“The world’s best athletes, enhanced.” This is how Christian Angermayer, co-founder and just one of the super-rich investors buying into the Enhanced Games, describes the movement he is a part of. The Games are built on this question: if steroids improve performance, then why ban them when your athletes could be performing to a higher standard? They are currently looking for a city to host the first Games in the second half of 2025.
Intense health exams and diagnostics before and after competition are part of the plan to make the event as safe as possible. According to the Games’ website, “When 44% of athletes already use performance enhancements, it is time to safely celebrate science.” Proponents believe steroids can be dangerous because competitors are trying to sneak under the radar, and health professionals at the event don’t know which athletes might be doping. At the Enhanced Games, organizers will be more intentional about health concerns related to performance-enhancing drugs because they know which athletes are on steroids, what types are being used, and in what dosage .
Billionaire investors like Angermayer and Peter Thiel along with a convincing vision of a faster, stronger, “enhanced” olympic experience may have convinced you that these Games are bound for international success (and profitability), but their main competitor isn’t going away anytime soon. The Olympics are one of the few international sporting events that people reliably keep up with and enjoy. They have arguably the most storied history of any sporting event. This is not something easily replaced, both in reality as a functioning international partnership and in individuals’ thinking as the greatest display of human athletic achievement and potential available.
But the Games have a plan for drawing interest, and it doesn’t focus on smart advertising — it banks on human nature. In an interview on the Joe Rogan Experience, Angermayer said one of the reasons he has high hopes for the Enhanced Games is because “I deeply believe humans are wired. We want the best, and we want to also watch the best. You’re not going to watch something for the best natural player. No, you want to see the best absolute player, even if this player or person is enhanced.” The supporters behind these Games are betting on the human desire to see something historic.
World Records are one of the best parts of the Olympics, and for me personally, events in
which records are broken are the ones I prioritize to watch highlights from. I think the fact that at the Enhanced Games humans might achieve heights never before approached by the most conditioned and gifted athletes of the last 1600 years of Olympic history is what separates the event from taking steroids for bodybuilding shows —or so you can get a little more muscly with less work. Because when an elite athlete takes steroids to break a world record, he or she isn’t doing it solely for personal glory or success; they are pushing thelimits of human achievement. Many performance-enhancing drugs’ biggest drawback is their negative effect on overall health. A juiced-up professional athlete stands at greater risk of having heart disease and heart attacks, and many smaller side effects are associated with different types of steroids, almost none of them desirable. This leads people to write off steroids as always irresponsible and never a wise choice even when done openly and not with the intent to cheat. When the US and USSR began building expensive space programs in the ’50s, astronauts from both nations knew they were taking on immense risk by participating, but they also knew that they were advancing human development to new heights. With this logic, we can see how when the goal is to run faster than any human has ever run before it could destigmatize the use of enhancement to reach it. And while I don’t recommend it for any readers, taking steroids is much safer than strapping yourself to the top of a rocket in the ’50s when they were still repurposed ballistic missiles and space travel was completely unheard of.
I believe the Enhanced Games have a good chance of being a successful and popular international institution. However, what translates high hopes to success is good management, healthy business practices, and breaking world records. So keep tabs on the Enhanced Games, its success is a real prospect, but not a foregone conclusion.
