Rope-a-Dope
The largest person I met at the Enhanced Games, a mini Olympics for steroid users that was held in Las Vegas this past May, was a six-foot-ten, three-hundred-and-twenty-pound Russian man named Lukas Lakutsin. He was having lunch near the pool at the Fontainebleau. He wore a tank top, and I was staring, perhaps inappropriately, at the veins in his forearms. I shook his hand. I felt like a newborn clasping onto his father. The pecs, the traps. I asked him what he’d ordered to eat. He replied, “Everything.”
Lakutsin was in town to watch the competition; not everyone who was enhanced at the Enhanced Games was an athlete. The Games had a small slate of events: the hundred-metre dash, some swimming, and some weight lifting. Competitors could choose from a menu of performance-enhancing drugs, or P.E.D.s, which were banned in mainstream sports, as long as they had F.D.A. approval—anabolics, human growth hormone, stimulants. “Enhancement” was the organizers’ preferred euphemism for what the Olympics refers to, in its own loaded way, as “doping.” The term did have a liberating effect. I found myself asking everyone I encountered if he was enhanced. Lakutsin: enhanced, but only before bodybuilding competitions. A life coach from North Carolina, whose biceps I wanted to touch: enhanced. Fabio, a Michael Jackson look-alike in town for the event: not enhanced, unless you count the rhinoplasty. Only one guy, Timothy Piatkowski, a researcher involved with the Games, suggested that my question might be a little rude. “You wouldn’t necessarily ask someone so openly, ‘When did you inject meth and for how long?’ ” he said. Piatkowski was enhanced, though: “A whole bunch of androgens, growth promoters, peptides.”
I got into Las Vegas on a Wednesday, as the athletes were acclimating to the venue, a temporary twenty-five-hundred-seat arena outside Resorts World. I stumbled onto powerlifters grunting in a hotel ballroom. Ripped guys with perfectly formed butts and bulging shoulders were swimming laps in the pool. The inaugural Games would take place on Sunday. The gathering also served as a product launch and a medical convention. Enhanced Group, the company behind the Games, had recently begun selling peptides, supplements, and testosterone, over the counter and by prescription, to the public. It was conducting a study on the effects of the drugs on its athletes and was holding events earlier in the week to proclaim the benefits of enhancements for everybody.
In mainstream sports, the aversion to P.E.D.s is so deeply ingrained that few people even discuss the topic. But athletes still use them. For obvious reasons, it’s difficult to know precisely how many are doing so, but a 2024 survey found that between six and nine per cent of élite athletes were doping. Most sports treat performance enhancers as they once did gambling: like an existential threat that undermines fairness and offends our shared humanity. Naturally, the International Olympic Committee wasn’t a fan of the Enhanced Games. World Aquatics, the body that oversees swimming, compared the athletes to “clowns juggling knives.” Richard Pound, the founding president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, and a crusader against cheaters, told me, “Sport is essentially a form of social consensus as to what is O.K. and what is not O.K.” He went on, “You don’t start off in sport to become this artificial monster. You’ll see some of the folks at the Games. I think you’ll probably conclude that, if it’s not grotesque, it borders on it.” The leader of one sport federation predicted that, as a result of the Games, someone would die.
At Resorts World, no one seemed too worried. I saw enhanced men and women tooling through the casino on mobility scooters or sipping coffee in the rooftop pool. Large men delighted in meeting other large men. Lakutsin told me the gathering was affirming of humanity. “In Russia, people watching you, and they thinking you look like a freak,” he said. “If you do not look like other people, they start hate you.” At the food court, he’d run into Mitchell Hooper, the reigning World’s Strongest Man, who was in the dead-lift competition. “He says, ‘What the fuck! You’re so huge!’ ” Lakutsin recalled. Some Enhanced employees were also enhanced. In the mornings, the hotel gym was packed with wired, shiny-skinned guys grunting by the squat racks, making the hungover treadmill joggers and stair steppers self-conscious.
One problem with anti-doping enforcement is that it’s been impossible to define what doping is. Athletes are people who seek physical enhancement, in one form or another. They practice. They train. This self-improvement has always included the intake of various substances: animal testicles, raw eggs, Gatorade. One Olympic swimming team in the nineteen-seventies is said to have considered administering helium enemas, for buoyancy. Cyclists have tried strychnine. Marathoners have drunk brandy. It turned out that most things other than water, protein, and some salts and sugar were performance impairers. Only recently have we developed drugs for athletes that work.
