On May 24th around 50 athletes—in swimming, weightlifting and athletics —will gather in Las Vegas for the first Enhanced Games. Up to $25m in prizes will be awarded, with $250,000 going to those who win first place and bonuses of up to $1m to world-record breakers. Around 2,500 people will watch from the stands of a purpose-built arena, where they’ll also be treated to a Super Bowl-style closing ceremony—The Killers, a rock band, are playing—and have the chance to mingle with scientists, crypto investors and celebrities. The games will be streamed on YouTube and Roku: Bryan Johnson, a venture capitalist who has become famous for trying to chase immortality by tweaking every aspect of his body and lifestyle, will be one of the commentators. This spectacle is an advertisement for Enhanced’s other business: selling performance-enhancing products to non-Olympians. The company has pumped its competing athletes with drugs over the past three months in the hope that their achievements will inspire viewers—from ordinary gym-goers to grandparents trying to keep up with their grandchildren—to also get enhanced. A dizzying array of injectable drugs is already for sale on Enhanced’s website, promising to support everything from “sleep, energy and sharper mornings” to “healthy ageing”. Ultimately the real purpose of the games is to push the limits of what the public sees as the acceptable use of performance-enhancing drugs. Some of these have long been a part of the high-street gym scene: anabolic- androgenic steroids, such as testosterone, and human-growth hormones are widely used to improve muscle strength and performance. Increasingly, though, bodybuilders, “looksmaxxers” (people who go to extreme lengths to become more physically attractive) and Silicon Valley coders are supplementing their regimens with a new generation of drugs called peptides. Many peptides are unlicensed and produced by dubious-looking manufacturers in China. Some claim to speed recovery and healing; others to thicken hair, build muscle, deepen a tan or even improve libido. Gym enthusiasts and their coaches are now experimenting with combinations of chemicals aimed at improving strength, longevity or looks—nicknamed “stacks”—all without medical supervision. The Enhanced Games emerged from this subculture. Just before Christmas in 2022, Aron D’Souza, an Australian lawyer in his 30s, was working up a

sweat in an upmarket gym in Miami when he overheard the buff people around him chatting about being “enhanced”. After D’Souza asked them what they meant, they cheerily discussed the contents of their stacks with him. For D’Souza, these enhanced gym-goers were prototypes for a healthier, more ambitious humanity. He began to wonder: what if the Olympics allowed for open enhancement? What feats could humans achieve if they could do whatever they wanted with their bodies? D’Souza was well-connected with rich people who liked big ideas, including Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and a venture capitalist. At Thiel’s annual new year’s party D’Souza pitched his idea for an Olympics on steroids; Thiel later wrote him a cheque. Balaji Srinivasan, a former executive at Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, and Christian Angermayer, a German entrepreneur, followed suit. Their shared interest in the Enhanced Games stemmed from similar political orientations: all three men believe that people should be able to do what they like with their money and their lives with as little state interference as possible—preferably none. (Thiel has characterised regulators as “the Antichrist”.) They also all have close ties with Silicon Valley, where there is a tradition of viewing physical weakness, disease and even death as problems to be engineered away. D’Souza’s pitch was perfectly calibrated for this mindset. To draw attention to his nascent company, D’Souza began courting controversy. His main target was the International Olympic Committee (IOC). He argued that the IOC exploited athletes commercially while paying them nothing. (An early version of Enhanced’s website accused the IOC’s president of jetting to fancy hotels to visit billionaires and dictators while Olympic athletes slept in their cars.) D’Souza also called for national anti- doping agencies to be defunded for their “discrimination” against enhanced athletes. There are some grounds for criticising anti-doping agencies, especially on the issue of consistency. Tough bans have been imposed on individuals while groups of athletes from powerful countries such as Russia and China have been shown leniency. Few would go as far as D’Souza in suggesting that anti-doping rules be scrapped entirely, but many observers agree the system is broken. John Hoberman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the history of doping in sports, told us that doping has

