RedHanded - RedHanded x The Upshot: The Enhanced Games | #451

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

“Juiced to his gills” on a combination of testosterone, steroids, and god knows what else, three times Olympic medalist James Magnussen put on over 30 lbs of lean muscle in just a few months, risking his health, his reputation and his legacy, all in an attempt to break the 50m freestyle world record, and launch the ‘Enhanced Games’ into history books. Yet, two years later, the classic thought experiment of “the Olympics – but  everyone can take whatever substances they want” has struggled to get off the starting blocks. Why? Join us, and our friends from The Upshot, to find out some of the wildest stories from the history of doping.Listen to The Upshot--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

Hello. Hello. Hi, guys. How are we doing? Hello. Hello, everyone, and to everyone listening, welcome. We thought, what better than to invite our good friends from the podcast, The Upshot, when the world of true crime and sport collide, which is what we're doing today.

Yeah, because we've been following the red-handed episodes. You guys have done a few sports figures. Yeah. We had OJ, obviously. OJ most recently. The Biggie, the juice. The shoes. That's well worth.

I watched your version on YouTube, which is a banger. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I have thoroughly enjoyed your more crime-angled. I enjoyed your one on Gaza. Gaza was a stand-out one. A lot of the characters that we tell the stories of have sort of crime-y elements. Crime-adjacent elements.

Which is why we, I mean, huge fans of you, but I'd say our most consistent upshot listening was when we were on tour. and we did a road trip around New Zealand afterwards and Sturuti's partner, great guy, not a crimeer. Quite sensitive, actually. So usually if it was just Siru and I doing Car Chronicles, it would be like some horrible child rape story, but Sam just kidding quite.

So it's a nice crossover for us. We had a solid two weeks of the upshot in the car where we got, it was like a nice meeting of the way. So hopefully we can do the same today. Did you try and smuggles and crime in? Oh, West Britain is asleep. You guys did it for us. You guys did it for us.

Yeah, we had a cat murder cover-up was my favorite crime story. Yeah, Jermaine Pennant, who used to take a film before. I don't know if you came across that episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was going out with, what was her name, Jen Metcalf?

From Holliomey. And she had this, like, fluffy sort of Siamese cat, and she went away for the weekend, and Jermaine had these two pit bulls or some kind of quite, quite aggressive thing, that while Jenner, was away for the weekend, killed her cat, basically. And instead of owning up to what happened, he decided to bury the cat.

He had to get professional cleaners around because this cat was an absolute mess all over there, cream carpet. And then she got back and obviously he was like, well, that was my cat. And he just didn't own up to it. And my favorite scene in the whole story is that he went around with her, putting up missing cat posters around their neighborhood. How long can you drag out the lie? Yeah.

He revealed it in his memoir that came out like, 10 years later. You've got to hold something back for the memoir. Yeah, Jen, if you're reading this, I'm sorry. Oh my God. I think it's not crimey, but one that stays with me. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong because it's animal related. Was it Colleen Rooney who threw her wedding engagement ring into a squirrel sanctuary?

Was it that? It was. That was a good one. But also, crimey ones. Was there one to do with cannibalism? Am I remembering that correctly? I swear you guys have covered it. No, you haven't.

No, everyone thinks we have, but we've never done it. The rugby cannibals in, it's so good. Oh, amazing. It gets quite, they start off quite, you know, the dabbling in cannibalism. By the end, it's like, skulls are super old. Once you've started, you might as well go full, full edgene. So, doping. Relentously back to the world, we go.

Come on, God. Know anyone who's done it? I was trying to think. As in, like, taken steroids? How are we defining it? I think roids, I mean, we're going to get into the origins of it where they were using stuff that I'm not sure was helping. No, there's some quite questionable substances that they're putting inside. It's recreational drugs.

But, I mean, you meet people in the gym, don't you, who are sort of roided? Oh, very obviously. Especially when they have, like, the Johnny Bravo look. And I know, like, not everybody's favorite day is leg day. But I'm also like, how has this happened and nothing is going on here? Pod on clavicular, you know, this teenage guy who's like going to insane lengths. Oh, the looks maxer. Yeah, he backsets.

So he bangs his face with a hammer. He takes meth to hollow out his cheeks. He's made himself infertile by rejecting his. He took so many steroids, he's in fertile and unable to get an erection. So then he takes, isn't he takes something like four Viagra's a day just to be able to get an erection if he wants to? That's what I mean. There's a lot of like trade-off you have to make for this. And I'm like, the other thing I learned recently quite interesting is if you take testosterone, your body stops making it.

So then you actually are like making the situation worse because it can make you infertile if you take artificial testosterone because your body stops making actual testosterone. I can see that. So it's just like everything just feels very like you're not seeing the actual consequences of what you're doing. But the look smacking, the face smashing stuff. Is that what's actually happening or are they just doing that to sell this weird technique? kids and then they're actually going and getting filler in their face. Because is it real if you just smash your face, your jawbones get bigger? Yeah, it's a bit of both.

I think the hammering the face thing is probably not doing anything. Yeah, I don't think it's like giving you this like sculpted, like chiseled look. And I think it's just a way to like make poor kids on the internet like smash their faces. Yeah, we. So there's looksmax.org, which is basically the forum where they, they share all of their tips for it. And people upload, mostly 14s and 15 year olds, uploading pictures and then rinsing each other for how ugly they are. And I'm giving each other tips on how they can improve, how they can ascend. Ascend.

Me, Jack and Georgia are the colleague uploaded pictures of ourselves as sort of 30, mid-30% to get. Rate me. What did you get? We got absolutely destroyed. You could probably find our posts on there. Lower tier normies. Yeah, we're low tier normies. Low tier normies.

We're cooked. One of the comments was just surgery, bro. That's it. Well, now you know what it's like to go to an all-girls school. Been there, my friend. I have no sympathy. Actually, I'm glad it's happening to everybody. Should we get into some doping?

Let's get into the doping. So I put together a little history of doping to kick us off. Because history of doping, it basically goes back to the beginning of sport. So back in the Olympics in ancient Greece, they were taking magic mushrooms. They were taking these juice cocktails that were laced with opiates before races. Roman gladiators as well, they took strickenine. It's not poison. Yeah, so it's now used in rat poison.

But it's like this like stimulant that if it's found in the bark of the poison berry tree. And they would, yeah, take this. So it's like very toxic, but in small doses it acts as a bit like speed thing. And Strickenene, it became a bit of an institution in doping, really. And it was still popular more than a millennium later when the Olympics was revived. And nobody needed a pick-me-up more than the marathon runners. So the marathon at the 904 Olympics in St. Louis, it was particularly brutal. I've got a picture here of the runners on the starting line.

Part of the reason it was such a brutal marathon is that James Sullivan, who was the the chief of this Olympics and a bit of a sadist, he decided to use this race to test his purposeful dehydration theory. He basically had this idea that taking on liquids while doing exercise was bad for you. It would slow you down. And he therefore decided that his athletes would not be allowed to do that. He'd put one water station at the halfway point of this marathon.

To run a full marathon. To run a full marathon. And can I ask, I know this, I might be completely wrong, as might be quite controversial. Isn't that also what bodybuilders do? Like severely dehydrate themselves in order to make their muscles look more bulging. Like before a competition,

I think like you shred and you don't drink any water. Boxers definitely do for weigh-ins and stuff. Yeah, yeah. For Wakelar. Maybe he was onto something. The bodybuilders just have to stand there, right? Yeah, they just have to stand there. They're like not, you know, I know, I know.

I know it's like, you know, I'm not saying you're standing there. But when you're being evaluated, I think, to get that like bainy. Hugh Jackman definitely did that in Wolverine. But weird if you're going to run a marathon. When you're running a marathon, it's not a good idea. So you get water at how many, what, 30 miles? At 13 miles there, they had one waterway.

Naturally, they also decided to start the race at 3pm in 32 degree heat. And the course ran over this. It was this like dry, dusty track. It went over these seven huge hills. And the runners were led around the course by a fleet of automobiles which were pretty new at that point and that might have been nice

for the spectators to marvel at these new cars but it also meant that they kicked up this cloud of toxic red road dust and exhaust fumes directly into the runner's faces so one of the runners who was actually the

reigning Boston Marathon champion didn't even make it out at the stadium at the start of the race just collapsed vomiting another runner inhaled so much road dust he had a stomach hemorrhage, nearly died. 32 runners started the race. Ten of them had never run a marathon before, and 14 of them finished.

So it's a pretty, pretty sadistic race that's going on. Or maybe a marathon's just not that hard is why I'm going on. The guy looks up their times and they're actually quite quick. Yeah, so I'll come on to the guy who win. It's the slowest, slowest winning time ever. Were they on strict need of this? They, they, some of them, some of them definitely were, including a guy called Thomas Hicks. So he's an American guy.