At first, most sports allowed the drugs. Our attitude toward P.E.D.s has largely tracked public sentiment toward Big Pharma. In 1968, in response to a few athlete deaths that were believed to be linked to P.E.D. use, the Olympics began drug testing. The Olympic Committee introduced a definition of doping: the use of foreign substances in abnormal quantities to enhance performance. There were problems with this. It could be read, for example, to outlaw an excess of sugary snacks during a bike race. The drug tests were largely symbolic. Worldwide, about two Olympic athletes a year tested positive. When Mark McGwire broke the home-run record, in 1998, he kept a bottle of androstenedione in his locker. Major League Baseball had banned steroids, but it didn’t test for them. Perhaps what did the most to turn the public against steroids was the sense that some athletes were breaking the rules and getting away with it. WADA was founded in 1999. Pound, the founding president, told me that there weren’t lengthy discussions about why a given substance should be banned. WADA tried a new definition of doping. Using a substance is cheating if it meets two of three criteria: it enhances performance, it represents a health risk, and it violates “the spirit of sport.”
According to WADA, the spirit of sport is “the celebration of the human spirit, body and mind.” Pound told me, “It’s a little fuzzy, but at least it gives you the warm feeling about what sport should be.” The fuzziness, perhaps, allows for the fact that we’re all enhanced in one way or another: Viagra, smartphones, Lasik, Claude. We eat enriched grains and receive flu vaccines. Some wiggle room helps. But WADA’s rules can be arbitrary: huffing supplemental oxygen (performance enhancing, but not harmful) doesn’t violate the spirit of sport. Caffeine (performance enhancing and, like almost anything, a little bit harmful) once violated the spirit of sport, but now only extremely high levels of it do. The concept of doping isn’t much of a thing in pursuits other than sports. Actors use Botox and hair plugs to stay camera-ready. Pianists with stagefright take beta-blockers. You could say John Lennon was doping when he dropped acid and wrote “I Am the Walrus,” but you wouldn’t. The invocation of “spirit” seems to assert that sports have a special claim on the soul.
But the human spirit is a tricky thing. We cheat on our taxes, and we round up our height. N.B.A. players flop. Alva Noë, a philosopher at Berkeley, has said that, though doping is technically cheating, in that it’s against the rules, the doper isn’t much different from the basketball player who commits a rough foul. “It is cheating that is consistent, in so many ways, with the spirit of self-actualization, creativity, and achievement that is the mark of all sports,” he wrote. “To be willing to give your all even at the risk of injury to yourself and to others is actually what is required of any player who aims at excellence.” When I talked to Noë about the Enhanced Games, he said, “It poses an interesting question about our conception of what it is to be a human agent. Maybe a more honest way to understand human genius is to realize that we’re very dependent on others and on technology.” He continued, “When do I forfeit my ownership of my own accomplishments because of something I ate or took? I think that’s just a really open question.”
Aron D’Souza, a founder of the Enhanced Games, is friends with Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI. Altman once described D’Souza as “ruthlessly ambitious,” a “monster networker,” and “obsessed with status and power in a way that is hard for me to relate to.” In 2009, when D’Souza was a student at Oxford, the venture capitalist Peter Thiel gave a guest lecture. D’Souza managed to arrange a meeting. Thiel, who has a passion for immortality, introduced himself to D’Souza by saying, “Hi, I’m Peter, and I’m going to live forever.” D’Souza recalled to the Financial Times, “I think I just replied, ‘Hi, I’m Aron. I’m studying law.’ ” D’Souza schmoozed. On a walk around campus, he asked Thiel if he had any nagging problems. Thiel mentioned the news outlet Gawker, which had recently outed him as gay. A year later, D’Souza devised and orchestrated a plan in which Thiel secretly funnelled millions to the wrestler Hulk Hogan so that he would wage a defamation lawsuit against Gawker. Hogan won a hundred-and-forty-million-dollar judgment. Gawker filed for bankruptcy.
