Finding the Superhuman in the Super Normal
A proposed “Enhanced Games” will allow athletes to dope in order to break records. The recent feats of Jasmin Paris and others like her prove that dangerous drugs aren’t needed…
This is the introduction to April’s edition of the Off-Field newsletter, curating monthly tales from the fringes of sport and society. Read it here.
Imagine a world where cheating doesn’t exist. Not because nobody engages in it. Because everybody does.
Copying your classmate’s answers in an exam? Fine. Card counting at the casino? No problem. Securing that new job by lying in the interview? Well played. You’ve shown courage, aptitude, and initiative. In a world where cheating is not a concept, transgressions aren’t punished. Nor even recognised. They’re rewarded as an example of ruthless human endeavour.
This is the world that Aron D’Souza seemingly wants us to live in as he launches his controversial Enhanced Games in a bid to reach the top by any means necessary.
Scheduled for a 2025 launch and backed by millions in private investment, the controversial event will allow competitors to use performance-enhancing drugs in a bid to blitz existing world records in athletics, weightlifting, and swimming.
The self-proclaimed Olympics of the future was described as “bollocks” by World Athletics president Seb Coe, who threatened a ban on anyone taking part. So far, retired Aussie swimmer James Magnussen is the only high-profile athlete to commit, though D’Souza insists that many more will follow after the Olympics this summer.
“On a fundamental, philosophical level we have the ability to overcome the weakness of our feeble biological forms and become something more,” he told the BBC recently.
D’Souza’s iffy reasoning positions sport’s anti-doping policy as a shackle on human advancement. He glosses over the fact that preventing unfair advantages wasn’t even the primary reason that the IOC introduced a ban on performance-boosting substances in 1967.
Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen, his body pumped full of amphetamines, lost consciousness midway through the team time trial at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome and fell from his bike. The skull fracture killed him.
Seven years later, British cyclist Tommy Simpson collapsed and died from heart failure a kilometre from the summit of Mont Ventoux on stage 13 of the Tour de France. He was found to have empty tubes of amphetamines in the back pocket of his jersey.
Public outcry forced the authorities into action. Most people realise that sport is not worth dying for. Athletes can forget this. Sporting bodies mustn’t.
D’Souza’s dangerous human circus also ignores recent history. In 2023 alone, Faith Kipyegon broke the world record in the 1,500m and 5,000m. At 23.56m, Ryan Crouser launched a shot put further than any human before him. Maria Perez took half a minute off the 35km race walk record. In swimming, nine new records were set at the World Championships in Japan. And Mondo Duplantis once again leaped over the world record in pole vaulting, the seventh time he’s done so. He’s only 23.
Last month saw the latest edition of the Barkley Marathons. Not only is it the quirkiest race on the ultrarunning calendar, it’s arguably the toughest. Participants must complete five 20-mile loops within 60 hours. The off-trail route is unmarked, undulating, and unforgiving. Runners must memorise the way, and prove they’ve done so by tearing a page out of books scattered along the course. Before 2024, only 17 runners had completed it in 37 years. This year saw a record five runners touch the finishing gate in time, including its first-ever female finisher.
It’s not Jasmin Paris’ first running accolade. In 2019, she became the first woman to win the 268-mile Montane Spine Race, breaking the course record by 12 hours. We can be confident she did so without the help of performance-enhancing drugs, because she also stopped along the route to express milk for her newborn baby.
Paris is a 40-year-old mother of two from Manchester who works as a vet. She’s not a human lab rat, but a normal person who just so happens to be able to run longer and faster than most men half her age. She doesn’t need dope to break records, shatter expectations, and inspire awe.
Clean athletes like Paris are already walking, swimming, running, jumping, and throwing further and faster than ever before. The limits of human possibility continue to be redefined. And all done in a manner that doesn’t threaten to rob families of their mothers, brothers, sisters, and husbands. These “feeble biological forms” are managing just fine without the input of Aron D’Souza.
This month’s Off-Field celebrates the superhuman in the super normal, from Scrabble champions and plucky wrestlers, to troubled moonwalkers and awkward scribes at the Oscars.
Enjoy the selection, and do consider sharing it with a friend.
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