Ready! Set! Shoot up?
On May 24, the inaugural Enhanced Games will be held in Las Vegas. At the Olympic-esque event, which will feature track, swimming and weightlifting competitions, performance-enhancing drugs — steroids, peptides, regulators and stimulants — are both allowed and encouraged. They just have to be FDA-approved and monitored by a doctor.
“You can have a regulated approach,” Max Martin, CEO and co-founder of the Enhanced Games, told NYNext. “We’re taking what’s happening in the shadows anyways — unsupervised and unsafe — and putting it out in the open, putting the right clinical and medical regulatory framework around it.”
Martin claims they have internal data showing as many as half of all athletes admit to using banned substances, but only 1% get caught. And he contends Olympic drug testing is arbitrary to begin with.
In the early 2000s, “If you drank four cups of espresso before a race and got tested afterwards, you would’ve been considered to have doped,” he said.
By bringing fifty athletes (most of whom are enhanced) to Vegas and pitting them against one another, the founders hope to show the public that PEDs and steroids aren’t as evil as they’ve been made out to be.
“We want to be the showcase, to be a platform,” Martin said. “Breaking a world record is amazing but it’s very unrelatable … we want to show that, no matter how old you are, it can be very positive to use medical performance-enhancing drugs.”
Among those seeking to defy age is two-time world champion swimmer Megan Romano. At 35, she’s coming out of retirement to compete.
“With the help of enhancements, she is swimming quicker than she was even in her prime,” said Christian Angermayer, one of the Games’ co-founders and an investor alongside Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr.
Both Martin and Angermayer were on hand on May 8 when the Games’ parent company, simply known as Enhanced, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “ENHA.”
“In going public, we’re running towards transparency as much as we can,” Angermayer said. “With most sports organizations, you don’t know where the money [goes] … There’s billions secured in sponsorships, billions in media rights fees, and nothing finds its way down to the athletes.”
The Enhanced Games will pay a total of $25 million to its fifty athletes — $250,000 to the winner of each event, plus a square $1 million should anyone break the world-record in the 100-meter sprint or the 50-meter freestyle race.
On top of that, athletes on the in-house Enhanced Performance Team are receiving a six-figure monthly stipend.
Angermayer said he has world record-holders in his Instagram DMs reaching out to see if it’s too late for them to get involved.
“I have to check my requests so I don’t miss any gold medalists,” he quipped.
This story is part of NYNext, an indispensable insider insight into the innovations, moonshots and political chess moves that matter most to NYC’s power players (and those who aspire to be).
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