He was doing pretty well. He was leading the race at the sort of two-thirds, three-quarters mark. But he was severely dehydrated as, as you would be. And, you know, he'd already passed the hydration station. He was, like, really struggling and he started begging his trainers who were traveling in a car to give him some water. But, you know, they were pretty wedded to this dehydration theory. So you got to try it out. They, though, had no qualms with handing over to him a concoction of egg whites, brandy and rat poison, strickenine.

Oh, like a brandy sour with poison. With rancorous with rat poison. Yeah, it sounds delicious. And it sort of worked in a way. He managed to keep going and he turned up at the stadium. But by that time, he was in no fit state to run, really. So one of the race officials gave an interview afterwards where he said that when Thomas Hicks came down the home straight, his eyes were dull, lustreless, the ashen colour of his face and skin had deepened. Which, he's been poisoned.

That's not, and run a man. And maybe has salmonella. Yeah, I'm quite sure. And as he was coming down the home straight, he started hallucinating and thought that the finish line was still 20 miles away. So he lay down on the home straight and tried to. tried to get Carl up and go to sleep, but his trainers caught up with him, lifted up and basically carried him across the line, at which point he collapsed.

And apparently after he collapsed, the race was over and he was still on the ground. His legs were still moving in the air as if he was running. That is not a well man. Can I just like, what are they trying to prove? Yeah, he basically thought that drinking water while doing exercise would slow you down. It can be quite uncomfortable. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, if you're consuming that much, if you consume like a bucket of water, then I can see that it's sort of sloshing around inside you. But I would argue it's also quite key. It feels almost like. Especially in 32 degree heat when you're sweating buckets. It feels almost like anti-doping. It's like, how can we make this even harder for you to do this? Exactly. Would everybody watch that instead of the enhanced games where like, how far can somebody go if we give them everything they want?

Versus like how far can people go if we give them nothing, absolutely nothing? Like starvation Olympics. I don't know, I don't want to watch that Squib games So he ends up, he does finish the race They give him a gold medal which is nice He finishes in three hours, 28 minutes Which actually is pretty fast

Yeah, he got carried Yeah Did get carried across the line And it was carried He was running to water He was like, I have to finish this Slowest winning time in Olympic history For a mountain

It's still quite fast I bet the guys in the cars were just glugging water the whole way around. Yeah, so it was pretty cruel. By the 1930s, though, athletes had largely moved on from strickening it. I'm sure there was still a bit of it about. But the drug of choice by that point was meth, methamphetamine, which at that point, it was legal.

You could buy it over the counter. It was like a nasal congestant, some kind of thing. Keeps you off for two days, but... Your nose will be clear. The Nazis were quite into it, weren't they? Yeah. Yeah, we did a whole... short hand on other Nazis

invented meth in order to like give to all their front line soldiers so that they would just keep fighting. Just stay away. Yeah. Genius. It's hard. It's hard to beat an army that is all on meth. Yeah.

Quite terrified. Managed it. Yeah, they are going to say. We did it. Fuck you. Yeah, actually alongside the Nazi frontline officers, it was also

the squad of Wolverhampton Wanderers were on it in the big in 1930s. Sort of the two big forces of the era so they were on meth until their manager

a guy called Frank the Major Buckley found something stronger monkey testicles so surely harder to get your hands on

well around this time it was actually surprisingly easy so the major had got this idea from a French surgeon by the name of Sergei Voronoff

and Voronov had come up with this theory that basically grinding up animals, bollocks and injecting them into humans would help stop aging. And in the 1920s, this became quite popular. He was implanting monkey testicle tissue into his patient's scrotums. He claimed that that improved sex drive, vision, memory, and just generally prolonged the life.

He had this monkey farm in Italy where these poor monkeys were getting farmed, harvested for their testicles. Because obviously at that time, we've done a lot of stuff around like that era of time when like in the West there was this big like looking to the East for a lot of answers and like that Eastern mysticism and spiritual and alternative medicine. Like obviously Chinese medicine is kind of like traditional medicine is kind of chocker block with like, you know, suck on a rhino horn and you shall be erect forever or whatever. Was he like influenced by something like that? That's a good question. I don't know. This is my idea.

Yeah. Yeah, so he tried it with various different animals. He tried it with dogs and... Didn't work? Yeah, no, he basically found it did work. He tried it, to be fair to him, he tried it first on himself and really felt the benefits. What a good amount.

Well, just shot it up in his veins. I think he was injecting. Oh, it was a thing. Just picking up on monkeys, are you aware of the monkey in Brazil called the English monkey? Because it looks like an Englishman. Have you seen it? No.

That's why I wasn't texting and being rude. I was trying to find this because it's so important that you see this. Oh, he looks so sad. Look at his little face. I think they've harvested the testicle genes from like a bloke in Benadorm and injected it into Brazil. Not in his natural habit. The Benadorm children of races, you sit outside all day watching the races.

So like this guy's injecting monkey testicles into people for like potency. What was that monkey trying to achieve by injecting himself with a Benadour mask? Just going on holiday man. He's just trying to have. He spent 50 weeks a year working his monkey ass off. Yeah. He'll have two weeks in the sun. Yeah, I don't think if I saw that monkey, it's like when you know there's some restaurants where you go and you can like pick out.

Sure, sure. I want that lobster. I want that fish, whatever. Would that be the monkey you picked? And then if you like go down to Sergei Voronov's, you know, monkey farm and you're looking around and so I think we're going to do it with this one

it's like do you know any other monkey doesn't do it on sliding pace scale you know how much you got so yeah

this technique became actually pretty fashionable in high society in the 1920s sort of the Zen pic at this day at one point

he actually evolved from monkeys to humans and started implanting the testicles of executed criminals into his wealthy clients, which it's hard to believe that that happened, but it did. It just feels like that episode of The Simpsons went home against snakes' hair.

Oh yeah. And then he becomes a killer. I'd rather have the red-faced monkey than some sort of executed prisoners testicles, maybe. But I'm not a man. I don't know. What do you want? You're getting more testicles then? Do I now have four?

Probably also easier to get them. Yeah, do you have to swap them out? That's a big question. Foreignov's got like 20 rackers. around in the pool table. Yeah, and do you, is it like there, like do you take on the characteristics of the... I've seen enough horror films.

Yeah, that's a good premise. But were people executed... There's a question for you guys, maybe, will people executed for stuff that wasn't that bad back then? Oh, yeah. So it could be like a thief. Yeah. What year?

What year are you talking? Were you, 20s? This was 1920s, 30s. Oh, all sorts. Deserting. Yeah, a spy for like the so... Yeah, I'll have a hedge. Anthony Blunt.

testicles, please. He was trying that for a little while, but unfortunately the demand outstripped the supply for felon, felon balls. So you're back to day with monkeys. And the major, this manager of Wolverhampton Wanderers, which is why we're talking about this. There is a streetbook. Where are we? He heard about this treatment and decided to try it out on himself.

And he did it for three months and loved it. Never felt better. He introduced that to his squad and before long, most of the squad were getting these jabs three times a week. Amazing.

Can I ask at the time where were they in the divisions? They were, they were decent. Wolves were a decent side. They were known to be very aggressive, I think. That makes a lot of best.

They were, yeah, they were a good team but not, they weren't like, okay. Top tier. But lo and behold, after this, these procedures, they began to go on an incredible run. So they smashed Everton 7-0, they beat Leicester 10-1. Some of their opponents did begin to get a little bit suspicious.

So one of the Everson players after the game complained that one of his opposite number had this sort of glazed expression. Like a monkey. Yeah, after the Lester game, when they beat Lester 10-1, the Lester players complained to their local MP that something was. up, but nothing was done about it. And eventually, a few other teams decided, you know, this was clearly working for wolves. We should get involved, including Portsmouth. And then when the 1939 FAA Cup rolled around, it was no surprise to those in the know that the finalists were the wolves and Portsmouth. No way. Sponsored by Monkey. Sponsored. So the press dubbed it, the the monkey gland final.

So everyone knew what they were doing. This wasn't like a secret. Like it was in... No, I think by this point it had got out. It's out. And it wasn't against the rules. It wasn't against the rules. Like this point, no...

And they only just survived World War I. There's only about four blocs in the country. Let them have the monkey testicles. Exactly. Yeah. We need all the monkey testicles we can get. I'm just like, how could this possibly be working? Is it just the placebo effect?

They're like, this has got to... Like, there's like a thing where the more complex... like the ritual to deliver the placebo effect, the better it works. So, like, versus just giving somebody a pill, if you're like, we're going to take the juice out of this monkey, we're going to distill it, we're going to put it in this little, and then you're going to inject yourself in this little, that's quite a lot. So I could see that that could be quite potent.

And also quite terrifying for your opponents as well. Yeah, yeah. Reverse placebo effect. I guess it still is. It's like a logical effect, yeah. Well, it worked for both of them, so they both made the FAA Cup final, Portsmouth 1-4-1 in the end. But then obviously this is in 1939

and Second World War kicked off and sadly after that the practice declined. Was it not popular in the trenches? Yeah, I don't know if there had time for that in the trenches. Not one's just got their men. We've got our monkey testicles. Hitler also injected himself with a bull seaman. Oh, really?