D’Souza established himself in Thiel’s inner circle, which comprised mostly men, most of whom were gay and most of whom were tech founders or venture capitalists. They held dinners and vacationed together. Some were transhumanists. In 2022, D’Souza was in Miami, where Thiel was hosting a New Year’s party. At a gym, he encountered an unusually muscled lifter. The guy told D’Souza that he was on testosterone. During the next few days, D’Souza worked up a plan for the Enhanced Games. At the New Year’s party, he pitched Thiel, who later invested. (Eventually, so did the Winklevoss twins.) A German billionaire named Christian Angermayer, another member of Thiel’s circle, became a co-founder.
D’Souza launched the Enhanced Games in 2023, with a trollish promotional video that aped the language of gay liberation. A voice-over announced, “I am a proud enhanced athlete. The Olympics hate me. I need your help to come out. I need your help to stop hate.” In the media, the Enhanced Games became known as the Steroid Olympics. I first talked to D’Souza shortly afterward. He was thinking of inaugurating the Games during the Paris Olympics, as counterprogramming; the athletes could use any drug they wanted. The event didn’t come together, but his provocations got a lot of attention. He pitched Lance Armstrong on investing. Armstrong declined.
I was surprised to learn that D’Souza is not a sports fan. “I’m not the kind of guy who will, like, go to the football on a Saturday,” he told me. “I’m a philosopher. I read old printed books in my library at Oxford.” Angermayer also began following sports only recently. “It’s very hard to be a fan of anything if I’m not involved,” he told me. “Now that I’m able to play in that world, I’m super obsessed about it.” In 2024, D’Souza pitched the Games at an academic conference on doping in Denmark. His remarks were not what attendees expected. “He did not talk so much about sport,” Verner Møller, who organized the conference, told me. “He was talking about a future where we would not die because we have found medicine that would allow us to live eternally.” D’Souza told me that the Games were a proof of concept for a larger mission: “My thesis has always been, with the Enhanced Games, it works, we generate revenue, we can push that into scientific development, better drugs come out, and eventually, through capitalism, we cure death.”
In early 2024, Angermayer published an essay titled “The Future Is Enhanced,” a manifesto predicting an era of science-aided human improvement which would arrive in waves: sexual enhancement, muscular enhancement, cognitive enhancement, happiness enhancement, and a final, transhumanist wave involving brain-computer interfaces. Angermayer calls this humanmaxxing. He rejects the idea of living forever—“Statistically, you’re going to have an accident, and, if you don’t have an accident, then someday the star system will end”—though he does think that we are a matter of years away from achieving indefinite life spans.
Angermayer runs Apeiron Investment Group, which has invested heavily in biotech and longevity. Its companies research therapeutic psychedelics and treatments for premature ejaculation. One afternoon in Las Vegas, he invited me up to his hotel suite. When I arrived, he was nibbling on nigiri. He is forty-eight and makes intense eye contact. I couldn’t detect a single pore in his face. Angermayer told me that he takes the peptides GLP-1 (for weight maintenance), tesamorelin (for growth-hormone production), and GHK-Cu (for skin regeneration); the anti-aging hormone DHEA; and a number of sleep supplements. He has been on testosterone-replacement therapy since his thirties. On busy days, he takes modafinil, a wakefulness drug used to treat narcolepsy. This week, leading up to the Games, there were many busy days.
Enhanced’s drug study, which will track the athletes over five years, was preparing to release early data, and Angermayer was excited. “We’re going to change the debate, and then the debate will be: Is it actually morally acceptable that we’re not allowing these drugs?” he said.
Angermayer had pushed D’Souza to moderate his initial anything-goes instincts. Enhanced now encourages the use only of drugs that have F.D.A. approval. “They’re the best agency in the world to decide what should be in the human body or not,” he said. “I’m not the arbiter—nor should WADA be.” Enhanced says it tests for health, not for drugs. Athletes with unsafe levels of certain biomarkers wouldn’t be allowed to compete, regardless of how they got that way. WADA, which views taking P.E.D.s, safe or not, as cheating, rejects the approach. But it’s popular among philosophers. Peter Singer is a fan.
I told Angermayer that I thought his approach was rational, but that enjoyment of sports was an irrational endeavor. (Peter Singer told me that he was intrigued by the Games intellectually but added, “It’s not something that I’m going to say, ‘Oh, great, the Enhanced Games are on! I must make sure that I can watch.’ ”) Angermayer asked, “Why do you think we like sports? Have you ever thought about that?”
