LAS VEGAS — I am sitting in the sweltering Nevada heat watching a man struggle to lift a bar over his head. If he manages to do it, he will win $250,000. The man is Boady Santavy, a two-time Olympic weight-lifting contestant from Canada, and his muscles look like they were culled from the Marvel Cinematic Universe: massive, cartoonish arms that seem to belong to a superhero rather than a real human. Santavy is attempting to beat the world record for the men’s snatch — a lift of 183 kilograms, or approximately 403 pounds. After a tortured few seconds, he drops the bar, an official “no lift,” and hobbles away, visibly cursing.
Santavy is one of 42 athletic contestants — weight lifters, swimmers, and track runners — who gathered in Las Vegas over Memorial Day weekend to compete in the Enhanced Games, a unique and now notorious athletic competition in which almost all participating athletes are on performance-enhancing drugs. Broadly derided by critics as the “steroid Olympics,” these games have taken the deeply unprecedented step of juicing many of their athletes to the gills with anabolics, testosterone, peptides, human growth hormones, and more. All of that chemical enhancement has taken place under the watchful eye of a team of medical professionals. Competitors spent 12 weeks in the United Arab Emirates at an elite compound, training for the weekend’s event while working closely with doctors who tailored their “protocols” — drug cocktails — to individual needs.
The Silicon Valley roots of a steroid Olympics
Why is a technology journalist covering this event? Because Silicon Valley is largely to blame for the Enhanced Games. The bizarre spectacle is the work of a former startup founded by veterans of crypto, AI, and biotech firms, backed by mega-investor Peter Thiel and former Coinbase executive Balaji Srinivasan. The event sits at the forefront of a growing industry that Silicon Valley has embraced with open arms: human enhancement, in which injectable drugs and ingestible supplements serve as both a source of physical empowerment and good business.
Traditional athletic health organizations hate it. The World Anti-Doping Agency has called the Enhanced Games “dangerous,” and Travis Tygart, CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, describes it as a “clown show that puts profit over people.” Steroids have long been viewed warily by the international health community, and even federally approved consumer drugs have stirred concern among health professionals.
However, Enhanced’s organizers argue they are actually the good guys — that they are fixing a persistent bug in organized sports: plenty of athletes are already doping, just doing it secretly. The secrecy increases risk because there is limited medical oversight. In the Enhanced version, athletes self-admittedly take drugs under the careful supervision of a medical team.
A $1.2B startup with a telehealth platform
The Enhanced Games are not merely trying to improve sports safety. The event is also a business. The games are the work of Enhanced Group, Inc., a newly public company that enjoyed an IPO earlier this month at a $1.2 billion valuation. Enhanced sells personalized health treatments including peptides, GLP-1s for weight loss, testosterone injections, and other physically “enhancing” drugs. The company recently partnered with Rezolve Ai to launch a digital telehealth platform.
Enhanced wants to transform what it did in Vegas into a global business: a distribution network for consumers looking to bulk up and make themselves more youthful. The drugs Enhanced sells have been cleared by the FDA, but there is concern that by normalizing steroid use, the company could have a trickle-down effect on wider culture, leading some consumers — notably young ones — to seek less regulated, more dangerous compounds that could end up having disastrous results. This concern hangs over Enhanced’s athletic competition, which has largely been read as a big advertisement for its own business and the peptide industry itself.
One nation, under peptides
I am one of some 200 journalists from around the world who touched down in Vegas two days prior to the games. Enhanced provided us with a dedicated workspace, regular meals, and press time with athletes and executives. They were exceedingly nice to us, but one cannot escape the nagging suspicion that we are an integral part of their business plan. As skeptical oglers of this Barnum & Bailey-esque curiosity, our job is to report back to the masses, who will then know of its existence. In other words, we are free marketing for Enhanced’s business.
That business is part of an industry due for a gold-rush-like boom later this year, should a certain deregulatory deliverance occur. In February, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on The Joe Rogan Experience and said he was a “big fan” of peptides. Kennedy also implied he planned to encourage the FDA to make some peptides more accessible to the public. In July, the FDA will convene a pharmaceutical advisory committee that will consider whether restrictions on certain previously banned peptides will be loosened.
