James Billot is the newsroom editor of UnHerd, from which this article was adapted.
Blood is rolling down the shins of Mitchell Hooper. The two-time World’s Strongest Man has just deadlifted 475 kilograms — equivalent to a young hippo — and now he has a shot at the world record. As he steps up to the wooden stage, the crowd roars. This could be it: the moment the 510-kilogram — that’s just under 1,125 pounds — record is smashed.
Bending down, Hooper clutches the bar. The spotlight glistens off his polished scalp, his shoulders swallowing his neck. He lets out a final wheeze and pulls. His whole body seems to swell under the strain. History is in the making.
The bar never leaves the ground. After three seconds of agonizing effort, Hooper releases it in defeat. He stands back, meekly waves to the crowd and slinks away stage left. Even three months of heavy steroid and testosterone use wasn’t enough to get him over the line.
For this was not an ordinary strongman competition. This was the inaugural Enhanced Games in Las Vegas on Sunday — an Olympics-style spectacle with a distinctly un-Olympian twist: drugs, and lots of them.
Testosterone, anabolic steroids, stimulants, metabolic modulators and a grabbag of peptides were just some elements of the “stacks” that these athletes took ahead of the event. In any other sporting context, it would have resulted in disqualification and a lengthy (if not lifetime) ban. But at the Enhanced Games, it was almost a prerequisite.
These competitors were, after all, sporting outcasts. Many were rejects, drug cheats and also-rans. Few had a pathway back into disciplines they had devoted their whole lives to. Now, they were effectively sealing their fate by competing in a tournament dismissed as a “clown show” by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and “dangerous and irresponsible” by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
With so many drugs involved, I made my first trip to Vegas expecting an event as riveting as it was uncomfortable: a Hunter S. Thompson sort of scene, but with steroids instead of psychedelics. I didn’t plan on barreling down the Strip with a fistful of mescaline and a quart of ether, but I got an offer to go to a gun range with another attendee before the event had even begun. It was a promising start.
Instead, the games proved to be a sterile affair. Like the athletes competing, the crowd appeared to be on their own strict protocols, with tech bros and YouTube influencers flexing enhanced muscles on camera. Veins bulged out of muscles I did not know existed, and skin stretched across foreheads so tightly that eyebrows were rendered immobile. As I wandered around the makeshift arena, many were happy to share details of their regimens with me. One offered to put me in touch with his “peptide guy,” which I politely declined. Anti-aging-guru Bryan Johnson delivered analysis while sheltering under a black parasol — all the better to protect his skin from harm.
In fact, many in the stands appeared more enhanced than the athletes themselves. Since his dramatic weight gain last year, the swimmer James Magnussen, a former 100-meter freestyle world champion, had shed the extra 40 pounds he once carried, one of many athletes who retained the lean physiques of their former Olympic selves.
The contestants were competing across three categories: swimming, sprinting and weightlifting, with 42 competitors vying for a total prize pot of up to $25 million. First-place finishers would get $250,000, plus bonuses of up to $1 million for “breaking” world records.
By the end of the evening, however, only one $1 million prize was handed out. The Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev swam 20.81 seconds in the men’s 50-meter freestyle, a hair 0.07 quicker than the world record — and a hair faster than his previous record at an Enhanced Games-sponsored event in February 2025. It hardly represented the dawn of a new sporting era, but it was nevertheless heralded by Max Martin, the Enhanced Games CEO, as the moment “we changed the world.”
At times, the Games felt like an episode of “Severance”: a sealed-off system observed from the outside, its participants acting according to rules that seemed both hidden and self-evident to them. At the end of each race, athletes were routinely asked how enhancement had changed their lives. The responses were effusive — gratitude directed at the organizers; praise for a newfound lease on life; and carefully rehearsed reflections on the transformative effects of the substances they had taken.
This was, of course, the point. The Enhanced Games are a publicity stunt. The athletes are running, swimming and lifting advertisements for the supplements, longevity treatments and specialized regimens promoted on the event’s website. But if they were meant to be an ad for a better, faster, stronger tomorrow, the performances suggest there is some way to go. Just a single world record broken, but three unenhanced athletes won their events.
If these results were meant to serve as a rebuke to the old sporting system, then the event was a failure. But they also pointed toward a deeper tension at the heart of the organization.
On the one hand, its founders present the Enhanced Games as a new “Apollo mission,” testing the limits of human performance and pushing the boundaries of human potential. On the other, they argued that what today’s enhanced athletes do isn’t really different from tactics used by previous generations. Promotional videos invoked the ancient Greeks, who supposedly used figs, mushrooms and plant seeds to sharpen performance. But it doesn’t take a scientist to understand that there is a difference between eating a fig and injecting EPO (erythropoietin), a hormone that is designed to increase red-blood-cell count, but can also raise the risk of stroke, heart attack, pulmonary embolism, blood clots and sudden cardiac death.
That raises a broader question: What happens when these protocols — or simplified, mass-market versions of them — move beyond tightly controlled experimental settings into a wider, commercially accessible market?
The rise of the overlapping “looksmaxxing” community offers some clues. In both cases, the body is subjected to pharmaceutical intervention in pursuit of an aesthetic goal. Enhanced’s co-founder Christian Angermayer argues that pursuit of enhancement doesn’t need to be morally distinguished by its motivation: Whether driven by vanity, ambition or competitiveness, in this view, it forms part of a single continuum of biomedical self-optimization. Notably, he sees these games as a node in a broader cultural campaign to make pharmacological enhancement socially acceptable, arguing that medicine is too narrowly focused on treating illness rather than improving healthy people.
Yet what is most revealing is where he draws his inspiration from: the trans movement. In 2024, Angermayer argued that the broader freedoms won through struggles over gender identity would eventually extend to the right to “shape and enhance one’s own body and mind according to individual desires and aspirations.” In this telling, enhancement is not simply a sporting or medical question but a libertarian one — part of a wider rejection of fixed ideas about what constitutes a “normal” body.
The debate around transgender athletes exposed how fraught questions around hormones, bodily autonomy and fairness in sport can be. In 2022, the trans swimmer Lia Thomas won a National Collegiate Athletic Association women’s freestyle title, but the sight of her on the podium alongside smaller competitors became a lightning rod for public unease about where inclusion ends and competitive advantage begins. Magnussen’s own transformation provoked a different but related reaction. His enlarged physique, with lats spilling out of his swimsuit, looked more like that of a WWE wrestler than an Olympic athlete.
Perhaps this is part of the appeal. People came to the inaugural games expecting to see mutants; this time around, mutants were not forthcoming. But as more and more people develop their own regimen at home, that boundary may begin to blur. As for the games themselves, the format will almost certainly return, iterate, expand. And once athletes have crossed the line into enhancement, there is no obvious way back to the old rules. What happens in Vegas rarely stays in Vegas.
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