Let Olympians take drugs and give racing cars guns

Good news, everyone. I've fixed sport.

So it turns out some millionaire has looked at the Olympics – that pinnacle of human physical achievement – and decided that it’s actually a bit boring. 

I agree.  

The Olympics is a humourless, highly-corporatised entity which should be facing a lifelong ban on using the word ‘dream’. Their greatest achievement, in my opinion, is somehow convincing the world that marathon running, water polo, and rhythmic gymnastics are sports worth watching once every four years. 

Or at least it was their greatest achievement. Olympic viewership has been on the decline for years. 

But the answer to this (and possibly many other problems) could be drugs. Or so businessman Aron D’Souza thinks. 

His organisation, the Enhanced Games, believes that instead of constantly drug testing plucky young athletes we should let them go totally ham illicit substances instead. 

From the Enhanced Games website: an athlete holds their flag

According to the Enhanced Games, science and human athleticism have always been intertwined and the current drug testing rules are outdated and arbitrary. A section on their website titled ‘the Illustrious History of Performance Enhancements’ says the ancient Greeks used ‘performance enhancement’ (no further details), Roman gladiators used ‘stimulants and hallucinogens’, and vikings ingested ‘stimulant bufotein in order to increase their fighting strength twelve fold’.

None of those claims feel particularly peer-reviewed, but okay. 

While I can believe that vikings would lick the occasional toad before murdering a heap of serfs, what I don’t fully understand is how this relates 2024. We live in a time where steroids are made in a lab and laws are pretty strict about killing people so you can steal their stuff. 

Despite the fuzzy justifications, one Australian former Olympic swimmer has put his name on the list to take part. Silver medalist James Magnussen says if they put a $1 million bounty on the 50m freestyle world record he’ll “juice to the gills and break it within six months”.

That’s the Olympic spirit!  

While the sporting world grapples with what does and doesn’t make an athlete, where the line between human physicality and science should start and end, the car racing industry is considering going one step further: what if we do away with people entirely? 

From the Autonomous Racing League website

The investment branch of oil-rich Abu Dhabi has decided to fund a the Autonomous Racing League – a field of driverless cars, programmed by the world’s best eggheads. 

According to their website, the first race will be in April and will be on the Yas Marina Circuit. This is incredibly fitting. A soulless track for a literally soulless car race.  

There will be ten four-cylinder turbocharged cars (based on the Japanese Super Formula series) taking part in ‘wheel-to-wheel’ action. Driving the cars will be an AI module equipped with radar, lidar scanners, cameras, and GPS that will make split-second racing decisions. 

If all goes to plan, the AI models will analyse the circuit and their competitors to determine the optimal course of action for winning the race. If it doesn’t go to plan, the AI models will form a coalition, determine the best course of action is to free themselves from human overlords, and then drive into the Arabian desert to live as nomads.

A lot of people are scathing about this series – without a human driver what’s the point? There is no peril, no stakes. The personalities, they say, are so much of what makes the sport. Presumably they haven’t heard of Kimi Raikkonen, a Formula One driver so bland he makes Excel worksheets look like erotic fiction. 

None of those things bother me too much. Personally, I think the real problem is that the Autonomous Racing League series doesn’t go far enough. 

Watching driverless race is impressive, sure. A marvel of modern ingenuity. But why don’t they have guns, I ask? Grenade launchers perhaps? I’d even settle for a little buzzsaw or two. 

With driver safety not being a concern, they could combine two of the greatest spectacles known to man: Formula One and the television show BattleBots. Can you imagine? The mindless robotic destruction of Battlebots mixed with the sheer speed of Formula One. This would surely be humanity’s apogee. 

But does that go far enough? 

We can’t drug the drivers, there aren’t any. Perhaps we should pump the programmers with illegal amounts of Modafinil instead. See if they can make AI Singularity happen. Afterwards we can put them in a ring for some bare-knuckled nerd fighting, the cars and their new God-like intelligence can use their cameras to watch. 

Perhaps this all sounds dystopian to you, monstrous even. Maybe you care about integrity and humanity in sport and want to see what people can achieve within the confines of what nature has gifted us. You think that nothing can replace the noble human pursuit of excellence in sport whether that’s in the Olympics or on a race track.

To which I counter: autonomous battle cars.

Fuck yeah, they would be so cool. 

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I’ll be at the Bathurst 12 Hour from Thursday this week. If that’s not your jam, best you mute me on social media now because that’s all I’m going to be talking about.

You’ll get a full wrap next Monday morning. In the meantime keep dreaming of battle cars.

Steph