Filmmaker Alex Gibney attends the Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo by Henry S. Dziekan III/Getty Images)
A new ESPN documentary series seeks to pop open the lid on how technology is powering a new age of athletic training and what that might mean for the future of sports.
ESPN Films debuted the six-episode docuseries “Enhanced,” produced by Academy Award and Emmy-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, on Jul. 16 behind the paywall of its $4.99 ESPN+ monthly streaming service. The series promises an “unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at how athletes are using modern technology and science to achieve greatness,” according to ESPN.
“We’ve been talking to Alex for years about making something like ‘Enhanced’—an edgy, forward-looking collection about the limits of the human body,” said Libby Geist, vice president and executive producer of ESPN films and original content, in a release on ESPN’s website.
“I’ve always been fascinated with the will to win—often at any cost—as well as the scientific and ethical issues surrounding the attempts to push the body beyond natural limits. But in ‘Enhanced,’ there was also an opportunity to look beyond doping and changing the contours of the body to attempts to change the architecture of the mind in order to increase performance. I’m delighted that ESPN gave me and the team the opportunity to explore.”
Dan Coyle, author of The Talent Code, David Epstein, investigative reporter at ProPublica and author of The Sports Gene, and Tom Taylor, senior editor at SportTechie, are among the experts lending insight into the range of topics across the series.
SportTechie Takeaway
This new ESPN series highlights one of the cornerstone areas of coverage for SportTechie: how science and technology are enhancing athletic performance, reducing recovery time, and giving elite athletes an edge in their areas of play. Expect these issues to continue to play front-and-center as tech and science increasingly raise the bar of athletic performance.