Same idea, surely. Yeah, well, only one ball, famously. So he really needed it. He should have a trunks of injection or veins. Good question. Not sure. He had a very discreet doctor. but I'm sure.

Was he on like everything? All of it. What, like heroin as well? Heroin, I don't think so. I think he was more an uppers guy. Okay. Had a lot to do. So the monkey glands then ceased to be...

After that, yeah, the Sajivoranov's technique sort of went out of fashion a little bit. A lot of techniques went out of fashion a little bit. Has it ever been tested? Has anyone ever proven for it was? I think it's been disproven. Oh, bummer. Yeah. There's only one way to find out, really, isn't it?

Were they getting the sperm out? They were taking basically like tissue samples from how I understand it. Okay. Tissue samples from the monkey's balls and transplanting that into any tissue. Yeah. At one point you said they ground them. I was picturing a pestle and mortar. Yeah.

I feel like this is not a replicatable process that they were running. In hard games. Now's the time. This is what it's for, isn't it? I would love somebody to be like, I'm on monkey tusks. Old school. Because it's the... I guess we're going to come on to it.

But it's anything, isn't it? No recreational. Well, nothing illegal is what it's meant to be. So you can use things like, my understanding is like off-label stuff for this, but nothing that's illicit. But also, nobody is telling anybody else what they're on because they don't want protocol stealing in between competitors. So, like, James Magnuson has, like, gone on radio shows or, like, said to the Sydney Morning Herald, like, what his...

like what he is taking but it's like you don't have to declare what it is. And they're also not going to test them are they? Well quite fun element if they then reveal at the end. Like a box. I guess that is your key edge.

Yeah, I think that's the thing is they want to keep their like secret potions of like what worked. That's going to get fruity. I could see monkey glands being experimented with. Yeah, why not? Why not? I don't hear first. So that's a few of the ancient doping stories.

I just love the fact that they would do poison. Just poison. Rat poison monkey testicles. It's quite. Give it a shot. In order for it to be like not allowed at the Olympic, does it have to be proven to actually work well? Like would an athlete be like eliminated?

Good question. If they were using something that monkey chest didn't work. Yeah. The winter at the first Winter Olympic drug ban was a snowboarder who was smoking weed, wasn't it? Yeah. It was so bright. But then they banned him

and then it turned out that actually they hadn't listed weed as like one of the band. Drugs. I think it is now. Yeah, that was actually when we were watching the Winter Olympics this time, like, talk about the other athletes and they're like, this is what time I work up, this is my exercise regime, this is what I ate for breakfast, these are all supplements I take.

And then the snowboarders are like, I smoked this much weed. Ice cream for breakfast. Monster energy. I think it was the first Olympics where snowboarding was included. which I really like. Because like, apparently like, Richard Olympics was quite,

it was quite stuffy. You know, the skiers were a bit snobby about the snowboards. It's like, we can't have the snowboarders coming in. And eventually, you know,

like, look, we need to open this up to the kids, like, get some more eyes on the, on the Olympics. And first winner is just like, he's just disqualified straight away. Thank you.

But this is my question, kind of coming up what Hannah saying? It's like, if you can use things that aren't proven to work, but also, what if you're using something

that I would feel like, if I'm not a snowboarder. I've never done it in my life. But I can only assume if I did it while I was stoned, I would be worse at it. Why isn't he allowed to use something that would just make him worse? Or does it make him better? Well, there's quite a lot of that. There's like people get called doing Coke and then get banned.

I think it sets a bad example, I guess. Yeah. Oh, okay. With like Darts and Snooker in the 80s and they were just necking pints the whole game. What was his name? Bill Wurbenock or something. He drank 50 beers a day. or something.

He could claim five a day against his taxes. Yeah. It was like, for work. Basically, it was to like, because he had tremors probably because he was drinking 50 bucks a day. But in order to play snooker, he needed five pints to like steady his hand. It does help a bit, though, doesn't it?

I mean, I think it definitely does. I can't say I've ever watched either, but I feel like it's lost its charm. Yeah, yeah. It's too professional. Like all sport. Speaking of ultra-professional sports, cycling, dope as paradise.

I think when you think a doping, running and cycling off and the biggies. But actually cycling started off just as kind of wacky races as the marathon that Zach described. So, cycling basically began in the modern sense in the 1890s when the bike with the pedals and the chain

came up. Before that, it's penny farthing. Can't be competitive sport on something that looks like that. But the safety bicycle comes out and that's the big moment. And very quickly, competitive events start. And the first really popular one was endurance races, which is just indoor laps of a track for six days straight.

So you're allowed to get off and eat and sleep. But obviously, you're losing time. So the cyclist very quickly just devise a cocktail of drugs so that they can do 24 hours a day for six days. That is surely having a heart attack after one. So apparently the poisons were strychnine, as always. Classic. That was red and cocaine.

Because cocaine as well was over the counter, right? Oh, everywhere, yeah. Yeah. So you just sort of buy it and, I guess, rub it on your gums or whatever they were doing. So they were just at it for six days straight. Basically on like a bender, but cycling. Also, like, what is the point?

What is the point of that? Like, I don't want to take away from anybody who's doing endurance, but I'm like, who wants to watch that? Yeah. Who cares that much? And to the point that you're, like, driving these people to, like, stay awake for six days and take all of these drugs. I'm just like, is it, is it worth it? I think there's two explanations.

One is male dick measuring. You can never rule out as a factor in anything. And the other is betting. I think it became a big... Because there was also pedestrianism, which was people walking laps. And that got really nasty. People started setting up bookies, and then they were like brothels and stuff. It got like really out of hand.

And cycling is the most data-driven sport. Which is why it attracts autistic men. Like, my friend of mine is real into it. And every birthday, I'm like, I don't want to go. Don't make me sit in the room with these men and talk about the tour de front. Would they happily just do laps for six days? right then. They would happily do laps, never speak to another human being.

Yeah, that's also a factor, isn't it? They just want their whoop. That's all they want. Chat whoop. Well, anyway, as you can imagine, these co-keeds who are also doing rat poison, a lot of them fell ill. No. So there were loads of...

I feel like got poisoned themselves. So there were loads of them who just like fall off the bike, crash. A lot of them were just like full psychosis, hallucinating. So this is where people are really watching. It's like when people say they're watching F-1 for the cars, but they're actually watching for the crashes. They're watching for the people falling off the bikes. Yeah, that's a good point.

So I think it was the New York Times are reporting on at the time and they said, the riders are becoming peevish and fretful. And then they said, the winner was like a ghost, his face as white as a corpse, his eyes no longer visible

because they'd retreated into his skull. This is an elite athlete. Classic. Strychnine poisoning. Six days. Good news is you could get Valium over the counterback then, so you'd be right as rain in a bad time.

Just take the edge off. Yeah, there was... Balance it out. There was definitely a thing going on as well of like balancing out with the uppers and downers and stuff. But the endurance races end up banned, understandably. And then a lot of the competitive energy shifts to the Tour de France. So the first Tour de France was 1903 and it was pretty savage back in the day. So much like that marathon, it was a lot of people who were just like, yeah, I'll give it a go.

So the first stage was 18 hours, which for comparison is, in length, it's twice what any stage is now. And a lot of these guys had never... That was stage one. Yeah, stage one of the whole thing. 18 hours. Yeah, 18 hours. Just through the night. They were built different.

And apparently originally no one really wanted to do it, but then they put up this massive prize money. It was six years wages for the average worker in France. So suddenly everyone's like, you know, it's a bit of that like squid games, energy. People are like, fuck it, I'll give it a go. Among them, the French rider, Ippolite Ocoutourier, who he, I guess he was kind of old school in a sense

because his way of numbing the pain from cycling for 18 hours was to just guzzle red wine and sniff ether. Oh, nice. How French. Yeah, that's kind of chic, isn't it? Yeah, the red wine. I think it's ether's like an anesthetic, right? Dentists used to use it, yeah.

When you just sniff it on a rag? Yeah, but you have to be very careful, otherwise it burns your face, so you can always tell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very flammable as well, isn't. It's inside a house rules. That's what the guy's addicted to. Oh, it's addictive as well, of course it is.

So what's the deal with what's chloroform, similar? I think chloroform's just like less of a nice time. No, like, in cloud, I think. you're just out. You're just out. Because we always talk about the first football World Cup during one of the games

the physio ran on with chloroform to treat a player but he slipped and it smashed and the physio passed out on the beach. Oh my God, that's amazing. Yeah, no. I don't think you're having fun on chloroform. I think you're just asleep.

