitive advantage’.
Enter performance enhancing drugs: Beta Blockers, Stimulants, Diuretics, Anabolic Steroids. All substances that help the body surge past its limits. Banned in most sports. But thanks to Dan Turner and Enhanced Games, now at the centre of a new sporting revolution that asks ‘what if we dope safely and openly?’
Turner has worked with almost 300 international athletes over a career spanning decades in research, performance enhancement, coaching and healthcare. From motocross champion Hunter Lawrence, ultra runner Dylan Bowman to Olympian Kate Courtney he has overseen the performance, fitness and longevity of world class athletes in elite sport. At Enhanced Games, though, he is engineering a paradigm shift; from conducting competitive sport as a feast of human endurance, will and excellence to a biomechanical exhibition of the human body’s ability to go further than we ever have. i.e. unleash the ‘superhuman’ inside.
Sports. Science. Steroids
Doping is stigmatised because it’s done secretly. To gain an extra leg of pace, a last surge of strength or the one long breath that could take you to glory. Sporting bodies and purists argue it’s immoral, against the concept of ‘fairness’, and contradicts the idiom of ‘sporting spirit’. But what if doping became transparent? i.e. anyone wanting to take drugs to compete could.
Enhanced Games believes fairness can’t be achieved by punitive laws, but by allowing athletes to boost their performance the way they wish to. “We want to offer athletes the autonomy and free will they don’t currently have,” Turner says.
But hang on. Wouldn’t a free-for-all doping fiesta unravel into a lewd exhibition of disorder, chaos and maybe even debauchery as opposed to a dignified event with its competitive spirit intact? After all, drugs help but they are also dangerous.
Turner claims ‘athlete safety comes first’, that science will precede intent and even in the wildest sporting dormitory ever assembled someone will play the hall monitor. Everything will be medically supervised, backed by science, and done within the boundaries of sense and sensibility. And of course, everyone will get paid handsomely regardless of where they finish.
The Doping Squid Games?
Founded by Aron D’Souza, Enhanced Games has expectedly met with fury and disapproval. “Dangerous” “Irresponsible” “Bollocks”, it’s been called all that and more. The games negate the existence of WADA, the sports authority responsible for testing and banning substances. They also imperil, critics argue, the very essence of competition because if common people can drug themselves to spar with elite athletes - or better still, outperform them - it undermines the years of toil, training and tears that professionals go through to reach that level.
But Turner and co believe that this is another evolutionary leap in the frontier science of anti-ageing and human enhancement. If drugs can help engineer better performance in sport, surely they can also improve health, body function and longevity. The question is should we?
Will the Enhanced Games then be the world’s first live-streamed, openly viewed scientific laboratory or a farcical modern day Manhattan project that we’ll eventually come to regret?
The implications are political, ethical, cultural and of course very, very personal.
At SYNAPSE 2025, Dan Turner will unpack his chest of wild ideas, showcase the alchemy of athletic performance, debate the nature of fairness in sport, position doping as a way to improve humans, argue the science behind it and pick apart the prescriptions from the provocation.