Sports may never be quite the same once Kristian Gkolomeev of Greece takes the starting blocks for the 50-meter freestyle this Sunday at the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas, where he will quite possibly swim the fastest recorded time in the event, while being juiced up on steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs. 

Gkolomeev, if he can pull it off, will be paid a cool million dollars for beating a world record, along with another $250,000 if he finishes in first, all while showcasing the power of bioenhancement to improve performance for the world’s top athletes — and maybe for the rest of us.

There is no doubt the Enhanced Games, founded by Australian entrepreneur Aron D’Souza and financed by Peter Thiel, carry a certain distracting undercurrent of weird-for-weird’s-sake — part Siegfried and Roy, part Diane Arbus museum exhibit waiting to happen. It’s tempting to dismiss the whole spectacle, which seeks to prove that athletes on steroids, HGH, Adderall, and other PEDs can put on a great show and also advance science — and maybe an IPO or two — along the way.

But for anyone who has followed the enhanced-sports beat long enough, the wonder is not that a venture-funded outfit is pumping big money into a slick carnival of pumped-up human bodies, fit and jacked and pulsing with pharmacology — the wonder is that it took this long.

The elite athletes that we put on pedestals are mere reflections of the rest of us, and whether we cop to the reality of it or not, we who inject GLP-1s, stack peptides, gobble beta blockers, or guzzle protein have long since crossed the Rubicon on better living through chemistry. The 42 athletes competing in the Enhanced Games are just more transparent and less embarrassed about seeking an edge.

“Being open and upfront about it makes a lot of people uncomfortable, which is kind of funny,” said Shawn Arent, chairman of the Department of Exercise Science at the University of South Carolina. “Come on, man, think about it. Captain America was our original juicebag, strength and power and all that from a serum. Enhancement goes back a long way.”

Arent has mixed feelings about the Enhanced Games, but wonders at the continuing cultural inhibitions on PEDs. If athletes can run faster and punch harder by juicing up, what other applications beyond sports or personal fitness could be possible?

“The appeal of what the human body can do is the basis for my career,” Arent said. “I’ve argued for a while, for example, special forces in the military, why are we not enhancing? It brings them home alive. So the ethics of that never made sense to me.”

So if Gkolomeev beats that world record in the 50-meter freestyle, don’t be surprised when some House Armed Services Committee members seeks out more funding for the Pentagon’s “Special Forces — Medical and Fitness” budget line. That 1990s Jean-Claude Van Damme clunker “Universal Soldier” might turn out to be prophetic. 

The San Francisco Bay Area has always been a center of innovation in the boundaries of fitness and enhancement. The world first learned of testosterone in 1935 at San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel, when Zurich-based biochemist Leopold Ruzicka announced at a meeting of the American Chemical Society that his team had successfully synthesized testosterone in the lab, earning this headline in The New York Times: “New Male Hormone Found by Scientist.”

“Science is still too young to hold any hope at present for rejuvenation of the aged or for the lengthening of the span of human life,” Ruzicka told a reporter during his visit to the U.S. “What contributions I have made are only a feeble first step in this direction.”

In the 1990s, when I was a San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter, I watched with odd fascination as players like Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco experimented with steroids to try to get bigger and stronger and stay in the lineup more often to hit more home runs. Asked by Wired (opens in new tab) in January 1999 to imagine the future of sports, I wrote, “Any wide-open musing on the subject of technology and sports leads to one inescapable conclusion: Given the megamillions an individual athlete can now claim with even moderate accomplishment, it’s amazing more are not going hog wild with chemical help and other life-altering enhancements to their athletic prowess.”

I always thought it was inevitable we’d arrive at something like the Enhanced Games. In August 2000, I wrote an opinion column in The New York Times, under the headline “Baseball Must Come Clean on its Darkest Secret,”  (opens in new tab)in which I wrote straight out, “Mark McGwire has used steroids.” My whole point was: Stop lying about it. Let’s not be hypocrites.

Then I helped Canseco write his 2005 book “Juiced,” a New York Times No. 1 bestseller in which he not only admitted his own steroid use and told tales of shooting up McGwire in the ass with a steroid needle in one of the bathroom stalls at Oakland Coliseum, but he also openly advocated for a revolution in how society thinks about enhancements and how they alter the horizons of  human possibility. 

“Steroids are the future,” Canseco and I wrote at the start of Chapter 1. “Informed use of steroids, combined with human growth hormone, will one day be so accepted that everybody will be doing it. … Human life will be improved, too. We will live longer and better. And maybe we’ll love longer and better, too. We will be able to look good and have strong, fit bodies well into our sixties and beyond.”

It was Canseco and his honest and infectious enthusiasm for steroids that boosted use of synthetic testosterone nationally, with an entire industry then growing up around the trend. Total testosterone prescriptions in the U.S. jumped from 1.75 million in 2002 to 4.5 million in 2010. That number has hit more than 11 million annually in recent years, according to data compiled by healthcare research company IQVIA, with recent growth especially pronounced among men ages 25 to 34 and 35 to 44.

“To me, Enhanced Games is allowing people to explore the frontiers of performance,” said longevity guru Bryan Johnson, who will be at the Enhanced Games as — you have to love this title — Human Enhancement Analyst on the Roku broadcast team.

Johnson told me he read “Juiced” when it came out and remembers the book’s message of being open to chemical experimentation to push the limits of what the human body can do. “I think Canseco was early and right,” he said.

