Enhanced Games

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Sunday night at Resorts World Las Vegas, a 32-year-old Greek swimmer named Kristian Gkolomeev swam one length of a freestyle pool in 20.81 seconds. He was wearing a polyurethane suit that has been banned in competitive swimming since 2010. He has never won an Olympic medal in four tries. He walked away with $1.25 million. The official non-enhanced record is 20.88 seconds.

You may have seen a clip of the swim or a headline. Almost no one has named the real story underneath it. With banned equipment allowed, a million dollars on the line per record, and a hand-picked roster of mostly-enhanced athletes, the Enhanced Games are the cleanest public experiment anyone has run on how much performance-enhancing drugs actually do for elite athletic performance. The result came back light.

The backstory

The Enhanced Games are an Olympics-style event with one notable difference: athletes are allowed to use performance-enhancing drugs. They were founded in 2023 by Aron D'Souza, an Australian lawyer best known for running Peter Thiel's lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker. Funding has come from Thiel himself, Christian Angermayer, Balaji Srinivasan, and 1789 Capital, the venture fund associated with Donald Trump Jr. The inaugural event was held on May 24, 2026 at Resorts World Las Vegas. About 50 athletes competed in swimming, track and field, weightlifting, and a strongman deadlift exhibition.

The organizers' public pitch is that anti-doping rules are dishonest, that athletes already use PEDs in numbers nobody acknowledges, and that a transparent, medically supervised alternative is more truthful and safer. The business model underneath that pitch is different. The parent company, the publicly traded Enhanced Group, sells testosterone, peptides, and longevity products direct to consumers.

Prize money was structured to chase records. Every event winner took home $250,000. Any athlete who beat a recognized world record received an additional $1 million bonus. The marketing materials promised a wave of records. The message was that once you remove the rules, the real ceiling of human performance becomes visible.

What happened Sunday night

Only a single record fell. Gkolomeev's 20.81 in the men's 50m freestyle was 0.07 seconds faster than the official world record of 20.88, set by Australian Cameron McEvoy last year. Gkolomeev was wearing a full-length polyurethane "super-suit," the kind of equipment World Aquatics banned in 2010 because it was distorting the sport. That was probably the high point of the night.

The rest of the program was weaker. Fred Kerley, who has run 9.76 in the men's 100m clean, won the Enhanced 100m in 9.97. That time would have placed him eighth in the Paris 2024 final. He has since stated he ran clean in Vegas to protect his Olympic eligibility, which makes the result slightly less damning to PEDs, but the marquee 100m of the Games was still a time that would not have made a podium at any major championship in 20 years.

Tristan Evelyn won the women's 100m in 11.25, a time that would have failed to make the heats at the 2025 World Championships. James Magnussen, the former world champion who was the first marquee athlete to publicly sign on and the loudest about being enhanced, finished last in the 100m freestyle final. Hafthor Bjornsson won the deadlift exhibition at 475kg. His own all-time deadlift world record is 501kg, set five years ago.

The organizers released their own usage data: 91% of competitors used testosterone, 79% used human growth hormone, and 29% used anabolic steroids.

Elite performance is a stack

PEDs work but they don’t do everything for you. They give an athlete more raw material to train on: more muscle, more red blood cell volume, more recovery bandwidth, more intensity in workouts.

Barry Bonds wasn't Bonds because of the cycle. The cycle let an already-historic hitter compound at the margin. Lance Armstrong didn't beat the peloton because of EPO. He beat a peloton that was also on EPO because his physiology and his preparation were better. The Enhanced Games is the closest thing the public will ever get to a clean measurement of how big that margin actually is. The number it returned looks small.

Where the read could be wrong

This isn't a clean indictment of PEDs. The athletes the Games could attract were mostly past peak. Gkolomeev never medaled in four Olympics. Magnussen retired from competitive swimming in 2019. Bjornsson is 36, 5 years past his record-setting prime. The Games could not get current world-record holders because they are still chasing Olympic medals, and they would face a lifetime ban following an Enhanced appearance. So the roster ceiling was already low, regardless of what was in their bloodstream.

Most Enhanced athletes were on a program for weeks or months, not the multi-year build that real chemistry-driven performance gains tend to require. The body needs time to convert pharmacological raw material into trained tissue, and there was not much time. Every athlete was peaking for a single weekend in May, rather than the multi-event championship cycle they had spent their careers learning to peak for.

Even granting all of this, the gap between what was promised and what was delivered is wide. Chemistry helped at the margin, the way chemistry always helps at the margin. It did not unlock a new category of performance.

Why you should care

The reason any of this is in a newsletter that mostly covers metabolic health is that the Enhanced Games are not just a sporting event. They are the marketing arm of a consumer enhancement business. The parent company sells testosterone, peptides, and longevity supplements direct to consumers, and is expanding into that market at the same time the FDA has loosened restrictions on testosterone prescribing and certain peptides. The bet is that the spectacle of athletes breaking records creates demand for the products that helped them do it.

The wellness peptide complex, the testosterone clinic boom, the off-label longevity stack, all of it rests on a quiet thesis that the right molecule, prescribed by the right telehealth doctor, unlocks a meaningfully different version of yourself. The Enhanced Games is the highest-stakes public test of that thesis anyone has ever run. The marketing arm shipped a product the marketing itself didn't support.

That doesn't mean TRT is useless or that any given peptide is a scam. The rest of the work is what it has always been. Training, genetics, time and recovery.

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