Chapter 1: What sparked the idea of the Enhanced Games?
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 worlds of true crime and sport collide, which is what we're doing today.
Yeah.
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.
That's well worth it. I watched your version on YouTube, which is a banger.
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Chapter 2: How has doping been historically significant in sports?
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 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. The rugby... 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, they're dabbling in cannibalism, and by the end it's like, skulls are super old.
Once you've started, you might as well go full Ed Gein.
So, doping.
Relentlessly back to the real world we go.
Come on, guys. Know anyone who's done it? I was trying to think.
As in like taken steroids?
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of the Enhanced Games on athlete health?
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 to 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 giving you this sculpted, chiseled look. And I think it's just a way to make poor kids on the internet smash their faces.
Yeah, get clout. So there's looksmax.org, which is basically the forum where 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 giving each other tips on how they can improve, how they can ascend. Ascend.
Me, Jack and George, our other colleague, uploaded pictures of ourselves as sort of 30, mid-30s. Rate me. What did you get? We got absolutely destroyed. You can 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 now.
Shall we get into some doping? Let's get into the doping. Let's do it. So I've 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 strychnine. It's not poison. Yeah, so it's now used in rat poison, but it's this stimulant that is found in the bark of the poison berry tree. And they would take this. It's very toxic, but in small doses it acts as a bit like speed. And strychnine, 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 1904 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
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Chapter 4: What was James Magnussen's experience with doping?
He put one water station at the halfway point of this marathon.
To run a full marathon.
To run a full marathon.
And
i ask i know this i might be completely wrong this 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 weight class maybe he was onto something but the bodybuilders just have to stand there yeah they just have to stand they're like not you know and i'm you know i know it's
I'm not saying you're standing there, but when you're being evaluated, I think to get that like bain-y. Hugh Jackman definitely did that in Wolverine. But weird if you're going to run a marathon.
When you're running a marathon is not a good idea. Suboptimal. So you get water at how many, what, 13 miles? At 13 miles, they had one water point. Naturally, they also decided to start the race at 3pm in 32 degree heat. And the course ran over this 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 runners' faces.
So one of the runners, who was actually the reigning Boston Marathon champion, didn't even make it out of the stadium at the start of the race, just collapsed vomiting. Another runner inhaled so much road dust that he had a stomach hemorrhage, nearly died. 32 runners started the race. 10 of them had never run a marathon before, and 14 of them finished.
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Chapter 5: How are the Enhanced Games structured compared to the Olympics?
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 laid down on the home straight and 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.
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. If you're consuming that much, if you consume like a bucket of water, then I can see that sloshing around inside you. But I would argue it's also quite key, 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?
Yeah, 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. Squid Game. Squid Game.
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. That's fast. Actually, it's pretty fast. Yeah, he got carried. He did get carried across the line.
He was running to water. He was like, I have to finish this.
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Chapter 6: What are the ethical concerns surrounding performance-enhancing drugs?
So the major had got this idea from a French surgeon by the name of Sergei Voronov. 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 chock-a-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.
So he tried it with various different animals. He tried it with dogs and he basically found that 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 Samaritan. Yeah. What, just shot it up in his veins?
I think he was injecting it into his balls, I think. 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 sunburned.
Look at his little face.
I think they've harvested the testicle genes from like a bloke in Benidorm and injected it into... Yeah, that's an English bloke in Brazil.
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Chapter 7: How does the public perceive doping in sports?
And then he becomes a killer. I'd rather have the red-faced monkey than some sort of executed prisoner's testicles, maybe? But I'm not a man. I don't know. What do you want?
Are you getting more testicles then? Do I now have four?
It's probably also easier to get them.
Yeah, do you have to swap them out? That's a good question.
Voronov's got like 20 rattling around in the pool table. Yeah, and do you... Is it like there? Do you take on the characteristics of the...
seen enough horror films yeah yeah it's a good premise but were people executed this question for you guys maybe were 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 we talking were you this was 1920s 30s oh all sorts deserting yeah a spy for like the soviets or something i'll have his blunts testicles please
He was trying that for a little while, but unfortunately the demand outstripped the supply for felon balls. So he was back to day with monkeys. And the Major, this manager of Wolverhampton Wanderers, which is why we're talking about 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... Oof.
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Chapter 8: What future does Aaron D'Souza envision for the Enhanced Games?
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 gone on radio shows or said to the Sydney Morning Herald what he is taking, but you don't have to declare what it is.
And they're also not going to test them, are they?
Well.
quite a fun element if they then reveal at the end like a like a box yeah 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 gonna get fruity I could see monkey glands being experimented with yeah why not why not so that's uh 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 homespun. In order for it to be like... not allowed at the Olympics, does it have to be proven to actually work well? Would an athlete be eliminated if they were using something that didn't work?
The guy at the first Winter Olympic drug ban was a snowboarder who was smoking weed, wasn't he? But then they banned him and then it turned out that actually they hadn't listed weed as one of the banned drugs. I think it is now.
Yeah, that was actually when we were watching the Winter Olympics this time and it was like, you talk about the other athletes and they're like, this is what time I work out, 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.
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