One of the most powerful billionaires in the world is now advancing one of the most controversial ideas to hit the sports industry in years. 

Peter Thiel—the cofounder of PayPal, a key early backer in Facebook, and more recently an entrepreneur, investor, and political activist—is throwing his weight and part of his estimated $6.2 billion fortune behind the Enhanced Games, a start-up multisport competition in which athletes are actively encouraged to use performance-enhancing drugs. Thiel is joined in the Enhanced Games seed round—reportedly in the high seven-figure range—by several other venture capital titans, including Apeiron Investment Group’s Christian Angermayer, whose own net worth reaches $1 billion, and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.

The audacious concept—once just a Saturday Night Live skit—behind the Enhanced Games: There is a significant gap between the number of athletes who say they use PEDs and the number actually caught in testing. Rather than continue on that path, why not bring all use out into the open, and champion those drugs to test the boundaries of human performance and help counter the effects of aging? 

“The Enhanced Games is renovating the Olympic model for the 21st century,” said Aron D’Souza, Enhanced Games president. “In the era of accelerating technological and scientific change, the world needs a sporting event that embraces the future, particularly advances in medical science.”

The effort will feature competition in combat sports, gymnastics, swimming, track and field, and weightlifting. But serious questions persist. Like any other start-up sports league, the Enhanced Games will be entering an already-crowded market for fans’ time and attention. The business plan calls for competing at Division I college facilities, as opposed to building new infrastructure.

Most directly, though, the Enhanced Games will be challenging both existing laws around drug use, as well as cultural standards that govern much of sports. Before the funding, U.S. Anti-Doping Agency CEO Travis Tygart told CNN he found the Enhanced Games to be “farcical … likely illegal in many states,” and “a dangerous clown show, not real sport.”

Notably, the Enhanced Games’ announcement of its seed funding round arrives just days after the Court of Arbitration for Sport found Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva guilty of doping.

The long-awaited answers from Diamond Sports Group on its plans for the 2024 MLB season are finally beginning to emerge, as the bankrupt Bally Sports parent has struck one-year rights deals with the Cleveland Guardians, Minnesota Twins, and defending World Series champion Texas Rangers. 

While the regional sports network operator’s other plans in baseball for 2024 remain uncertain, the new deals give an initial dose of clarity for the upcoming season. The new agreements do not include streaming rights, but are modified to involve lower fees than what the teams had previously been receiving. Diamond said the changes will allow them to “profitably broadcast” the three teams through the end of the 2024 MLB season.

The Rangers previously received about $110 million per year in a deal running to 2034, but the new pact will bring an earlier expectation. That situation is similar to the one for the Guardians, who were receiving about $55 million with the deal stretching to ’27. The Twins, meanwhile, saw their prior DSG pact, worth $54.8 million last year, expire with the end of the ’23 season. 

A U.S. bankruptcy court in Texas is set to hold a hearing Feb. 9 on a motion to approve the agreements.

“We are pleased to have reached [an] agreement with the Cleveland Guardians, Minnesota Twins, and Texas Rangers that work for all parties and enable us to continue delivering high-quality, live game broadcasts on Bally Sports to dedicated fans through the 2024 season,” DSG said. 

The plan for 2025 and beyond, however, remains quite uncertain. The latest pacts arrive as DSG—not long ago thought to be headed toward dissolution—is now attempting to revive itself through a three-pronged recovery plan that includes a large-scale refinancing of its debt, the arrival of Amazon as both a distributor of Bally Sports content and a post-bankruptcy investor, and a settlement of a legal dispute with corporate parent Sinclair Inc. 

It is not yet known how MLB—or the NBA and NHL, for that matter—officially stand on that plan, as it would supersede prior deals in which the leagues were set later this year to regain local team rights held by DSG.

Apple is taking another big technology swing, introducing Friday its new mixed-reality headset, the $3,499 Vision Pro. And not surprisingly, several sports leagues have quickly moved to build apps for the headset and take advantage of this new platform, which seeks to advance the notion of “spatial computing.” But arriving right along with the excitement are a series of pressing questions. 

MLB, the NBA, and the PGA Tour were among the leagues to be first movers on a device that allows immersive digital media to be integrated with the real world—a fundamental difference from the more isolating nature of most virtual-reality applications. 

Sports offerings within the Vision Pro will include live and archival games in 4K resolution, interactive statistics, and three-dimensional enhanced data visualizations—all controlled with eye tracking, speech recognition, and hand gestures.

“The performance of new devices like this simply unlocks a new set of experiences that become possible,” Jamie Leece, MLB senior vice president of games and VR, tells Front Office Sports. “The Vision Pro is so much more powerful than devices that have come before, and has given us more horsepower to do greater things.”

Despite the Vision Pro’s ability to blend actual and virtual realities in a single experience, the technology still encounters many of the same issues that have hampered sports in VR for years, notably a conflict with the social interaction that is inherent to watching live games. Many of the leagues already active on Vision Pro are working on synchronized experiences in which two headset users who are geographically separated can watch a live game together. But group-viewing of games in a real-world setting will still be challenged with the Vision Pro, and not just because of the high price point.

“If you and I were together in the same space and wanted to watch anything, baseball or otherwise, I don’t know if we’d make the choice of both putting a headset on, even if we were fortunate to have two Vision Pros,” Leece says.