At the beginning of the livestream of Sunday’s Enhanced Games in Las Vegas — an Olympics-style competition where performance enhancement is not just allowed, but hyped, for the 42 athletes participating — an advertisement sums up what seems to be the worldview of the organizer, Enhanced Group: “Every era redefines what’s possible, records fall, science advances, and progress doesn’t ask for permission.”
That last part, “Progress doesn’t ask for permission,” is written in big white letters, before those words shatter dramatically across the screen. Then just a few seconds later, in case you missed the message, the voice-over concludes: “No apologies, no permission, no going back. The future of human performance has arrived.”
The pose is obvious: Old rules around both science and sport are for tradition-bound losers. If you want to succeed like our athletes, most of whom are taking unspecified combinations and amounts of testosterone, human growth hormone, stimulants, anabolic steroids and more, you should listen to us. Ignore those hall monitors from the International Olympic Committee or the research scientists or even your own doctor. Anyone who thinks off-label supplement and peptide stacks, hormone use and steroids are potentially dangerous is using antiquated logic. And if you’re inspired by these athletes, we are also selling some of these products to you, the viewer.
I watched as much of the six-hour livestream as I could tolerate. The sports in competition — swimming, weight lifting, track — are not ones I find especially riveting. I understood at least one of the motivations for the athletes participating, and I am sympathetic to it. The winners of each event won $250,000, or $1 million if they broke a world record. Some of them competed clean, and at least two said they still wanted to be able to participate in the regular, non-doping competitions. Elite athletes aren’t always well funded, and those amounts of money are truly life altering.
But my sympathy ended there. The announcers barely pretended to be anything but Enhanced spokesmen. One, an Australian with a man bun named Kurt Mills Hanson, came right out and made the reason for the event clear. He explains that the medication and vitamins that “enhanced athletes” took under the close supervision of doctors and nutritionists in Abu Dhabi should also be available to the schlubs watching at home. Hanson talked about the journey of a few of the Enhanced Games athletes who came out of retirement to participate in their 30s and then said: “What’s the cut through here? This is the cut through for that middle-aged person sitting at home, maybe 40s, 50s, even beyond, maybe they’ve had kids, family, you’re out for 10 years, you haven’t done much, then maybe you go online, check out our enhanced, you know, protocols, and see what you can do, and hook it up.”
Christian Angermayer, a German billionaire who is a founder of Enhanced Group, is clear about the goals of the company, which recently went public and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In a post on X, he explained that the combination of the company’s two main products, the sporting event and telehealth, “creates a flywheel of credibility, consumer trust, cultural relevance and proprietary insights that simultaneously strengthen both businesses.”
He’s right that supplements are a huge business and only growing. According to a report just released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States, “38.7 percent of adults used two or more dietary supplements, and use increased with age.” Sixty percent of adults over 20 take at least one supplement, and these percentages have risen over the past decade. The market for dietary supplements globally, which is already around $200 billion, is projected to double in the next several years.
The Enhanced Games can be understood as a mega advertisement for the products Angermayer is selling all year long: expensive supplement protocols to help regular people live, work and lift better. Because advertisements for supplements are overseen by two different federal agencies, and neither can keep up with the onslaught of quasi-medical advice on social media, a lot of shoddy science slips through.
Angermayer claims that his company runs on transparency, because at least its athletes are being honest about doping, presumably unlike mainstream athletes who dope and lie about it. This attitude is tough to square with the fact that we don’t know exactly what each athlete participating in the event was taking or at what doses, or how that might apply to people who aren’t exercising for a living. Though there is a clinical study of over 30 of these athletes in the works, I don’t know how they would separate the effects of multiple drugs at once, or how we can take a claim of transparency seriously when the study is funded by the company.
Angermayer also claims that the company is about longevity as well as performance, but those goals are different, and sometimes in conflict. Some research suggests that certain former elite athletes may be in worse health at midlife because of the wear and tear they put on their bodies and minds during competition, and one can only imagine the long-term repercussions for the athletes on the experimental protocols overseen by the Enhanced Games.
Take peptides, which Enhanced sells on its website. Eric Topol, a cardiologist, executive vice president of Scripps Research and the author of “Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity,” laid out the lack of solid evidence for the most commonly used peptides in his Ground Truths newsletter last year. And just last week, my newsroom colleague Dana G. Smith highlighted new research that “upends” the entire argument for one popular anti-aging supplement that Enhanced is selling, N.A.D.+. She explains “part of the thinking that helped to fuel the booming market for these supplements may be wrong. A study published this month in Nature Metabolism showed that blood levels of N.A.D.+ don’t actually fall with age.”
I called Topol to vent my frustration with what feels to be an oppressive avalanche of direct to consumer marketing over the past few years. I asked him why the push for unproven remedies that promise to cure all of our ills seems relentless.
He explained it was a combination of a growing distrust of the medical establishment, the train wreck of Covid, the allure of influencers and the introduction of auto-injectors, which are supposedly less painful tools for self-administering shots. Now that millions of Americans inject themselves with doctor-prescribed medications from fertility meds to GLP-1s, they’re more comfortable injecting themselves with just about anything.
Topol doesn’t see any signs of the longevity and supplement craze abating. “It’s a mess. I have not seen anything like it,” he told me. It certainly doesn’t help that Robert F. Kennedy is trying to relax federal restrictions on a handful of peptides, which according to Axios, “could be a bonanza for telehealth companies, compounding pharmacies and longevity clinics looking for the next big wellness trend.” Enhanced Group, which counts Donald Trump Jr. among its games’ backers, would likely benefit from this deregulation since it could sell an even wider variety of peptides that will have the implicit and very public seal of approval from Kennedy.
I’m slightly more optimistic than Topol. We’re going to have to let this period of moral vacuity play out, but I am hopeful we will come out on the other side realizing that, actually, gatekeepers and pearl clutchers at various oversight committees had a point.
The Enhanced Games’ shortcomings might be the first step in that direction: Only one world record was broken by a doper, and three clean athletes — a swimmer and two runners — won their events. According to The Guardian, “organizers say that around 250,000 people watched the event live on YouTube,” which is pretty underwhelming for a competition that pitched itself as a revolution.
Tristan Evelyn, a Barbadian sprinter who won the women’s 100-meter race without using performance-enhancing drugs, said it best: “This proves that winning takes more than chemistry.”
Now, we just need a credulous public to believe her.
End Notes
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I have fallen down a serious rabbit hole of true-crime documentaries about Mackenzie Shirilla, an Ohio woman who crashed her car into a building, killing her boyfriend and a friend in 2022. She is now serving 15 years to life in an Ohio prison, and there are multiple shows about her on streaming platforms. There is so much interest in her cause because Shirilla is a beautiful young villain who cataloged her exploits on social media and seems to have very little remorse for causing two deaths, seemingly on purpose (though she denies it was intentional). Her parents are also a whole mess. I can recommend this to you only if you want to waste several nights on the internet that you can never get back.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
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