When Optimization Ate Itself

Let me start with an apology for missing last week’s edition. The perfect excuse was delivered the day after by none other than Steven Bartlett (Diary of a CEO) who posted this week that a few glasses of wine cost him three days of peak performance. Three days. For wine. With dinner. I too had a glass of wine the night before, but if I’m honest, life just got in the way.

Bryan Johnson - the tech squillionaire who spends millions trying not to age- walked into the Enhanced Games around the same time, carrying a UV umbrella. To shield himself from the sun on the walk from the car park. The man optimized a twenty-second stroll.

These are not outliers. They are the leading edge of a philosophy. And the Enhanced Games is where that philosophy lands when you follow it all the way down and remove every guardrail on the way.

The backstory, for those lucky enough to have missed it: a group of wealthy men decided sport would be more entertaining if athletes could take whatever they liked. Peter Thiel wrote a cheque. Saudi royalty followed. The event landed in Las Vegas, which felt appropriate. They promised to push the boundaries of human performance. They built a supplement store into the website. They called it science.

What they produced was a weightlifting champion who would have placed tenth in Paris, a world record swim where freeze-frames show the athlete hadn’t reached the wall by his official time, and a hundred metre winner who ran 9.97. Admirably, he said he didn’t need drugs because God gave him fast feet. Which is true, and not really what the event was selling.

This somewhat reminded me of the 1998 Tour de France.

A soigneur for the Festina cycling team was stopped at the French-Belgian border with a car full of EPO, three days before the Tour de France. It became the biggest doping scandal cycling had ever seen. Teams were expelled, riders went on strike and the sport nearly tore itself apart on live television.

Festina is a watch company and ironically sales went up by 25%. Years later their own lawyers stood in a French courtroom and argued that the brand had never been more famous. There is, it turns out, no such thing as bad press, only press.

The Enhanced Games understood this perfectly. They are a supplement company, and the event is the advertisement. The scandal is not a risk they are managing. The scandal is the product. Festina stumbled into the discovery by accident. The Enhanced Games engineered it on purpose, and if the only goal was to be talked about, then they succeeded, and writing this newsletter makes me part of the problem.

But aside from the marketing coup, the Enhanced Games showed that greatness isn’t something you can buy your way to on your own. It needs someone on the other side of the net.

In his 1974 book The Inner Game of Tennis, Tim Gallwey makes the point that your opponent is not your enemy. Your opponent is the person who makes you possible. They set the level you have to reach. They create the conditions under which you find out what you actually have. Without them, without that pressure and that proximity and the shared agreement that the contest is real, you are not competing. You are performing.

No chemistry set produces that. No optimised sleep score gets you there. Three fewer glasses of wine on a Saturday does not manufacture what real competition manufactures when the stakes are honest.

The Enhanced Games didn’t fail because the drugs didn’t work. They failed because they removed the point. Sport was never the number on the scoreboard. It was the conditions that made the number mean something: the shared limits, the real opponent, the agreement that this is actually happening and only one person wins.

Take that away and you don’t get the absolute limits of sport. You get an expensive mirror, pointed at itself.

Cody Miller won half a million dollars, pounded his chest, and promised not to gamble it away that night. Steven Bartlett is on day two of recovering from a Merlot. Bryan Johnson is back in the car park, umbrella up, optimizing the return journey.

I’m still trying to work out where the line sits between getting better and losing the plot entirely.

Jan.