Can you imagine that whoever was on the field there probably with like a broken ankle or something that's like the physio would be there and be there and be there and a minute. Just look over and it's like, is that, it's like, cool. Cool your way over.

to him in the smashed glass. To his puddle. Anyway, so Ipolié, he's on the red wine and the ether. Unfortunately, he crashes out in stage one. It doesn't make it the 18 hours. The winner that year was a factory worker called Maurice Garan. He had an interesting story because as a child, his parents had sold him to chimney sweeps for a wheel of cheese.

It's a French. What a life? What type of cheese? I was wondering that. So if it's a wheel, there's got to be a brie, camember. What would you sell your child? For? Not blue.

Nothing blue. Oh, I would only blue. Are you only blue? I'm just on my own at Christmas. Eating my blue cheese at nobody else wants. Why doesn't nobody like blue cheese? Yeah. A bit overpower.

I wouldn't sell a child for it. I'd nibble on it at Christmas. I think a good, a really nice camembert. I'd probably swap a child. Depending. Depending on an annoying child. You. It's not going to be cheddar, is it, surely.

Oh, a cratcher? A crotch is good. Wouldn't be in a wheel, I guess. Do they not make cheddar in work? Yeah, you can. You can get the big ones that they're all down the hill. Oh yeah, literally the cheddar rolling. If it was like Ports a little baby battle, I'd be cheeseled off. Did not plan that joke. I'd just like to make clear.

Anyway, so Maurice Garron, really interesting character. And he actually emerges as the frontrunner in this first tour de France. And it's not, he's, you know, he's boozing and all that stuff. But it's not just the strict need in the booze. He's also deliberately just shoving people off their bikes. At one point, he's vying with one guy for. for the whole tour de France. And so he knocks the guy off his bike

and then gets off and stamps repeatedly on the guy's wheel. I feel like Maurice is from the school of hard knocks. And he's also maybe the wheel being sold for a wheel of cheese as a child. Maybe it's all like psychological effort. He's like, no, take that.

Yeah, I could see it. Yeah, this is a free of... This is what we do on Red Hand. I really feel like the wheel is... You didn't know where you were coming. Representative of his broken child. well he wins it so he avenges his tough life he wins that first tour and after that it's everyone's like oh so the deal is you can just completely cheat in the tour de france it doesn't matter

so after that it's open season the following year people are throwing like tacks nails and glass in front of each other's bikes they are apparently a lot of them are putting itching powder in their competitors shorts seems like wacky races yeah obviously in the in the tour de france people also taking trains just to because you know you're going across the country so you just take your bike onto a train, cover the whole race, wait out for a bit, rejoin the pack. Oh, no. Why bother cycling? Well, actually, our old friend Ipolite Ocouturier cooked up a really good method.

So he found a way to get towed by a car for the whole tour. Basically got really thin, like fishing wire to see-through, touch it to the car and then he had a cork on the other end, which he held in his mouth, probably from his red wine. Yeah. And just got towed the whole way. That's amazing. But he got found out because he crossed the line at the same time as the judge's car.

So they started to clam down on all these like wacky racers style cheating methods. Wasn't there another one

who had their trainers had water bottles that were filled with lead so they'd have like that one

that's full to watch as that you know they sometimes swap things at the top of the hill they'd hand him

a lead things that he's really heavy going down and at the end you just chuck it off

to the side I love that I really wrote that's a good one I think that one really worked till he got caught

that feels like good clean fun. Yeah. You know? Unfortunately, they clamped out on all the good clean fun, but not the drugs.

So after that, it became much more about actual doping. And in the 1920s, the winner of the Tour de France told a journalist, he said, we have cocaine to go in our eyes,

chloroform for our gums, and do you want to see the pills? We keep going on dynamite. In the evenings, we dance around our rooms instead of sleeping. So they're just fucked. Wow.

Cocaine in your eyes. Yeah, there's that quick a way. You know, like a tequila shot in the eye. It's probably the quickest way. When you just can't get drunk quick enough. But there was a rock star thing of up the button, wasn't there? I was just going to say that.

Straw. Straw. It's called boofing. It's called to boof, yes. Straw. Like a poison dart. I was about to names and rock stars I've heard did it, but I'm not sure that's confirmed. It's probably libelers.

So yeah, so they're doping. They're dancing around their rooms. I get the sense that some of that doping is just for laughs. So there's just a bit of a like last days of Rome thing going on. Another rider says that he takes La Bomba, which is a cocktail of amphetamines and heroin. So you're going up, down, and every which way. Actually, I quite like his main rival is a guy called Gino Bartali,

and he said, I just drink 28 espressos a day, which... Somehow that feels worse. Yeah. The idea of 28 espresso makes me feel anxious. Same. Whereas the heroin and... Heroin taught you right out. Yeah, true.

Anyway, despite all this, the Tour de France does not ban... doping until the 1960s. He's had like half a century. I think that decade was when doping really got clamped down because the Olympics also did the same. 1967, war on drugs. And the first athletes full foul of those rules at the Olympics

was Hans Gunner-Lillian War who was caught, he's a pistol shooter. He was caught having two beers beforehand to steady the hand, like the dance players. And they banned him. So I guess that was the point where, yeah, even booze. He was breathalized because drug testing had begun at this point.

And then obviously it's urine tests for most of Olympic history, which a lot of people have come up with quite creative ways to get around. So there were athletes you had like, you'd store clean urine in your armpit, under your armpit and then have a tube down. And actually both Maradonna and Mike Tyson had prosthetic penises. The Wizzanator was called. Yeah, the Withernita. Mike Tyson's one.

Literally just a plastic knob that you hide clean urine in. You can still get them online. Oh, I can't imagine. About 65 quid, I think it was. And are they designed? specifically for urine tests? I presume so. I guess what else?

Yeah, or Halloween. But there was also, there was a basketball player who did it and he used his girlfriend's urine and they were like, look, you haven't been doping, but you're pregnant. So we've talked about doping for ages, but I don't think we've mentioned any sort of modern performance enhancers, right? It's all been like cocaine and strychnine. But, you know, in terms of actual performance enhancers, that came quite late. And the Tour de France is where it was really pioneered.

And at least the first half of the 90s, everyone was at it and there was just a culture of secrecy. The main stuff they were using, obviously, steroids and then EPO, which is, it basically helps oxygenate the blood that goes to the muscles so that you can basically don't get as tired in the muscles. That was being widely used with no one really talking about it until the 1998 Tour de France, which became known as the Festina affair because the team Festina, they were caught smuggling a carload of EPO and amphetamins, actually, over the Belgian. border into France for the tour. With the tour, yeah. So they're still doing the amphetamines. Speed. The whiz were still...

Okay, that was still the riders. It wasn't... It wasn't the... The storage were for the riders and then the team bosses afterwards. They were just up all night. And just a guy with a van

behind them full of monkeys. Yeah, the monkey glands. That can cross the border. But basically these border guards catch them there, like, right. So then within about three days, they raid all the teams, hotels. And they find loads of these drugs.

They find written plans on how to how to dope, basically. Like, everyone's just doing it without even covering it up. And suddenly, all these riders start dropping out of the tour. So that year, only half the riders who entered the tour actually crossed the finish line at the end. And there were loads of convictions as well. So loads of big names in cycling, basically, got taken out by this,

except a little-known Texan by the name of Lance Armstrong, who he was there that year. I mean, he'd had an amazing story already because he'd been diagnosed with cancer in 1996. The doctors gave him a 20% chance, of surviving. But apparently they only told him that to give him hope. Wow.

Obviously, we know he survived that and thrived. He won seven Tour de Francis in a row, 1990 to 2005. Were you guys live strong band people? Remember them? I remember that era. So I think I've told you this out before. Really embarrassing stories.

I really wanted one. I think I was like 14 or 15. And I like phoned around all the cycling shops in London and found one that had it and I walked. I got all the money. pocket money I had, which was enough to get the Livestrong Bad, but I had no money for the bus. So I walked to, like, St James, you know, like where Buckingham Palace is. Oh, wow.

And there was a cycling shop there that had them. And I got my fucking Livestrong Bad and, like, wore it at school on the Monday. And no one cared. But you cared. I was the most of the most thing. That's the kind of grit that kids are happy. Yeah. I was sort of the Lance Armstrong of my school, I guess.

I think so. And I think it's like how, you know, I had to walk, blah, blah, blah, blah to get water or whatever. I had to walk to St. It seems to get a lot. It must-produced silicon band, which were widely available about a week later. You can tell your child that before you sell them for some. Yeah. It was such a strange phase.

Yeah. Just like every cause imaginable just had these silicon bands. What was Scooby? Probably still strangling turtles today. Yeah. Oh yeah, because those don't. I'm sure, though. They're going to be around for the next 500 million years.

The best one was like the anti-racism one, which was like the black. With a white one. With a hands holding. No idea he was just a black silicon band and a white silicon band like that. And then you wore both of them and you were like, yeah. There was a Camo Army one, I think. I think so. Yeah, I guess that was everything.