Since then, the peptide industry has stood at a bizarre crossroads. Some startups are conjuring products based on chemicals that currently reside in a legal “gray” zone, hoping to be first-to-market if the government eases up on them. Others stick to only FDA-approved products. A hot spot of this frenzy has been Silicon Valley, where techies are both using and investing in peptides with mutually aggressive gusto. Companies like Superpower, an AI longevity startup that sells FDA-approved peptides, and Noho Labs, a peptide startup backed by Elad Gil, have risen in prominence, while elite clubs like the AGI House have begun hosting peptide injecting “parties.”
But peptides aren’t just gaining steam in the Bay Area; they are seeing a groundswell of use throughout the country as fitness culture sees an aggressive upswing. Recent reports show that teens and twenty-somethings are turning to peptides to “looksmax” — the trendy new term denoting extreme efforts to beautify oneself. The gym is increasingly seen as a key hub of cultural life for young people. This country-wide push for self-improvement has been fueled by a social media landscape that champions the superficial. The progenitor of “looksmaxxing,” the 20-year-old online influencer “Clavicular,” has been a prominent and controversial figure in the popularization of peptides. He is only one in a sea of online voices, including podcasters like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman, who have recently promoted or platformed the topic.
What is the Enhanced Games business model?
The Enhanced Games is a multi-sport event that allows athletes to use performance-enhancing substances without worry of drug tests. The business model is straightforward: the company monetizes the spectacle to drive consumers to its telehealth platform, where it sells FDA-approved peptides, testosterone injections, and other enhancement drugs under medical supervision. The company went public at a $1.2 billion valuation and has attracted backing from prominent Silicon Valley investors.
This is all about “health,” right?
Peptide producers — including executives at Enhanced — have sworn that their primary concern is consumer “health.” At the same time, they don’t seem to mind admitting they are also interested in money. Maximilian Martin, the 29-year-old CEO and co-founder of Enhanced, is a calm defender of his company’s unconventional practices. Martin, who previously founded a bitcoin mining company and is always impeccably dressed in a suit with an affable salesman’s smile, met with journalists for a press conference where he answered questions with even-keeled good nature, speaking soberly about how his company plans to monetize the creation of a new generation of chemically altered mutants.
Appropriately, X-Men comes up. “People have been using performance enhancements for a long time. If you look at Hollywood and you look at Marvel superheroes, they’re all enhanced,” Martin offered. “Like Hugh Jackman doesn’t look like he looks at his age because he has such a clean diet and sleeps eight hours a night, right? So that market is already there. The peptide market in the U.S. today is already 85 million people. Most of that market is served by unsupervised, unregulated substances that people are taking. What we’re doing is we’re entering that market with a pathway for people to get to those benefits that they’re looking for in a safe and medically supervised way.”
Christian Angermayer, Enhanced’s billionaire co-founder and executive chairman, was more succinct. “I’m a capitalist,” he told journalists bluntly. He doesn’t see a disconnect between profits and health. “There is no reason why something that is good should not also be a business.”
Let the games begin
May 24th, the actual day of the games, was a sweltering blur of events — all taking place inside a $50 million open-air stadium constructed in a matter of weeks for the express purpose of hosting the games. The complex housed a track, swimming pools, and an expansive pavilion for the weightlifters. Surrounding risers were filled with an audience that cheered enthusiastically despite the hot sun.
Yet while the scene may superficially call to mind the Olympics, the vibe was much less a serious sporting event than an uncomfortable cocktail of America’s Got Talent, WWE, and Gladiator. Beautiful influencers filled the stands in youthful, colorful herds. An announcer narrated the day’s events with a sonorous boom that made it feel vaguely like sitting courtside at WrestleMania. Later in the evening, The Killers played a brief concert to close out the games.
The athletes stalked the grounds like mythical titans, their bulking, unreal muscles glistening in the sunlight. Martin was seen throughout the day, walking to and fro in his impeccable suit, which became progressively more wet as he kept rushing down to the pool to hug the swimmers who won their races. Angermayer glided about the event with a breezy energy, a tranquil smile affixed to his face.
Other staples of the tech industry — like Bryan Johnson, the mega-wealthy biohacker who plans to live forever — were also involved. Despite no known professional athletic achievements, Johnson spent the night commentating on the spectacle in a Charles-Barkley-esque, retired athlete kind of way.