I said I thought that most people watch sports, basically, to feel something.
“If you look at it scientifically, we are actually evolutionarily primed for comparing our skills,” he replied. “Go to the zoo and watch gorillas, or any form of apes. They keep that raw display of who’s the strongest, who’s the fastest.” When Enhanced athletes proved to be faster and stronger, why would anyone watch anything else? This put pressure on the Enhanced Games. “For it to be a success, there need to be world records,” he said.
The next morning, I caught a training session at the pool. It was difficult to discern the outward effects of enhancement on the athletes. The swimmers looked like swimmers—sinewy and long, with huge hands and feet. An exception was James Magnussen, an Australian who’d been the first person to sign up with Enhanced and had promised to “juice to the gills.” In an attempt, last year, at a world record, he’d put on too much muscle and had basically sunk. He’d slimmed down since then, but, as he swam laps, his lats still oozed out of the sides of his swimsuit. One person commented online, “You can see his back from his front.”
Most of the athletes were Olympians who’d retired or were at the back ends of their careers. A few were serving WADA bans. A small number were competing clean. A clean swimmer named Hunter Armstrong told me that his decision to forgo P.E.D.s was about celebrating the talent given to him by God. Also, he wanted to maintain his Olympics eligibility. He was trailed all week by anti-doping officials, who took urine and blood samples. Money was a major draw for everyone there. Enhanced paid the athletes salaries, and each winner would get a quarter-million-dollar bonus. A world record would pay an extra million. After the swimmers finished up for the day, I met with Megan Romano, a former world-champion swimmer who’d retired ten years ago. She was now thirty-five and living in Las Vegas, where she made money doing odd jobs, betting on sports, and working loopholes at the slot machines. Romano had no realistic shot at a world record, but Enhanced was hoping she’d demonstrate that drugs could shave years off your biological age. Romano hadn’t trained for a decade. She’d done some hard living. She told me, “It’s crazy, because the warmup pool that we’re using, it’s at Ayu,” one of the hotel’s day-party clubs. “A year ago, I was partying in that pool.”
Angermayer’s manifesto had credited transgender activism with inspiring Enhanced. “The trans movement will ultimately extend to the ability to shape and enhance one’s own body and mind according to individual desires and aspirations,” he wrote. But the Games didn’t have any trans athletes. The competition categories were not men and women but, rather, XX and XY chromosome groups. Angermayer, who as a young man had hidden that he was gay, told me, “If you’re trans, do you really need to go into sports? Maybe that’s your passion, but don’t you have, also, other passions? And is it worth it? It’s at least what I asked myself: Is it worth it to shout out from the rooftops that I am gay? No fucking not! My life would be destroyed for nothing.”
Before the Games, Enhanced had put its athletes in a fifteen-week performance-enhanced training camp at a resort in Abu Dhabi. (The Emiratis had agreed to regulate the drug study.) The participants underwent a battery of physical exams, and then were put on personalized protocols, prescribed by doctors, before receiving their first pills and injections. “That first day on the protocol was the hardest,” Ben Proud, a British freestyle swimmer who won a silver medal in Paris, said, after a practice. “I was terrified, because, to me, that was the day that I went from the Ben Proud that I always knew to a new person.” I’d spoken with Boady Santavy, a Canadian weight lifter, when he was three weeks into the protocol. He’d noticed that his sleep had improved, and that his recovery after training sessions was faster. Nonathletes often conceive of performance enhancers as the lazy option, but it’s typically the opposite: athletes take them so they can train even more. Santavy had already put on bulk. “They’re more full and thick,” he told me, of his muscles. He thought he might be able to put up a world-record weight already.
