limits. (These levels would also typically be lower than those seen in some users of high-street gyms.) Pieles said that people in the enhancement business laughed when he told them what he planned on giving the athletes (“Your stack is so boring!”). He thought they had a point. “I don’t know why there is so much fuss about it,” he told us. In February around 40 Enhanced athletes moved to Abu Dhabi to begin training under their specially designed drug protocols. Their new home and training centre was ERTH, a luxury hotel that is being converted into a state- of-the-art sporting complex as part of the UAE’s plan to become a leading venue for global sport. Building works were shielded from view by placards declaring, appropriately, that the facilities were being “enhanced”. Even so, ERTH already had all the equipment the athletes needed: an enormous gym, a running track, a 50-metre indoor pool. “I’ve never experienced having all your wants and needs taken care of like this,” said Hawke, the head swimming coach. The athletes also had access to physios, sports massage and doctors; a private beach; and the hotel buffet, where the chefs had reimagined the indulgent menus to make them leaner and protein- rich. “This meal might cost me $75 back in Austin,” said Emmanuel Matadi, a sprinter, sitting at an outdoor table shielded from the strong sun by an umbrella. He shook his head in disbelief at the mountain of grilled salmon and vegetables on his plate. “I often don’t get all the calories I need simply because I don’t have the time or the money to cook at this level.”

Normally elite athletes pay for their own food, coaches, training facilities and travel. Ivan Rojas, an experienced weightlifting coach who now works for Enhanced, told us that when he coached the American team one year at the world weightlifting championships he realised they hadn’t been given travel uniforms. He ended up buying them embroidered polo shirts with his own money. There are modest prize pots and performance fees on offer at established competitions, but if athletes have to drop out they lose this income. “That’s how track is,” Marvin Bracy-Williams, a 100-metre sprinter, told us. “You have a bad day, somebody ain’t eating.” To make ends meet, Bracy-Williams had spent years as part of the practice squads of National Football League teams, where there is steady pay on offer. But after he broke his arm in 2019 he once again took up competitive sprinting: “It’s like gambling. You’re spending money to be a part of something, hoping that you win big.” Bracy-Williams had been offered a sponsorship deal worth $120,000 ahead of the Paris Olympics, conditional on his being selected for the American athletics team. But he pulled a leg muscle during training and in the qualification trials ran two seconds slower than his personal best. He didn’t make the cut. “I watched the money walk away,” he said.

Desperate to get back into the game, Bracy-Williams contacted someone who could hook him up with performance-enhancing drugs. He knew the risks—a probable ban from the sport, being dropped by his sponsors, social stigma—but felt as though he had no other choice. “I was willing to do whatever it took to just not hurt any more,” he said. Bracy-Williams started taking small doses of drugs, primarily testosterone. But they didn’t make much difference: his times didn’t budge and the pain in his leg grew worse. In agony one day, he confessed to hiscoach. The coach was sympathetic, but told Bracy-Williams he’d have to report him to America’s anti-doping agency. The next day inspectors turned up and tested Bracy-Williams. His sample was positive, and he was suspended from the sport until November 2027. “The hardest is when it’s 9am and you know all your friends are at practice,” he told us, “and you’re just sat there with nowhere to be.” For Bracy-Williams, the appeal of the games is clear. He’s one of six Enhanced athletes who have faced drug-related suspensions in their careers, leading some critics to dub the games the “Cheaters’ Olympics”. Athletes who were known for being squeaky clean, like Proud, the 50-metre freestyle swimmer, have more to lose. Anyone—be it a competitor, doctor or coach— who takes part in the Enhanced Games could face a long-term ban from professional sports. Proud sometimes seemed to be trying to justify his participation. He argued that Enhanced was actually levelling the playing field, which he believes is skewed in favour of athletes from countries that turn a blind eye to doping. “One of my close friends narrowly missed a gold to one of those Chinese swimmers,” he said, referring to a doping controversy at the Paris Olympics, in which 11 Chinese swimmers who had previously tested positive for a banned heart medicine were nevertheless allowed to compete. “You have to suck it up and get on with it, because as swimmers we don’t feel we have the power to stand up and say that something like this is clearly wrong.” He also seemed glad finally to be making money. “I always said, growing up, you never get into swimming for the money...that’s fine to say when you’re 20, 23 years old, but when you get to 28 or 30, it’s a very different story.” Since joining Enhanced he has earned both a signing bonus and a