The athletes: opportunists, titans, and abstainers
The actual competitions were thrilling enough, and there seemed to be a couple categories of athletes who came to compete. There were people like James Magnussen, a retired swimmer from Australia who won Olympic medals in the past and saw the games as an opportunity to get back in on the action. Magnussen, an image of whose massive body spread virally throughout the web earlier this year, spoke supportively of the peptide industry and once said that the combination of peptides and testosterone made him feel like he was “18 again.” He failed to break any records, placing last in two races.
Then there were people like Hafthor “Thor” Bjornsson — a massive Nordic bodybuilder and competitive weightlifter who has self-admittedly done a lot of steroids in the past and saw this competition as an opportunity to use them under closer, safer supervision. Bjornsson is recognizable to many because he starred in Game of Thrones as Ser Gregor Clegane, the brutal knight whose go-to fight move is to crush opponents’ skulls with his bare hands. During the games, Bjornsson thrillingly attempted a world record deadlift of 1,135.4 pounds but ultimately failed to muster the strength.
Finally, there were a few competitors like American swimmer Hunter Armstrong, who abstained from any supplemental intake altogether. Why was Armstrong even competing? The money, he told journalists. That was the answer many athletes gave for their participation. Armstrong has Olympic ambitions and wanted to keep himself in the running by not tainting his record. He also has a personal aversion to doping. “The Olympic movement is something that is very important to me,” Armstrong said. “Outside of personal reasons, if I were to go into some kind of protocol I would lose that opportunity.” Armstrong was one of several competitors who won their races despite not being “enhanced.”
The world record moment
The day’s events unfolded at a steady pace and, despite organizers’ promise of a titanic extravaganza of unlocked human potential, the event largely paled in comparison to the Olympics or a really thrilling football game. The whole thing ended on a weirdly convenient high point: the competition’s last race of the night — the men’s 50-meter swimming freestyle — culminated with Enhanced’s first and only world record. Kristian Gkolomeev, a hulking colossus from Greece standing six feet, eight inches tall, cut across the pool at a breakneck 20.81 seconds, besting the previous record by 0.07 seconds. The entire crowd erupted in cheers, the venue’s lights blared red in a gameshow-style spasm of celebration, and Martin again rushed the field in his suit, intent on hugging the dripping Gkolomeev.
The critics and the cultural moment
The critics of the Enhanced Games say it isn’t really about health — it’s about money. Yet it’s difficult to escape the sense that the games are also about something else: vanity, both that of America and the event’s organizers. America has always been the country where fitness culture extends beyond health into the realm of self-aggrandizement, and the Enhanced Games — a showy pageant embodying that principle — fits right in with the next big era of American self-regard.
The location of the event — Las Vegas, the nation’s hedonism-fueled “Sin City” — hardly screams “health.” Las Vegas is the locale of spectacle and consumption, of barely-remembered nights in which revelers live for the moment, not the long-term. The organizers could have set the games in the symbolically purifying environs of the Swiss countryside or Joshua Tree, but instead they chose a place where people commonly risk their futures over a game of cards for a fleeting chance at glory. Similarly, injecting yourself with drugs to make your muscles big doesn’t necessarily seem to be about long-term wellness as much as it’s about looking good in the moment — tomorrow’s potential health consequences be damned.
The glory for the event’s organizers resides in their ability to usher in a new industry, commemorating it with an extravagant ritual that, in their own words, heralds future “scientific breakthroughs” and “human advancement” — not to mention revenue. The gamble for them is on whether this industry does or does not blossom in the coming months, but like the consumers of their supplements, they appear to be living in the moment.
Around midnight, when the games were finally over and the crowd was dispersing, the press corps retreated blearily to the media center at the Resorts World hotel. As I was readying to leave, I made a pitstop to the bathroom and turned a corner, running smack into Martin. He appeared to be in a brand new suit, admiring it in the bathroom mirror, undoubtedly preparing for the late-night press conference scheduled to occur soon. Having not actually spoken to him yet, I was at a bit of a conversational loss. “Congratulations,” my tired brain landed on, as I headed for the door.
“Thank you,” he said, nodding briefly, then turned back to the mirror.