Max Martin, Enhanced’s twenty-nine-year-old C.E.O., would not disclose his personal enhancement protocol but explained that he takes six times the dosage of some of the athletes. (He has previously said that he takes testosterone. “A byproduct of taking testosterone is that it takes down your fertility,” he told GQ. “I’m not at a point in my life where I want to have kids, so actually taking down my fertility is a great thing.”) Mitchell Hooper, the deadlifter, said that he was taking testosterone, Anadrol, nandrolone, and Halotestin—all anabolic steroids—plus Adderall on competition days, for focus. Hooper, who set his own protocol and wasn’t part of Enhanced’s study, said he used to take higher doses. He’d sometimes found himself crying inexplicably at his kitchen counter from the Adderall. “It’s a bad idea,” he said. “Perfect, optimal health right now? Don’t do them.” But, for him, the trade-off—money, a platform—was worth it.
WADA was founded around the time of the war on drugs, and authorities warned that steroids would kill you. EPO, a naturally occurring hormone that is used by athletes to increase endurance, can dangerously thicken the blood. (WADA allows athletes to use non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as hypobaric chambers, to raise EPO levels.) Anabolic steroids can cause mood swings, shrunken testicles, baldness, and infertility, and can suppress the body’s ability to produce testosterone on its own. Heavy doses over a long time are linked to a higher likelihood of heart disease and stroke. But steroids aren’t going to kill you, at least not in the short or medium term. Norman Fost, a pediatrician and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, and a longtime opponent of the anti-doping regime, told me, “There’s literally a hundred times more documented deaths from playing football than from using steroids.”
Athletes use drugs because of financial pressure, because of injuries, because everyone else seems to be doing it. One afternoon, I talked with Marvin Bracy-Williams, a sprinter who signed with Enhanced after failing a drug test for steroids. Bracy-Williams told me that for the first ten years of his career he never considered doping. Then, in 2021, he injured his hamstring at the Olympic qualifiers. For years, he tried to regain his form. “I was doing everything, and still coming up short,” he said. “You start to have weak moments.” He began to feel like a sucker for competing clean. A friend of Bracy-Williams told the Guardian that the runner called him to vent. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done the right way,” he said, according to the friend. “Dog, there ain’t no way these boys are that much better than me.” Bracy-Williams told me, “I took the opportunity, and then it bit me, so here we are.”
Drugs help, but only on the margins. As skill increases, the effectiveness of P.E.D.s decreases. Any baseball player could take steroids—and thousands likely have—but none would be Barry Bonds. The big aid is in recovery and career longevity. The immediate effects are most pronounced in sports like weight lifting, cycling, and sprinting, where there is a more direct relationship between raw physical ability and results. Some sprinters believe that steroids can trim one stride, equal to about two-tenths of a second, off the hundred-metre dash. Of the top five fastest times in the dash, only one was set by a runner who never failed a drug test: Usain Bolt, who holds the record, at 9.58 seconds. The next closest time was 9.69—less than one stride slower. Bracy-Williams told me that Bolt’s run had moved him emotionally. “I’ve probably contributed a million views myself to the YouTube video of the world-record race, trying to figure out how,” he said. “It’s a work of art.” I asked him if he would be saddened if Bolt were revealed to have used steroids. “Think about it,” he said. “He still moved his body in 9.58 seconds, regardless of what was in there.”
On the morning of the Games, I met Aron D’Souza in the lobby of his hotel. He was feeling triumphant. “My advice to entrepreneurs is, like, You can just do things,” he said. Last year, he’d stepped down as C.E.O. He said he wanted to focus on new things. During New York’s mayoral election, he’d spoken to Andrew Cuomo’s team, to float his name for sanitation commissioner. “If I could have two years, I could clean up all the trash,” he told me. (He envisioned street-sweeping drones.)
Almost reflexively, I asked whether he was enhanced. “Not presently, but I feel like I should be,” D’Souza said. He explained that, though he wasn’t enhanced pharmaceutically, he did follow some of the teachings of Bryan Johnson, the longevity-obsessed tech founder, who strictly limits his sun exposure, gets transfusions of his son’s blood plasma, and scrupulously logs his nighttime erections. (After the Games, D’Souza reported that he’d begun taking an enhancement, but he wouldn’t reveal what it was.)
D’Souza told me that the opening of the Games was a landmark for humankind. “People see this as the start of the biotech salvationist movement,” he said. We talked about the ways in which the world might orient itself toward an enhanced era of indefinite life spans (we’d need to rejigger social security and pensions), but discussing eternal life at the Enhanced Games felt, at times, like discussing reaching low Earth orbit at the pole-vaulting championships. D’Souza had appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and compared the Games to the Apollo program. “You’re not going to the moon,” Rogan replied. “You’re just getting a bunch of guys juiced up running really fast.”