“I think if you look back through history, and you look at the big moments, like human rights, the right to vote, women’s rights, I think there’s a new right coming, and that’s the right to exist. Currently, the way the governments run the world, they allow certain things and disallow other things. They try to create guardrails, but there are conflicting interests. In the U.S., for example, if you want to explore psychedelics or cure your own cancer, you can’t do it, you’re blocked.”

D’Souza, president of the Enhanced Games, probably also at least skimmed “Juiced,” or has been deeply influenced by it without even knowing. In announcing the timing of the Enhanced Games, he stated that his goal was no less than to bring about “superhumanity.” This was not just about sports. This was, as Canseco once wrote, about evolving.

“We are here to move humanity forward,” D’Souza told the press (opens in new tab). “The old rules didn’t just hold back athletes, they held back humanity.”

Safe to say that if Hunter S. Thompson were still around, and not hopelessly addled by his own version of personal enhancement, he too would be checking out the scene this weekend at Resorts World in Las Vegas. The action kicks off Friday with media day, similar to the way the NFL builds hype for the Super Bowl, giving journalists a chance to interview the participants in swimming, weightlifting, and track and field. 

High-profile athletes include American sprinter Fred Kerley, a silver medalist at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and bronze medalist at the 2024 Olympics in Paris, who was banned for two years in 2025 for missing three doping tests. 

U.K. swimmer Ben Proud, a silver medalist in the 50-meter freestyle at the Paris Olympics, will also be on hand in Las Vegas. “My ambition has always been to be the fastest man on the planet,” Proud said in a statement. “I want to focus on performance at its highest level and challenge myself in new ways.”

Canadian Boady Santavy, a two-time Olympian, was the first weightlifter to sign up for the Enhanced Games. Listed at 5-feet-9, Santavy has lifted his weight (94 kilograms) in numerous international competitions, often lifting 96 kilos. In Vegas, with whatever enhancement he’s been sampling, he just might lift 100.

On Saturday comes a media walkaround of the custom-built complex where the games will be contested, and a media conference offering results from what organizers bill as a major scientific clinical study of the Enhanced Games athletes in training earlier this year in Abu Dhabi. (Sample finding, culled from a press release issued Thursday: 91% of the 36 Enhanced athletes in the study used testosterone or testosterone esters; 79% took human growth hormone; 62% used stimulants (e.g., Adderall); and 50% took metabolic modulators (e.g., anastrozole) alongside anabolic agents.)

Finally on Sunday comes the main event itself: the actual athletic competition, streamed live on Roku for no charge, which will likely achieve its goal of offering dramatic action and stunning pictures and video clips to quickly circulate on social media, followed immediately by a broader sorting out — think pieces in legacy media, most written from far away with little clue; amateur analysis on Reddit; steroid cocktail recipes on biohacking Discords. Given how much performance science has already shifted sports, it’s fair to assume that at least some of what happens at the Enhanced Games will be adopted elsewhere, whether in professional ball or basement gyms. 

Deep down, the Enhanced Games are doing much more than just selling the power of enhancement — although actual selling of supplements, via the Games’ website (opens in new tab), is an important part of the concept. They’re really seeking to place in a positive light a deeper ideology, not right versus left, but up rather than down.

If branding experts have long grasped the upside of trying to sell a feeling, then the Enhanced Games movement is pitching personal fulfillment and betterment as a kind of lifestyle. For the enhanced movement, the arc of moral justice bends upward toward bigger, stronger, faster, smarter, more alert. It all goes together with the skills needed for navigating high-stakes business deals or racing up the social ladder. 

Bob Alejo, a former strength and conditioning coach for the Oakland A’s and Los Angeles Angels, hopes that, at the least, coverage of the Enhanced Games will help people be more discerning about their own bodies. “The physiology of the human body hasn’t changed in centuries, but what we understand of it has,” Alejo said. “We have a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of … how to get bigger, stronger, fitter.”

Alejo would like to see people stay away from fads and focus more on what the experts advise, which is to follow the basics consistently. For example, no matter how hard you work out, your ability to gain strength and mass and boost overall fitness will be dramatically increased if you take one basic step: get a good night’s sleep regularly.

Arnold Schwarzenegger made his name as part of the whole Gold’s Gym scene at Venice Beach in the 1970s, and Alejo laughs thinking about their routine: They took steroids and HGH, they pumped iron, and then they went to sleep on the beach to work on their tans. “Little did they know, that was really the precipice of sleep and rest,” Alejo said. “Growth hormone levels stay higher with an adequate level of sleep, along with other healthy body adaptions. It’s not training that makes you big and strong, it’s rest. I like to say you have to rest to progress.”

I’m hopping a flight from SFO to Vegas on Friday and plan to channel my inner Hunter S. Thompson, reporting on the games for the Standard. To be honest, I really don’t know what to expect. The first time I flew anywhere to cover a sports event, I was in Cleveland reporting on 6-foot-6-and-three-quarter-inch Cal swimmer Matt Biondi, who burst onto the scene at the 1988 Olympics with his big stroke and world records. 

Will I feel some of that same excitement in Vegas, witnessing record speed? I think I might. But the other question for me and anyone else watching will be: Am I rooting for these people? Should I care about them? Or do I feel more like I’m watching someone else play a super-high-res video game, colorful and vivid and definitely not boring, but also a long way from real life?