It became a thing. But Lance kicked that off with his charity. So Fairplay, he raised a lot of money for charity. Of course, behind the scenes, he was using EPO and steroids to cheat in those Tour de France. And he actually failed a drug test in 99, the first tour he won. But his team doctor covered it up. They wrote him. They backdated a prescription for bum cream.

Saddle sores, common problem on the tour. And they basically wrote a prescription because this has steroids in it. Of course. Genius. Seems kind of easy. But word was gradually. So it's hydrochort ozone classed as a performance enhancing drug. Yeah, I think a lot of sports people can't have those creams and stuff.

Because often there's people who accidentally. Sure. Yeah, wow. Paul Pogba, didn't he, or he claims that he used some kind of cream, I think, by mistake. and various footballers who've say that's what they're taken

get out is yeah was it was it kind of Toro who took his wife's slimming pills or so Shane Warren took his mum's

oh his mum oh his mum and got banned anyway the whole team are in on it with Lance in the end

apparently a lot of them didn't want to be and were basically blackmailed into not only covering it up but taking drugs with him so that they were implicated

so it was all pretty nasty and these journalists who were trying to report it got like hounded, sued everyone You know, there were people who were adamant that he'd never cheated. But of course, as we all know, it eventually unraveled.

And he confessed on Oprah, where else in 2013. Apparently that day, he lost $75 million of sponsorship deals. Why did he do it? Was it just like the pressure was unpenable? Like, he had to at that point. No, I think to win the Tour of France in that stage, you had to cheat because everyone was. Oh, no, I mean confess. Oh, sorry.

I think it was too obvious by that point. People had come out and said, yeah, he forced me to. The game was up long before, I think. Oh, okay, okay. I don't know. Did you reckon he got money for Oprah? Maybe. That is how the game is playing. That's how she gets the exclusive.

Right. She's like, I will give you $75 million. Which is the amount I predict you will lose. Today, you break even. I actually think he's done a riot out of it. He's still, he's got big podcast. He's still about, yeah. He said, yeah, it's popular.

Because to be fair, everyone was doping. So in a way, he's still, so apparently that, all his seven titles are still unclaimed because apparently every other rider was doping. Like there's a vice article where they try and work out who the true honest winner would be of the 99 title if it's not him. And they rule out like the top 20. In a way, it sort of justifies the fact that he was doping.

It's just like everyone was doing it. He was just the best. If you were not doing it, then you're a mug. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you think he would do enhanced games? I'm sure. He'd be the face of the Adhards games. Surely you can claw back more than 75 million on that.

How's it? I really. I think that's a smart move, though, for him. I think if he's on this like rebrand, I've got a podcast, like I've done my time. I atoned for my sins, even though everyone was doing it. And then I'm starting again, I think if he goes back into the enhanced games, he's going to. I'd love him for that. I think he thinks it will drag him down.

Yeah. I think just, at this point, go full baddie. Yeah. Just embrace it. Give yourself the villain edit. The BBC asked him like five, ten years ago, would you, if you were back in 1995 and you could do it again, would you? And he was like, absolutely, I'd definitely, I'd dope again. Good.

Because otherwise he'd have just been sort of middling cyclist he's ever heard of. No one would have bought your bracelets, mate. No one would have your bracelets, you wouldn't have a podcast now, would you? True. Well, yeah, sort of the greatest doper of his time, I would say. Yeah.

That we know about that. Yeah, that we know. Yeah. Isn't that there's a stat of the top 20-100 metre times of all time and all of them, except for three, have been ruled out for doping, and those three are you saying, but...

Oh, wow. I would break my heart if you say bowl was a chute. I love him. This interests me, right? I am of the opinion that they're all still fucking doing it. They've just got better at getting away with it, gaming the system. The system can't keep up with the athletes developing ways to get around it, right? So I actually think that the reason the Olympics, etc.,

are so against the enhanced games is because if they're all doping and they're actually not much better than the Olympians. They're going to have to be, they're exposed, aren't they? Because they're all fucking doing it. So I really think that the enhanced games will be the same level and then the International Olympic Committee are going to have to be like, so that's why they're so against it. It's not because of sportsmanship.

It's not about fairness. It's not about the nobleness of the game. It's because they've been caught with their fucking pants down with a needle in their butt. They're not doing it. Yeah. So if you were to find it. find out that Usain Bolt, for example,

had been dope and you just said you'd be gutted. Oh, yeah. There's just a dishonesty to what you're actually seeing. It's like someone telling you that wrestling is scripted. That's going to go down badly with some listeners. But you know what I mean? It's like, oh, I'm being had here.

It's actually a vanity. I don't know. I think it's more to do with people dining out on this clean image of them as like, you know, I am this role model who's just done it. And I'm doing it. weight to the top from the bottom and... And I'm succeeding because I take this supplement

or because I eat this way rather than because I'm also supplementing. Yeah, it's like we could be cheating. Doping. Especially because sport has such a clean image now. It's more grating. I would love sport to just have those old school like tour de frowns, that kind of cheating.

That kind of stuff is fun and it's creative. It's like, work smart or not faster, not harder. Yeah, no, it is. Fill your water bottles with lead. It is. Have a cork in your mouth. Do you think that the negativity is what comes back to what you're saying about, like, the image, right? So it's like kids watching and things like that.

It's like, oh, look, they're taking drugs and, like, they may not understand, like, what you just said Hannah, which, like, they still have to be incredibly good to do it. But it's this feeling of, like, you can cheat your way to the top or, like, there's a quick fix or like a magic bullet that will make you better rather than just, like, working really hard. Maybe that's why it feels off. Especially Olympic sports. the only way they're making money is via sponsorship and what brand is going to sponsor you if you're cheating. That's probably the best explanation. And I think that in itself is a farce, you know?

Like, it's all about finance. It's all about money. So fucking smoke as much crack as you want. Amen. Well, thank you very much. That was, I feel like I've learned so much. Thank you, guys. That was great.

Really, really interesting stuff. So hot off the heels of us saying we don't think the enhanced games are actually going to happen. Hannah and I are going to talk to you about the inaugural enhanced games. games. Let's see. They have launched the enhanced games, which is just Steroid Olympics, basically. Kind of not quite, but that's the easiest way of explaining it. With an Apple-style launch event, it's how that's been described internally. So they're really hard. It's about the spectacle. It's nothing to do with the sport. And the question they're asking is, what would happen if all of

the rules of sport were stripped away? What could we achieve? As a species, if our hardest, fastest and strongest, we're allowed to chemically amplify their bodies without limit or recourse. I honestly have thought about that before. Like if that truly was possible, which it isn't, for reasons we'll go into,

is there a problem there to just see how far we could go ethically? It's a scientific sport, really. It's basically the athletes are, much like an F1, the skill of it, a lot of it comes down to like the engineers for the cars. The most, obviously, I'm not saying,

the drivers are also, amazing. They're great, but a lot of it comes down to like the sort of aerodynamics and everything. Like there's so much like science that goes into it. And this is basically the equivalent for doctors, right? Yeah, it's like the ultimate biohacking, right? Instead of just like, oh, how can I make myself concentrate a little bit harder at work or do a little bit? It's like, yeah, take that, but then apply it to Olympians.

So I can totally understand the appeal of something like this, theoretically speaking, for sure. And also the side of it is like could, because a lot of the, some of the athletes who are competing are retired and have been for ages. And then they're coming back to see if they can be as good as they were. So that's also very marketable as a like could, could a 60 year old. Yeah. Do the drugs not make you mental like Chris Benwari? Because that would be my only concern.

Yeah. Can you void rage, all that stuff? Can't you go like pretty mad? Yeah. And I think that is like a. a criticism of the enhanced games being like, what are the healthcare concerns? But I question whether that's what they actually care about.

It's all happening among consenting adults. This is what I was going to say. And I think it comes back to your reference of like the F1 cars. It's like the faster they go and like, you know, all of that. But then is it harder to control and does that lead to you crushing it or something? Kind of all sport now is like a bit of that like hosty impact of like their performing ponies and people just want that. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, people just treat them like that anyway. Absolutely. I mean, there was the really, really good podcast series. I don't know if you guys have listened to it called American Gladiator. And it was about Aaron Hernandez, who was the NFL player who basically just like, you know, all of the brain injury stuff that was coming out of that. And then he kills someone and then kills himself. I think that's what happened with him. And yeah, it's basically like making the connection between like how really far have we come from like gladiator times where it was like, who cares about the well-being of these people as long as there's a spectrum.

and as long as there's like entertainment to be had. And yeah, I thought that was quite interesting. So yeah, in June 2023, the Enhanced games website, Enhanced.com launched. And it launched with this like quite odd 34 second video clip that genuinely looks like it was shot in a primary school. You know when it's like sports marketing and everything's all very like epic and grand? And in a similar way, it has this like booming voiceover talking about this like proud enhanced athletes. That's what they call them. Describing them as a true libertarian who has finally been given the arena to compete in, unshackled by all the pesky arbitrary rules of the International Olympics Committee.