D’Souza’s vision was that each annual Games would bring incremental advancements. “This is the first threshold of enhancement,” he said. The second threshold might include bionics. The third level would include brain-computer interfaces—“integrating physical intelligence,” D’Souza said. An athlete might be able to download new competencies: Michael Phelps’s swimming mechanics, Steph Curry’s jump shot.
D’Souza said that Enhanced would draw a line somewhere. No jet packs to zoom down the track. I wondered how he’d avoid re-creating WADA’s definition problem. “The end conclusion of this project may be that Enhanced becomes the definitional regulator of what it means to be human,” he said.
The Games kicked off in the mid-afternoon. The gold Trump International Hotel loomed over the arena. The venture-capital firm of Donald Trump, Jr., was an investor, but the event conflicted with his wedding, in the Bahamas. (Angermayer told me that the Trump Administration’s friendly stance toward alternative medicines—psychedelics, peptides––had been a boon for the enhanced movement: “Trump winning was definitely a decisive factor in holding the Games here.”) At one end of the pool was a desk for the television commentators. Bryan Johnson had signed up to do the color commentary. The temperature was in the mid-nineties. Johnson held an umbrella and had on sunglasses that looked like the goggles scientists once wore during nuclear tests. Tickets weren’t for sale. Instead, Enhanced had invited a battery of influencers. Martin, the C.E.O., explained, “We’re built for social media, not television.” Lakutsin, the large Russian man, had come with Zoop, a social-media network created by a founding executive of OnlyFans, which had partnered with Enhanced. In the concourse, content creators filmed other content creators creating content. There was free food and drinks at kiosks labelled “+SOLIDS” and “+LIQUIDS.” Perhaps because of the filming frenzy in the concourse, or the transgressive aim of the competition, an air of permissiveness presided. I cut the +SOLIDS line and snagged a Wagyu slider.
The Games began. In the first event, a weight lifter named Beatriz Pirón just missed a world record in the snatch, in which a lifter pulls a barbell over her head in a single motion. But no one seemed stressed. The major record attempts would happen later. Hunter Armstrong, the clean swimmer, won the fifty-metre backstroke, but it wasn’t a record. After he was finished, he went off with anti-doping officials, to give more urine and blood.
I was excited to see Santavy, the weight lifter, who had boasted to me that the world record in the snatch should be no problem. None of the Enhanced Game records would be recognized in mainstream sports, but, he told me, “I’ll consider mine the record for sure.” Enhanced was following standard competition rules: lifters had three chances to put up their best weight. Weight lifting is the sport where steroids should help the most: get stronger, lift heavier. But the other lifters kept failing. Santavy attempted the record on his second try, but he bailed out as the bar went overhead. He looked shocked. He had one more shot. The final attempt, though, wasn’t even close. He fell to the floor and slammed his fists on the mat. An announcer declared, “Ladies and gentleman, we have a surprise for you. We’re going to give Boady one! more! chance!” There was laughter in the arena. Santavy failed at that one, too.
It was early, but the lack of records threatened disaster for Enhanced. If the drugs couldn’t help a lifter lift more, what was the upside for the rest of us? Interestingly, Santavy’s failure affirmed that you could stage a sporting event with drugs and not lose the drama. Pound had told me that performance enhancers ruined sports because they effectively fixed the results: “The key about sport is the inherent uncertainty of the outcome.” I wondered if WADA and Enhanced both overestimated how much the enhancements helped. Sports are fun because the better physical beings don’t always win. People choke and get inspired. If sports have a spirit, it’s in the recognition that our time is finite. We peak and we break down. Chances are, we’ll die. We have limited opportunities, so each failure is a little tragedy. What matters is the moment.
Enhanced’s moment was turning out to be pretty boring. It was beginning to feel more like an exhibition than like a sporting event. Most of the weight lifters were in different weight classes, so they were competing against themselves. In the track events, there were three false starts, each of which typically means an automatic disqualification for the violator. But the runners simply lined up and went again. One runner decided to skip the preliminary heat and just run in the finals.
