Viewed strictly as a sporting event, the first-ever Enhanced Games, held Sunday in Las Vegas, was neither a flop nor a success. 

On the plus side, there was a last-second comeback, the kind of drama fans want in any elite athletic competition. Going into the final event of the evening, no world records had been set — despite bold predictions by Enhanced CEO Max Martin that many records would fall at the feet of the 42 Olympic-level athletes, most of whom were juiced and jacked on an undisclosed combination of steroids, HGH, and three dozen other FDA-approved performance-enhancing drugs (opens in new tab). 

For the majority of the competition, athletes competing in three sports — swimming, track and field, and weightlifting — failed to crack the upper limits of human performance. There were stumbles, both literal and metaphorical.

Then, finally, in the last event, the 50-meter freestyle swim, came the breakthrough moment: Kristian Gkolomeev of Greece, in a four-lane pool constructed in the parking lot of the Resorts World casino, churned out a world record of 20.81 seconds — .07 seconds faster than the previous record (opens in new tab), set in March. He was aided not just by PEDs but by a sleek, custom body suit that is banned in international competition. For twenty-one seconds of work, Gkolomeev earned $1 million for setting the record, plus $250,000 for winning the event. That worked out to better than $200 million an hour, which helped distract from the fact that his “world record” would not be recognized by any sporting body other than the Enhanced Games itself.

For the Enhanced team, the Gkolomeev swim was enough to declare victory. “This is just the beginning!” an exultant Martin said poolside just after the race.  “We have arrived in mainstream culture. We’re here to stay.”

But then came the comedown. Enhanced — a public company armed with a reported $300 million investment from backers including Peter Thiel and 1789 Capital, which lists Donald Trump Jr. as a partner — hit a high of $11.19 per share on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this month. But by Tuesday, after the Memorial Day weekend, the stock had plunged, bottoming out at $2.68 in early trading and closing at $3.03. (It sunk even lower (opens in new tab) Wednesday.)

Though Enhanced has access to enough capital that a dip in its stock price is unlikely to set off financial panic, its market reception shows that the Enhanced Games are a work in progress. And the early reviews from critics on X were similarly unkind:

But despite the naysayers, the Enhanced founders are clearly onto something: With more people taking an interest in optimizing their fitness and health by consuming a wide variety of supplements and medical advice, it makes sense to promote PEDs through high-level competition. “Enhancing” isn’t about cheating, it’s about excelling — in sports and in life. 

Though they are slick marketers, the group pushing the so-called “Steroid Olympics” are not a bunch of flaky losers using enhanced sports as a tool to sell PED-based personal fitness schemes. If you hoped they would flop in Vegas and quickly go away, you might be disappointed.

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In reality, juiced athletes are going to keep gaining a larger niche in sports culture. We may need to get over the awkward feeling of knowing an elite athlete has taken the needle. And science has a big job in catching up to the reality of widespread use of synthetic testosterone — now surpassing 11 million prescriptions a year in the U.S. If it’s legal to be prescribed by a doctor, PED proponents argue, then maybe it shouldn’t be banned by professional sports leagues.

Having covered thousands of sporting events as a reporter, including the 1998 Nagano Olympics, my reaction to the Enhanced Games was mixed. Was the 50 free exciting? Did it feel like a real swim meet? Yes and yes. The crowd of 2,000 — most of them social media influencers —  kicked up the volume, a jolt of excitement was in the air, and the setting was hard to beat. I kept staring at the Las Vegas Sphere in the background, its orb glowing with images, including a human eye looking around, as if to question: What should we make of these juiced athletes?

At other times, the Enhanced Games had a cheeseball feel. There were eye rolls in the press section when a surprise announcement came that one of the weightlifters, Boady Santavy of Canada, was being given a fourth attempt — for no obvious reason. “Ladies and gentleman!” a voice announced on the PA system. “We have a surprise for you. We’re going to give Boady one more chance!” At that point, the games felt more “Battle of the Network Stars” than Olympics.