The positioning it, as you can see, it's quite like a maverick domain. That feels like the angle they're going for. And it makes sense. So just to like clarify exactly what the enhanced games are and like what's allowed, basically participating athletes can take all performance enhancing drugs they want. They can take as much as they want, and they don't even have to say which ones they're on. And that's because the board of the enhanced games are much more concerned with protocols stealing than they are about the competitors literally dropping debt. And I get that to an extent because it's kind of like if you're going to say it's going to be all out, like you can do whatever you want in the middle, oh, but you can't do this, this and this.

It kind of undermines the like full force freedom that they say that they're going for. So currently on the Enhanced Games website, there's this trailer, like we said, it looks very strange, but they are promising a superior spectator experience for those who will be watching, as well as millions in prize money for any victorious athletes. Yeah, so the International Olympics Committee and just about every sporting body under the sun have made it very clear that taking part in the enhanced games would be a career-ending move. So to push such a controversial event to actual fruition takes a special kind of stupid, blind arrogance, and loads of other people's money, which are things that Aaron D'Souza has more than enough of. The brains behind the enhanced operation is an Australian-born Korea venture capitalist. Is there a worse type of person?

Like all one percenters, Aaron D'Souza has dabbled in fintech, philanthropy, and he's also an honorary Moldovan consultant. There's not much to say about him until about 2022 because he didn't actually do anything. Just had all of these sort of projects flopping around, not really going anywhere. But that all changed when one day, he claims, he was in the gym thinking about all of the rippling biceps surrounding him. And despite the stigma around taking steroids in the 80s and 90s, Aaron Assousa apparently realized that everyone around him was totally juiced anyway. And he does a little bit of digging around. And he says that he discovers a couple of stats

that 14.83% of American men were taking anabolic steroids and 95% of the NFL were also doing the same. Now, I do have to say that these stats are actually pulled from astonishingly flawed studies, but it's like the rationale that he uses, that everyone is doing it anyway, so like, what's the big deal? And he basically figures that someone's going to capitalize on this at some point. So why not? Why not me? Why not little old Aaron? And so yeah, it seemed like

the perfect time for him to pull the trigger on it. Is he the money? Oh, no, no. No. He's the brains. Never invest your own money. Come on. Aaron D'Souza decided that he was going to celebrate all things doping to find out just how far the human body could be pushed if the rules were taken away. After this brainwave, over the next few months, DeSouza developed the concept of the enhanced games and shouted about it to anyone he could find. But he did have real trouble getting investors interested in his drugs athletic jamboree.

Pitching to Lance Armstrong may strike us as tone deaf, but I genuinely think that because a conversation with Aaron DeSuzer has been likened to talking to a bar of soap, Aaron DeSuzea probably didn't notice. I can understand trying to get Lance on board when it's more of a concept, but to pitch it to Lance Armstrong. You know that thing that ruined you, life.

How about have you considered being the face of it, making it your whole round? It sort of already is, really. You might as well lean in. Yeah. So that didn't work. It was a no. It was a no. Rejection at every turn.

But DeSuzer knew he was onto something. He also has a real problem with the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency. His argument is that, like, they're wrong to the core. They're all cheating. I think, yeah. And I'm kind of with him. I don't think he's genuine in that belief.

I think it makes a good sound like. So he says he's on a campaign to expose the hypocrisy of those bodies. And he was going to take them down on his own with the help of his very, very, very rich, France. So, yeah, Aaron de Sousa very much paints himself as sort of like the Robin Hood of doping in the sporting. He's like, they're all doing it. They're a bunch of hypocrites. I'm going to like democratize this and we're going to be real about it. We're going to be honest about it. And that's like, like, kind of said, that's like his whole schick. That's like

his spiel about like how this idea came to him like taking down big sport. But it's much more likely that he actually just probably stole the idea from a 2004 wired article called Steroids for everyone, which made a case for an enhanced Olympics. And this is one of the many reasons the Wired magazine is very much against Aaron D'Souza and the whole enhanced game situation. Which is actually quite ironic when you discover that what Aaron D'Souza did to one of their biggest competitors, a magazine called Gawker. Basically, when Aaron D'Souza was a mere fresher at Oxford, he was asked if he could show a friend of a friend around the, you know, historic university town. And that friend of a friend just happened to be co-founder of PayPal

and Facebook board member Peter Thiel. And apparently, Peter and Aaron D'Souza hit it off straight away and they stay in touch, spending many subsequent New Year's Eve's together, which, sure. It's like an age gap in that. Huge. Yeah. Yeah, like the 20 years sort of thing. Noted.

Yeah, this story is full of people who are so unbelievably rich that there's only about 16 of them in the group And they all just go to each other's houses for New Year? Sounds great. Yeah. In the late 2000s, it just so happened that Peter Thiel had a big gay ax to grind with snarky New York-based online publication, Gorker. The site had a magazine dedicated exclusively to the dastardly dealings of Silicon Valley, which is called Valleywag.

It's quite a hard word to say. Valleywack, Valleybag, yeah. Well, now I have to say it again, and it's going to be even harder. Valleywag hated Peter Thiel, and he hated them right back, going as far as to compare them to Al-Qaeda, referring to meetings with Gorker editors as negotiating with terrorists. Fatal blow came in 2007 with the headline, Peter Teal is totally gay, people,

which was true, and completely legal to publish, but left Peter Teal totally heaming. The writer of the article insisted that Teal's, People had told him that there was no problem with the Post, and Peter Thiel even donated $250,000 to the committee to protect journalists the same year, stating that he was a true believer in the critical importance of free speech, except when you call him gay. I mean, publishing it on the cover of your magazine. It's mid-2000s.

Even then, like a British tabloat wouldn't out someone for being gay even then. Yeah. That's like 80s, 80s son. So when little snotty law student Aaron D'Souza presented Peter Thiel with a plan to take Gawker down, he was all ears. It's a revenge story. At its heart, this is a revenge story. The plan was simple. If you have millions of dollars lying around in a spare afternoon, the problem was that Gawker hadn't done anything illegal. Peter Thiel can't sue them himself, but that doesn't mean he can't fund other people who do have a legitimate case against the publication. So all Aaron D'Souza needed to do for Peter Thiel was find a high-profile person with an actual case against Gawker and then they could pay the law firms to pursue the online journal into the ground.

Enter Hulk Hogan and his sex tape. Times were tough for the Hulkster in 2006. So his radio DJ buddy, Bubba the Love Sponge, I don't know if people, if people remember. remember this story, this will all be ringing all sorts of horrible alarm bells. Baba decides that what Hulk Hogan needs to, you know, get him out of this 2006 rut that he's in is a good old-fashioned shag. And that shag was going to be with Bubba's own wife. So, like, I don't know the ins and outs of this, but bizarrely, Hulk Hogan agreed to this

cucky, adulterous arrangement. But he said, I'm only doing it. I'm only going to fuck your wife if it's not filmed. That's his only stipulation. It was, however, absolutely filmed. And six years later, Bubba the Betrayal Sponge leaked the sexy footage to Gorka. And Aaron D'Souza, known then as just Mr. A, met with Hogan's attorney, armed with instructions on how to take Gorka down

and also fistfuls of Peter Thiel's cash. De Sousa was so discreet that Hulk Hogan himself had no idea that it was Mr. PayPal himself, Teal, who was basically bankrolling his legal fees to take Gorka down to the tune of like $10 million.

Well, he was just like, I've got an anonymous sugar daddy. It's a Hulkermaniac. He does basically think everyone loves him, doesn't he? That's his whole thing. It's like a level of like self-assuredness and confidence you would have to be, like, to ask no questions about who is giving you $10 million to mount this legal defence? Or are you like, I don't want to know. Probably bubba, some weird tink. So yeah, he asked no questions, he doesn't know, but the plan

worked. And in 2016, a Floridian judge did award Hulk Hogan $140 million in damages, forcing Gorka to far for bankruptcy. Now, most of Gorka's assets were bought up, by Univision and Peter Thiel has also made some bids to buy up the leftovers just to really rob as you would. So hang on, so obviously your Hulk's flawed Corker, Aaron's the broker, and what's so he and Peter Thiel have now sort of proven themselves as a force? More importantly, Aaron D'Sooza has proven to Peter Thiel that he's a little bitchy bum boy. Yeah, love it.