salary (he didn’t disclose the exact figures, but the total is believed to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars). And he still stands to earn $1.25m if he both wins his race and breaks the world record. In late February Proud stood in his hotel room, shaking as he inserted the needle into the soft flesh just below his waist for the first time. He felt a small prick and pushed the plunger. Now he knew he could never go back. Whether the inaugural games marks the launch of a viable business or a one- off PR stunt will largely come down to Enhanced’s leadership, particularly Christian Angermayer, who has become its main backer. D’Souza left the company at some point—it’s not entirely clear when, but his departure appears to have been amicable. Maximilian Martin, the company’s former chief strategy officer, seemingly became chief executive last August. Under him, Enhanced has become less provocative and more polished. Instead of proclaiming, as D’Souza did, that athletes today have to hide their doping like gay people had to hide their sexuality 50 years ago, Martin has tried to reassure the public that performance-enhancing drugs are “not that dangerous…under the right clinical and medical supervision”.

But thanks to Angermayer’s expanded influence, Enhanced still possesses its founding techno-utopian spirit. In the past few decades he has funded projects researching longevity medicine, brain-computer interfaces and the use of psychedelics to treat mental-health conditions (Angermayer is a proponent of hallucinogenic drugs, which he also believes will help humanity adjust to the mass joblessness that AI will create). Taken together, Angermayer’s preoccupations speak to a vision of the future in which medicines, rather than being simply used to treat disease, can extend human longevity and enhance well-being. We recently met Angermayer in his penthouse flat near Old Street, a trendy area of London. He has been on testosterone-replacement therapy (TRT) since he was 30; now 48, he is built like a gym bunny. Sitting at the head of a table the size of an aeroplane-landing strip, he offered us cannabidiol- infused sodas from a firm he invests in. On the wall was an artwork made of Ecstasy pills, arranged in a colourful halo. ”I was always very vain,” Angermayer recalled. “Even in my 20s, I was already thinking: how can I slow down ageing?” Now he believes he has found a way to bring the drugs he has been experimenting with to a mass market. The business model he described sounded similar to that of Red Bull, an energy-drink brand: stage a series of high-profile sporting events (in Red Bull’s case, extreme ones like cliff diving or motorsports) and use them to publicise a product. Earlier this year, Enhanced launched a range of personalised performance and longevity medicines, as well as services like blood panels and telehealth consultations. Angermayer envisions the games as a way to market these products. The venue in Las Vegas has been built using a modular system, which means it can be reassembled anywhere in the world (it cost about $8m to create, with $6m spent on the pool alone). He has big ideas for future iterations of the competition, musing that the athletes could one day race against humanoid robots or celebrities. The games under Angermayer are well-suited to the political moment, in tune with the cultural and ideological energies of Donald Trump’s second term (“A hundred percent the reason they’re happening in the US is because Trump won,” Angermayer has said). Trump’s son Donald junior is an

investor through his work at 1789 Capital, a venture-capital firm that aims to stimulate a MAGA-adjacent “patriot economy”. The administration has also proved friendly to ideas that Angermayer and others interested in body- optimisation and longevity medicine have long promoted. Earlier this year an expert panel from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended making TRT more widely available. The FDA is also poised to review its restrictions on some unapproved peptides (Angermayer says Enhanced will only sell peptides that have credible data on their safety in humans). Still, Enhanced has yet to turn a profit. According to its filings it lost $4.7m in 2024 and $26.7m in 2025. Lucrative media rights and big-name brand sponsorships have largely not materialised, perhaps because companies fear damaging their relationships with traditional sporting bodies. In early May the company went public by merging with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC), a shell company that is already listed. (SPACs have become a popular backdoor route for companies looking to avoid the bureaucracy of a traditional listing.) The merger documentation acknowledged that Enhanced possesses an “unproven business model” but nonetheless valued it at $1.2bn. Even so, most shareholders in the SPAC decided to sell their shares before it went public—taking most of the $200m in cash the combined firm might have held. Perhaps these investors didn’t believe in Enhanced’s vision or balked at the structure of the merger, which gave Angermayer’s investment firm around 97% of the voting power.