Last Monday, Shane Ryan, a 31-year-old swimmer who has competed for Ireland in three Olympics, announced that he would be coming out of retirement in order to compete at an event called the Enhanced Games, to be held in Las Vegas next May. (Though Ryan is American by birth, his Irish lineage allowed him to compete for Ireland in the 2016 Olympics, having failed to make the US team.) The announcement made headlines, and was condemned by various Irish sporting bodies, because the Enhanced Games is, as the name suggests, a competition predicated on allowing and indeed encouraging the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

When I first read about the planned Enhanced Games early last year, I was sceptical that the games would ever actually happen. The whole thing seemed very obviously harebrained. It struck me as having much less to do with sport per se than with a desire to use a sporting competition as a shopfront for a strange, and profoundly ideological, vision about the human future. (If you wanted to be especially cynical, you could, I suppose, say that we’ve had an Enhanced Games for decades already anyway, and that it’s called The Olympics.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people behind the venture have backgrounds not in sport but in technology and finance. Its co-founder and public frontman is Aron D’Souza, an Australian venture capitalist and tech entrepreneur.

D’Souza is a long-term inner-circle associate of the billionaire venture capitalist

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