Who can get stuff done. Yes. So and Aaron D'Sooza has proved to himself that he's not a failure and he can do things. and it seems people will give him literally unlimited money in order to make that happen. So the enhanced games gets pitched of Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel is all in, and that brings with it some explosive press coverage

and a lot of criticism as well. Concerns ranging from health risks to sportsmanship. I didn't know this. Maybe you guys are a bit more affair with levels of doping. Apparently testosterone can cause your muscles to grow so much that they separate from and then crush your bones. That's tough until the Olympic weight list. Yeah, so it's not like, I thought people were just worried about like heart problems and stuff like that,

but it's apparently... Well, and then you just sort of fall apart. I think so. Like, your frame can't support, like, the human skeleton can't support that much. Because I don't know, like... Yeah, I never thought about that, but it makes sense. It's like if you weren't taking enhancing drugs, your body can only grow, like a cup, can only grow to the size that's in. But then if you take a bunch of shrugs,

your body's like, and the tank cracks. Can't you bone max? Can you not like, because clavicular does the osteoporosis meds, doesn't need to grow his bones as well. Maybe that's what? Yeah. King Clave. The other criticism was that Aaron DeSuzer had like completely missed the point of sport. Has he?

I think that's what I really struggle with is like what is point of sport, you know? I feel like he's missed the point of sport, but not the point of like elite level competition maybe. But sport at the level of what it's meant to represent, I suppose, is like sportsmanship and working hard and resilience and fair play and all of that. And maybe that's what they're saying he's missing the point of. I'm just a sport as entertainment guy. And those concepts are just devices to make the entertainment work. But I think therefore it's fair game. A bit wide they're all going to go completely loopy.

But apart from that, I've got no issue with that. Aaron DeSuzer has a different tactic rather than sort of defending the, medical repercussions for his athletes. He actually says that enhancing and the right to enhance your performance is actually a human rights issue. I wondered when that was going to come up and started adopting LGBT language in his copy

describing his athletes as coming out as enhanced. I guess they kind of are. Are they being discriminated against as a group, though? Top-level sporting people. Are they really, you know, fighting for representation? Oh, this is it. So on his website, there was for a while it has been taken down now, a section dedicated to articles where the word cheated was swapped out for

fought for science and bodily suffer. He's really trying to reframe as hard as he possibly can. Language matters. Yeah, that was really good. So all of this was a bit dicey, even from the start, but it wasn't enough to scare off. Another Australian, James Magnuson, the world-class swimmer, It was well past his Olympic prime, I think we can say,

was the first to publicly announce that he would be an enhanced athlete. On the condition, it's a very, very specific high dollar condition, that DeSuzer would give him a million dollars for breaking the 50-meter freestyle world record, which like, fair enough. That's a good, that's a decent bet. And he apparently, Magnuson, bragged on a podcast that he would, quote, juice to the gills and break the record within six months. And what was that more than six months ago?

Surely we're due a record, aren't we? Oh, will we? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because as soon as he said that, Magnuson was, as Hannah said earlier, banned pretty swiftly from using any sort of professional sports pool in the entire world. So he basically has to train for this million-dollar world record attempt in an apartment complex pool in North Carolina. So it's just a little little kids

like a little bit of an apartment like splashing about. So is it even a 50 metre pool? I actually don't know but I can't imagine that it is because like an apartment complex pool is probably going to have limited space. It's like one of those like kidney-shaped tools. And he can probably just walk along the whole of it. And it's like they turn the wave machine on every half an hour. So yeah.

Can't trade on Tuesday because there's a ribix. He says in his interview in like some interviews that like, well, actually the weather was quite bad, so there wasn't anyone else in the board. That's handy. Occasionally people would come and watch. But his whole thing during this training that he's doing is jealously guarding the protocol that he's using. Because again, that's where the money is. It's kind of like, I guess, like your little black book, right? The magic potion that you figure out that's going to work for you.

But apparently he did spill to the Sydney Morning Herald that he was, quote, a full of testosterone. BPC 157, thymocin, Ipamoralin, and CJC 1295. I feel like he's giving away the protocols. I know. I was like, why are you saying all this? But by taking this particular protocol that he is doing and no doubt training in his North Carolina pool, James Magnuson put on 30 pounds of muscle in just a few months. I feel like, that's quite a lot.

It's working. It's working. It's doing the job. That's a shitload, isn't it? That's like more than two stone. Yeah, like, yeah, that's like, yeah, two stone. Is it 14 pounds in a stone? Like a big dog.

Big dogs worth muscle. Is that good when you're swimming? No, right. No. It's not. You're only 30 pounds heavier. It would be good if you were like, you know, clutching some lead, lead bottles and going down a hill on cycling. But here, he was the strongest he has ever been. That's what he said.

And he was squatting more than he had ever squatted. And he said, like, you know, he was in really, really good shape. But as you say, being super heavy isn't like the best thing. for a swimmer. So yeah, it doesn't really feel like why did you, it feels confusing as to why he chose our specific protocol to do what it.

I guess maybe if it's all muscle, then maybe it counteracts itself by how strong you are. Maybe. This is a real expert of you. I don't know. And I will take into account the fact that when he's doing

this world record attempt, he has passed his Olympic prime, but he attempts the record attempt. And James Magnuson actually missed the world record by two seconds. But that is 1.2 seconds slower than his own personal. After doing all of that.

Shit. So yeah. It doesn't work. Embarrassingly, all of the illegal doping that he did actually made him worse. And again, I'll say, like, control for the fact that he had also aged and he wasn't in his Olympic prime. But still, he was saying, I've never been stronger. Because he was pretty good, right, when he was legit. Yeah, like, I recognize his name.

And I'm not, like, you know, begin to. Yeah. I think. I really? Didn't he get in trouble with the Aussie team for the night before a big race? He was knocking on people's doors and running away.

I swear this thing like he did it and he did it to the relay team and the relay team lost the next day by a second. Oh no. And so he's quite unpopular in Australian sport already. So yes, big sad for the first enhanced athlete

who came out to the world and got worse. I'm surprised that he let that time get out like surely you want to hush that up was he doing it around the edge of his like roundboard so he's positioned himself

to be the face of the enhanced games right so his protocol is what he's working with them for this record attempt to happen right so like they really really really want him to do it

and the protocol is made by them and given to him they're working in conjunction and they don't pull it off and they bring in Greek Bulgarian Christian Gokt

who had just missed out on qualifying for the 2024 Paris Olympics by less than three-tenths of a second. But what I actually learned while reading about this is that all of the doping and like EPO, etc, that might add or take off depending on what you want, if fractions of a second, what makes the real difference is, remember those wetsuits they were allowed to wear? That makes so much more different. But because they're illegal now, nobody makes them anymore. So the Enhanced team and the coach and these two rival swimmers are all trying to find the last of these wetsuits in the whole world

and having arguments about who can wear which one. And Magnuson actually ripped one of them because he's so fucking huge. So not only are they, you know, blood doping, doing whatever, etc., all of all this growth hormone, they're also wearing illegal swimming costumes. Which makes a larger difference. I love that that's actually the whole thing. just wear those shoes that got bad 100 metres

Exactly And also I think they Sort of saw the mistakes they'd made with Magson They made them too big too fast So they kind of They don't give away exactly what they did With With their mum stung

Yeah Yeah Yeah Back into the window It's turret for you Just he's ripped up wet Yes exactly Magnus

You're just going to find him Like wandering through the Swiss The Swiss Lampus Terrorising He was like, terrorizing local villages. Fools in love with a local girl. He's like, being chased with pitchfork.

Yeah. Oh, poor guy. And it worked because Christian was swimming faster than Magnuson in just weeks in the call in North Carolina. And after three months of the enhanced protocol, he snatched Magnuson's million. They gave, he broke the record. He beat the world record by 0.02 of a second.

So he's done it? He's done it. He's done it. How does that? It doesn't count. Why? Because he's doping. Oh, really. And he's in the illegal swimming costume.

But it counts in the audience. It counts in, like, reality, doesn't it? That's not a point. He gets his million dollars, right? He gets his million dollars. And he's quite rightly said, like, why would I go back to the Olympics? I've already made more than I would in 10 careers as an Olympia. It's true.

Because the other sort of prong to Aaron D'Sooza's argument is that Olympic athletes don't get paid for buck. So it come over to the Enhance Games and actually make some money. So what now can you go again? If you beat it again, do you get another mill? Well, I believe he has beaten it again by slightly less, but in normal trunks. So he has still done it without the fish suit. That's pretty cool. That's great. He's done it.

Though I will say if the whole point of the Enhance games is to like see some like superhuman shit. And this is the marketing thing for it. Do ordinary people actually care that this guy swam 0.0.0.0. two seconds faster. Like, isn't it like, you want to see someone do it like 20 seconds faster? Which I know is like, not possible. But it just feels like, oh, is that it?

Yeah, because someone might break that, do that time again at like just the next Olympics. Yeah. It's a bit test kit. Swimming's quite boring watch anyway. Yeah, it is. This is the point I'm making. It doesn't make that much difference.

It just doesn't. And that's why the Olympics don't want to happen. Anyway, the money behind the enhanced games isn't just coming from Peace Teal's revenge pot, but also a psychedelic-loving Christian Angamaya, who's another VC who had his life changed by psilocybin, and he wants to sort of commercialise it and bring it to the... So this is where this is all going,

and it's just going to be giving us drugs. He's got the psychedelics company, that guy. He's a big funder, and also Donald Trump Jr.'s investment firm, which is called 1789 Capital, because the enhanced games isn't just a sports day for retired swimmers. It's a shop front stake in the anti-AIDS. and health industry, which is worth trillions.