The swimming events were more successful. Swimmers set sixteen personal bests. Megan Romano, the slot-machine player, won the women’s hundred-metre freestyle. She beat her previous best time by .28 seconds. Bizarrely, the Enhanced Games had allowed the swimmers to use “supersuits,” full-body swimsuits engineered with extra buoyancy that have been banned in mainstream competition. It was difficult to tell whether the personal bests were attributable more to the drugs or to the suits. And, still, no records.
Chances came and went: the hundred-metre dash was a bust. Fred Kerley, the seventh-fastest man of all time, was the headliner for the men. He was serving a two-year track-and-field ban for missing three drug tests, but he said that he was competing clean. (“I don’t need it,” he explained.) He won, with a time of 9.97 seconds. Afterward, he said his enhanced competitors needed to “get on that shit a little more.” Yet his own time was slower than that of a high-school sophomore at this year’s Texas school championships. Hafþór Björnsson, the Icelandic man who played the Mountain on “Game of Thrones,” was trying to break his own world record for the dead lift, at eleven hundred and twenty-four pounds. But he failed, too. Angermayer had told me that he expected two to five world records. I ran into him midway through the Games. “I’m getting nervous,” he said.
I wondered if I could find some drugs. This was a crowd, mainly, of bio-hacking, sleep-obsessed healthmaxxers for whom the typical delights of Las Vegas held little appeal. Angermayer, who pointed out that alcohol, physically and societally, is much more unhealthy than anything the athletes were taking, told me he’d never had a drink in his life. Las Vegas’s economy has had to contend with a public whose interests are trending away from depravity and toward wellness. I was curious if the city’s market for substances had adapted.
I began following up my inquiries about enhancements with one about how to score some. Under the bleachers near the +LIQUIDS kiosk, I found myself in conversation with a group of content creators. A thirtysomething guy named Jake told me that he was an investor in Enhanced, which had just gone public, via a SPAC, or special-purpose acquisition company. “I own eight thousand shares,” he told me. “We have a mimetic economy. I’m, like, We’ve got some mimetic material here. Now, given the fact that we’ve broken no world records, I may have to sell immediately.” Jake was enhanced: “I actually know a guy who’s a big juice head. Former arm-wrestling world-champion contender. The guy told me when I went over his house, ‘I killed so many people’—he was in the Army. He said, ‘My way of doing good in the world is making people feel better.’ ” This involved peptides and anabolics. Jake asked if I wanted an intro.
I’ve never had a problem with athletes using pharmaceuticals. And yet I found myself rooting for the unenhanced athletes. I was happy when Armstrong won. I’m also very much unenhanced; I don’t even drink coffee. Among the syringe fillers, this gave me a feeling of superiority that I was a little ashamed of. D’Souza predicted that in the future there would be a small group of the unenhanced. “That will be a status symbol in itself,” he explained. I asked Jake what the enhancements felt like.
“Just imagine yourself but with ten to twenty per cent more energy,” he said. “Are you a calm, chill guy? Do you want to be less chill?”
“Do I need to be less chill?” I asked.
“I was very chill, but if you’ve never experienced being the guy who’s, like, ‘I will fight you!’ you should try it once in your life,” he said. “It’s pretty fun.”
I declined. The final event was about to begin. It was the fifty-metre freestyle. Last year, Kristian Gkolomeev, a decently credentialled Greek swimmer, had swum a record time at a private Enhanced event, while wearing a supersuit, a feat for which Enhanced paid him a million dollars. This March, Cameron McEvoy, an unenhanced, un-supersuited Australian, beat his time, at 20.88 seconds. If Gkolomeev could surpass that, he’d get himself another million. Fifty metres is just one length down the pool—a frenzy of thrashing arms and legs. It was going to be close. I felt genuine suspense. When Gkolomeev touched the wall, the clock said 20.81—a new record, of sorts. Martin, the C.E.O., had watched from the pool deck, and he hugged Gkolomeev, soaking his double-breasted olive suit.
There was a brief closing ceremony, at which Enhanced had arranged for the Killers to play a set. The front man, Brandon Flowers, called out, “Congratulations, whoever deserves it!” I looked for Jake, hoping to wish him well. Maybe the swimming record meant he’d avoid some stock losses. He was still under the bleachers when I found him. He hadn’t been watching. ♦