ABU DHABI, LAS VEGAS
When I first heard about the Enhanced Games back in 2024 my reaction was that it was a tremendously stupid idea. Over time, after listening to the arguments, it seemed less so. The idea of running a trial of performance enhancements looked likely to tell us a great deal about the safe use of these medicines. I’ve been following this story ever since, and this week The Economist’s 1843, published our narrative non-fiction piece.
The article follows British swimmer, Ben Proud. Worn down by years of intrusive anti-doping surveillance, aging joints and modest pay, he signed up after watching a swimming rival break the world 50m freestyle record and earn $1m. Life changing money for a hard-up athlete such as Ben. He and a group of international athletes in swimming, track and weightlifting will compete tomorrow evening in Vegas. We reported all of this in our feature story, Dope and glory: inside the Enhanced Games The Economist (1843 Magazine) By Barclay Bram and Natasha Loder Published: May 21st 2026. I hope you enjoy it. We went to Abu Dhabi to report on the athlete training in the run up to the event.
The drugs on offer include testosterone, anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, EPO and modafinil, administered under a medically supervised clinical trial framework. The athletes trained at a luxury hotel-turned-sports complex—while US and Israeli strikes on Iran lit up the sky outside.
So why isn’t Enhanced still a really stupid idea? One reason is that the data they are gathering is going to tell us a lot about the safe use of performance enhancing drugs. And three people inside the games have said that rather than seeing medical problems from the athletes using drugs like testosterone and growth hormones, they are actually seeing markers such as recovery, sleep and bloodwork improve.
Women in the trial, who typically will have irregular periods and disrupted fertility from hard training, are getting modest supplements of oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone. If this restores their monthly cycles this will be another indicator that in elite sports low levels of “enhancement drugs” might have protective effects on the athletes. No effects on the heart have been seen at all so far. That isn’t as surprising as it might sound as the doses they are using are relatively modest.
The second reason is simpler: secrecy around the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports is deadly. The same hotel that is hosting Enhanced also hosts the Mr Olympia competition. This event, and others like it, are known for high death rates among competitors. A conversation about what safe use looks like can only start with good data.
If Enhanced can get over a message to the gym-bros that enhancements need to be medically calibrated and supervised that will be a good thing. Doctors have too little knowledge. And the enhancement culture is being driven by idiot coaches who have not a jot of medical knowledge and are telling trusting young men that they need to take risky levels of steroids—see the WhatsApp below. This recent video by Mitchell Hooper, the world’s strongest man, is compelling on the need for more transparency—and what is needed to stay safe.
Earlier today in Vegas, Max Martin, the CEO, said he hoped the event would be “bigger than one night in Vegas”. Enhanced is trying to inspire the world—and certainly shoppers to their consumer enhancement website. The commercial pitch is that we should watch these athletes and then find out about enhancing ourselves—all available on their website. Enhanced didn’t invent the sketchy gym culture that exists, but among the hundreds of millions of eyeballs that will be watching will be many young men and women who will be influenced to want to have bodies like the specimens that emerge tomorrow.
Young people, for the most part, don’t understand that their hormone levels are as yet unravaged by time, and that this older cohort of elite athletes are replacing the testosterone and growth hormone levels that they had as younger men and women. Swimmer Megan Romano is 35 years old and is performing better than she did at 20. How this all plays out will depend, to a great degree, on the message that emerges from the event tomorrow.
Previous work on Overmatter on the Enhanced Games.
Inside the new enhancement elite
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March 20, 2025
The air in the lecture hall of Balliol College buzzed with quiet chatter on a cold December day in Oxford last year. Delegates at the Second Conference on Human Enhancement, a curated mix of scientists, ethicists and investors, were on the cusp of ratifying the first draft of a declaration of human enhancement. This foundational document, in…
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