The men’s 100-meter sprint was also a bit of a fiasco. The track was cool, plopped down next to the pool, but things got off to a rocky start. There were multiple false starts and an untied-shoe episode before U.S. Olympian Fred Kerley, competing as a “non-enhanced” athlete, won with a time of 9.97 seconds. That was well off the 9.81 he ran to win the bronze medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics and obviously nowhere near Usain Bolt’s world record of 9.58. Kerley was visibly annoyed. “Got to do better than that,” he said, chafing at the pre-race hiccups. “They need to work a little harder and get on that shit.”

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Confusingly, another non-enhanced athlete, Tristan Evelyn of Barbados, won the women’s 100-meter sprint. “This proves that winning takes more than chemistry,” she said.

That’s a good point, actually. The Enhanced organizers would be smart to dial back the hype around PEDs and focus instead on hard work, discipline, and craft — the largest drivers of athletic success. Having covered Mark McGwire back when he was steroid-huge and hitting moon-shot homers, I can tell you that the “enhancements” didn’t help him hit home runs in any direct way. They just helped keep him in the lineup, able to recover from injury faster.

Similarly, breaststroker Cody Miller said that his pre-games regimen — eight weeks of doping and swimming in Abu Dhabi under the close supervision of medical and fitness professionals — gave him the ability to train harder and longer. Coaches had to redo practice plans because Miller and other swimmers could do more. 

The conditions required for peak athletic performance are complex. Anyone hyping testosterone and HGH as magic pills that instantly produce results is obviously misguided. Performance doesn’t work that way. 

“This is about inspiring millions of people around the world to rethink what’s possible,” Martin said earlier in the weekend. “It’s not the use of performance-enhancing substances that’s dangerous; it’s the misuse. Our approach is not to be naive and pretend it’s not happening but to take what’s happening in the shadows, put it in the open, and put the right clinical and medical supervisory framework around it. That’s the way to make it safe for people who choose to do it.”

Any time the subject is juicing, people start free-associating. A writer for The Atlantic (opens in new tab) described how, “in person,” the Enhanced Games athletes “did not seem quite real” and were “like action figures.” For me, they seemed very real indeed. Miller, who won both breaststroke events to take home $500,000, has a pretty robust physique — but no more dramatic than the bodies on the Cal swimmers who lived on my dorm floor back in the 1980s. Never mind the “male gaze” — I think it might be fair to think of the “fan gaze,” in which the sports spectator sees what the spectator wants to see.

Action figures? Miller talked about his two sons and what he would tell them about PEDs, along with what he would tell them about coffee or cigarettes. He thinks that, with time, more people will understand the choice he and other “enhanced” athletes are making. “To a lot of people, steroids just equals cheating, and that’s it,” he said just before midnight Sunday. “It’s hard for anyone who has no knowledge of this … to understand what this really is. That’s just going to take time. It will change. It will. And if people don’t like it, they don’t have to watch.That’s OK. I respect that opinion. And I ask that you respect me. That’s it.”

The best way to think of the enhanced movement — assuming you believe, as I do, that it is a movement — is that it’s not changing competition in a major way; it’s mostly just bringing what’s already happening out into the open. Despite the dip in stock price, Enhanced will be back with another edition of the Enhanced Games in a year, I expect, and based on what I heard from athletes in Vegas, more marquee competitors will sign up.

Next time, hopefully, a war won’t break out in the middle of their training regimens. The war in Iran did indeed spill into neighboring Gulf countries, and as a result the Enhanced athletes went through eight weeks of “protocols” in Abu Dhabi, fewer than planned. If they’re back next year, and get in more weeks of training, it will be interesting to see what sort of difference it makes. 

At the least, for athletes in sports who have generally performed for minimal financial reward, the competition represents a new opportunity to make real money to support their families. “This is going to change my life for the good, for sure,” said Gkolomeev after pulling in seven figures for one swim. “It’s a big help for me and my family. And yeah, I’m going to continue next year. Maybe I’ll break it again.”