And that's what they're actually investing in. Right. Yeah, because I think the thing is with this, like he failed to qualify for the Olympics, but then with the drugs did break the world record. So I think the thing is, if you believe, like, everyone in the Olympics is doping anyway, but if you don't believe that everyone in the Olympics is doping anyway,

I guess the real test case would be to see Usain Bolt take a bunch of drugs and see how fast he could run. But because of the, like, stigma around it, will never get to see that. So it's like this guy didn't qualify but then he broke the world record so it does make a difference It's quite a big jump

Yeah So what they're actually doing It's not actually about the records It's all marketing what they're actually doing is they're going to sell us a supplements line tied to the enhanced games as an event They're going to suck us in with the spectacle And then sell us the shit

Genius I like it more now Yeah I'll buy a supplement So DeSuzer has managed to pull in some very legitimate sounding people other than the enhanced athlete who are already committed to the event, like a man named Rick Adams.

Do you guys know who this is? Why would you? Apparently, he's a former member of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee who has now joined up. What's some defectors? Yeah, I'm coming over to the dark side. And he has said, and this is very confident statement, he has said, I am confident there will be a moment when people forget there was a time before the enhanced games. Big talk.

Big talk. It will be the game. Yeah. It already is. God. So Desoza is convinced the cultural impact of the enhanced games will change the world as we know it. And it could create a world, according to him,

where a 60-year-old could be running a four-minute mile. That would be very impressive. That would like to see. So yeah, this whole paradigm shift, it's bigger than just the games. It's like going to change the world. Plus, obviously, Trump Jr., backing it all, has placed the enhanced games deep in MAGA country,

and it's also aligning itself with RFK's Maha, Make America Healthy Again, campaign. And DeSusa often argues that the most harmful drugs are actually fast and processed foods, having done way more damage, according to him, than performance enhancers, which like, yeah, okay, but they're also way more ubiquitous.

More people are eating McDonald's than people are peeing out of external. And also, do we have to say that McDonald's and Coca-Cola are like lead sponsors often at like basically every sporting event in the world. And nobody has a problem with that. Does Susa also told the New York Post that the Enhance Games is now a very American project? Surely you're China into this year? Yeah, Russia and you guys are right. Why is Russia? Not in this.

You guys have done a really good job of taking us on a journey where I'm like, do I like the Enhance Games or do I not? I don't know where I see. To the end. No, yeah. Yeah. I think what the like bringing in of the Trump dynasty and the like sort of Americanness of it all, I mean it's brought them a lot of funding. But also because it has sort of aligned itself with the United States government, it has actually got quite a lot more parameters than it originally advertised because baby Donald Trump can't really just be like, yeah, cocaine heroin, fine. So they're not allowed.

So there are drugs that are off the table. And there isn't like blood-doping testing, but athletes undergo like brain scans, heart scans, stuff like that to check they are actually fit to compete because if someone drops dead, that's not going to do like great PR. But ironically, it does mean that athletes will be tested more than they are in the normal Olympics just for slightly different things. Would you watch it if it's on? I barely watch the Olympics, man. Yeah. To one day event at least. That's true.

I can probably manage that. But I don't know. I think I don't want to say that all Olympians are joking because I feel like I don't want to take away from the ones that aren't. I think they're all doing something like, like you were saying. They're like testing for different things and it's like what you can get away with. But I think this is such a like a thought experiment that lots of people talk about. So I feel like it was inevitably going to happen.

Like nobody's going to show it. Like where are they going to stream it? I think the stigma around it is so much that I don't know how they're like overcome the monetary. side of it. Like someone's going to constantly have to be bankrolling it because I just don't think any brands are going to want to be associated with it. I don't know. I'm not that bothered. I think, you know, consenting adults if they want to take a bunch of drugs and do it. But then is that right that they should? I don't know. And I do think it sets a precedent because I hear what you're saying about sport being entertainment, but it also means more to

other people in terms of like that good fight. And this feels wrong. But as I don't know, I don't know if I care that much. Just saying. I think if a guy broke the record at the enhanced games by like two seconds and somebody did two seconds less at the actual Olympics, I would be more like, I'm impressed by that. Yeah. By the Olympics than by the guy. Yeah, they've got to blow them out of the water for it to be worth it.

This is what I mean. And I think if you don't, then it's kind of just like a bit of a... Oh, I think it'll be good. Oh, okay. So you think it all... Don't baby, don't. Yeah, I think it will, um... How do they not use that line?

I think it will happen. I think probably it'll be a bit too much swimming. And the margin. margins will be a bit thin versus clean competition. But you can see it picking up. Now I understand the business model, Hannah. I actually think it has legs. So I think, you know, these things take a few years to get good.

I mean, that's certainly true. I don't think they'll stop trying. I think you've got to do, yeah, you've got to do four or five and then let's see. So I hope they stick to that. I hope no one dies. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, I don't know, I can see there's such a world of like people who are,

This crossover of like crypto bro, like online biohacking, like internet forum, like people who spend too much time in their mum's basement. There's enough of those kind of people who would be invested in this kind of thing that I can see it working. And if they do start to make some records and it gets some sort of like legitimacy, that it does become a sort of Formula One-esque thing where like there are like teams of doctors and scientists or whatever working to. to create these weird superhumans. Whether, like, ethically, it's a good thing to do to humans is, like, another question. And, yeah, hopefully no one dies. And what's in those supplements that they want to sell?

Yeah. Probably to, like, impressionable teenagers who are, like, you know, willing to smash their faces with hammers to try and get bigger cheekbones. I guess that's maybe where the ethics question is. Yeah, I don't have a lot of faith in the ethics. If people are trying to do that, but in a, in a twisted world, I can. can see it taking you off. Okay. I'm going to watch.

You should do a live watch a lot. Oh, yeah. It would be quite good. You should. Yeah, it's only a day. Yeah. Take some meth. Watch it all.

Marathon run. So to end, we're all slightly conflicted, and some of us are excited. I'm very excited. I've got absolutely no doubts about this thing. Well, there you go. That's everything you need to know about the enhanced games. Yeah.

Adam Altofi. Yes. Thank you guys for sharing. That was very informative. I feel like I've learned a lot. Likewise. Yeah. Thank you, guys.

If you enjoyed that, you've heard us bug the upshot before. If you do it and you want lots more like scandals from sports. Because the thing, I don't want to sell you guys as like a sports podcast because some of our listening to them are like, I don't really care about sports. In fact, I know they will say that. It's not what it's about. It's about like the scandals in sports. And I've honestly been hooked on their show for a very long time.

Thoroughly enjoyed it. Genuine fans here. You guys should definitely go listen to them. Thank you. That's very kind. And likewise, red-handed, which is the biggest podcast, and true crime. It's the only true crime podcast you should listen to.

And I guess I would dip your toe in with like an OJ. It is quite a nice crossover because I was looking at all your episodes and like there are lots of crimes. They do do crimes. You're like 40% true crime podcast yourself. Yeah, we had the Ham Rawi one as well. But you guys did I Tonya as well. That's not a really good sport.

Yeah. But pretty soon you just find yourself sucked into the gnarly world of like a proper American murder. You know how George Orwell was like this? like the classic British murder, which is like poisoning. The cozy murder. I feel like you guys do the proper American murder so well. It's like often a small town as well, isn't it?

For me, that's the like canonical. I listened to your stuff extrangler one. Oh, yeah. Which was good. It was like, it was quite weird listening to one that I actually remember. Yeah, we found that with them in the recordings. I remember that on TV. Yeah, there's something more sinister about it.

I prefer true crime in a podcast like yours to watching on TV. Do you? Thank you. Yeah, because it's like it's like, because it's like, It's just like you and the narrative. It's quite, I don't know. Well, I think that's why True Crime Podcasts are having, like, a moment because documentaries are all well and good, and obviously Netflix jumped all over that and they do their

big, big, produce ones. But I think people just kind of like unsolicited, like opinions from people like us who are just like, you know, what was it in that one? Simpin, not pimping or whatever. Like, they just want that kind of more homegrown feel, I think. And it's working. And yeah, thank you for the American stuff. I feel like they are.

They're just like the true connoisseurs of a good murder these days. I love a good like, and we are really doing a lot of these where it's like spouse and then pretends they didn't do it. Those are like the ones that everybody seems to love. Yeah. And yeah, and you just can't decide which way around whether they did. They're my favourite, if that's not too much. So that's red-handed podcast.

Check it out if you haven't already. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you for doing this collab. We've really enjoyed it. No, thank you. It's been great. Thank you.

we hope you guys did too and we'll see you next week for something else where we won't be together. Bye. Bye.