been “out of control for a long time” and that frequent testing doesn’t appear to be a strong enough deterrent. Some experts have even argued that medically supervised enhancement could be a safer option for competitive athletes, given that so many of them take black-market drugs anyway. But even critics of the current anti-doping regime viewed the Enhanced Games with concern—Hoberman, for instance, has called it a “dishonest and careless project”. D’Souza knew his idea would need scientific credibility to get off the ground. In 2024 he started to approach potential scientific advisers and organised two gatherings grandly billed as “conferences on human enhancement”. The company also needed to find athletes willing to put their bodies on the line—so it offered $1m to anyone who broke a world record in certain disciplines while on an enhancement protocol. In February 2024 James Magnussen, a 32-year-old retired swimmer from Australia known as “the Missile”, was the first to take the bait. Having won silver and bronze medals at the London Olympics, he had been trying out several alternative careers, as many former Olympians do: gym-owner, sports commentator and “Dancing with the Stars” contestant. But after hearing about the Enhanced Games, he was now ready, as he put it on a podcast, to “juice to the gills” and break the world record in the 50-metre freestyle. Magnussen asked Brett Hawke, who had coached two of the previous world- record holders in the discipline, to train him. He then started a stack composed of anabolic steroids, testosterone and human-growth hormone— as well as some peptides—using dosages agreed upon with his own doctor. At the time, no one knew what it would take to transform a retired swimmer into a world-record breaker. But it became clear that the drugs did work— almost too well. Magnussen’s recovery between sessions was so quick that he asked Hawke to push him harder. His lifts in the gym became heavier and heavier. By the time he swam for the world record in May 2025, he had put on 20kg of muscle; in photos, his back bulged out of his swimsuit like the Incredible Hulk.

The record attempt was a flop—Magnussen’s gains were so large they had slowed him down. “Unfortunately I didn’t actually grow gills,” he said, “because with all that muscle I was very low in the water.” Even so, he had proved that an enhancement protocol could help a retired elite athlete return to sport faster and more successfully than anyone had imagined. Perhaps the athletes just needed fewer drugs—and protocols informed by science. In December 2023 Guido Pieles was on his way to a medical conference when he received an unexpected email. It was from D’Souza. He wanted Pieles, an expert in sports cardiology and congenital heart conditions, to advise Enhanced. “Hang on, really? Are they joking?” Pieles recalls thinking. But he was interested enough to take a call with D’Souza anyway. “I had a lot of questions,” he remembers. Pieles wondered whether the athletes’ enhancement could be run as a clinical trial. Not only would this be safer— because the athletes would be under medical supervision—but the data gathered from the trial could then drive further research into the use of enhancement drugs in ordinary people, with the goal of improving their long-term health and longevity.

Pieles agreed to join D’Souza at his first enhancement conference in February 2024. By the end of the event, he had convinced D’Souza and Maximilian Martin, one of Enhanced’s co-founders and, at the time, its chief strategy officer, to the merits of a trial. Pieles was then dispatched to assemble an independent team of experts, which would design the trial, pick the drugs, decide the doses and supervise the athletes’ health. (This team ended up including both mainstream doctors and scientists as well as enhancement specialists, whose work tends to be on the fringes of sports science.) The experts stipulated that the athletes could use only drugs that had been approved for humans—ruling out most peptides. They also knew that the possibility of receiving a placebo would deter athletes from taking part—no one chasing a cash prize would accept such uncertainty about the contents of their protocol. Instead, the trial would measure the outcomes over time of a group of athletes, most of whom would take enhancements. Enhanced wouldn’t be able to prove whether any effects on health or performance were caused by the drugs, the intense competition, or both. But with blood tests every two weeks it would be possible to track how athletes responded to the drugs and changes in dosage. This close observation could also mitigate the known risks to the athletes’ cardiovascular and endocrine systems of taking enhancement drugs. Enhanced decided to run the trial in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which offers both world-class medical facilities and a strong, but suitably flexible, medical regulatory system. When we visited Abu Dhabi in early February, the trial had yet to be approved by the Ministry of Health, so the athletes had not started taking the drugs. But Pieles, an athletic-looking 52-year-old, was ready to answer our questions. There would be a menu of enhancement drugs on offer rather than a set prescription, Pieles said, allowing each protocol to be tailored to the specific demands of the athlete’s sport. Testosterone and anabolic steroids would be made available to build muscle; human-growth hormone to repair tissue; erythropoietin to boost red-blood-cell production; meldonium to enhance endurance (whether it actually does this is disputed); and modafinil and Adderall to sharpen focus and reduce fatigue. Dosages would start low but would be gradually increased to levels that Pieles said would exceed those used in standard medical care, while staying within what he considered safe