Enhanced lunacy

 Look, I get that the notion of an all-doped-up athletic competition is an idea well behind its time. Lance Armstrong and his buddies already did it, after all. They called it the Tour de France.

Also, baseball already did it. They called it 1998, the Year of Mac and Sammy 'n' them.

PEDs have been a fact of life in athletics for almost 50 years now, and probably longer. Attempts to keep them out largely fail, because the technology for masking banned substances has always outdistanced the technology for detecting them. The amount of "clean" in any given sport therefore is largely dependent on the integrity of the individual athlete.

Or, in the case of doping mafioso Armstrong and others, the utter lack of it.

That said, all you need to know about the proposed Enhanced Games --  scheduled for December of this year for now -- is that 36 years ago, Saturday Night Live played the idea for laughs.

Dennis Miller and Kevin Nealon spoofed an All Drug Olympics in a "Weekend Update" bit, which ended with Nealon going live from the All Drug weightlifting competition. A Russian lifter was attempting to clean-and-jerk 1,500 pounds after ingesting "anabolic steroids, Novocaine, Nyquil, Darvon and some sort of fish paralyzer."

The attempt ended with the weightlifter tearing off his arms. 

"Oh! He's pulled his arms off! That's gotta be disappointing to the big Russian!" Nealon reported.

Fast forward three-and-a-half decades, and that's not a laugh line anymore. 

Allegedly serious people, it seems, have come to believe an All-Drug Olympics is no joke. In fact, a number of prominent vulture, er, venture capitalists have gotten on board with the Enhanced Games, which would allow athletes to use whatever go-juice they chose if they chose to do so.

A promotional video even pitches the EG as something half-assed noble, using windy concepts like freedom and exploring the limits of human performance.

The Blob thinks that's almost as ludicrous as the SNL skit.

The Blob also wonders what former NFL player Lyle Alzado thinks of that "exploring the limits of human performance" jive.

Oh, wait. He doesn't think anything. He's dead, killed by brain cancer he always swore was the result of years of anabolic steroid use.

Ditto bodybuilders Rich Piana, Dallas McCarver, Andreas Munzer and Anthony D'Arezzo, among others. They all died at 45 or younger after juicing themselves to the moon for extended periods of time.  McCarver was just 26 when he passed; Munzer, 31.

Now here we are in 2024, with a bunch of rich dudes agreeing to bankroll an event that would actively encourage the Alzados and Pianas and McCarvers et al. Many world records undoubtedly would be set in the Enhanced Games, of course. And all of them would be meaningless, because none would be recognized as legitimate by any athletic governing body in the world.

And the athletes who set those "records"?

One would only hope they don't wind up like Lyle Alzado and all those bodybuilders in five, ten, 15 years. Because who would be crowing about the limits of human performance then?

Or playing it for laughs?