I am sitting in the sweltering Nevada heat watching a man struggle to lift a bar over his head. If the man manages to do it, he will win $250,000. <\/p>\n
The man is Boady Santavy \u2014 a two-time Olympic weight-lifting contestant from Canada \u2014\u00a0and he has muscles that look culled from the Marvel Cinematic Universe: massive, cartoonish arms that might as well belong to a superhero rather than a real human.<\/p>\n
Santavy is attempting to beat the world record for the men\u2019s snatch \u2014 a lift of 183 kilograms, or approximately 403 pounds. After a tortured few seconds, Santavy drops the bar \u2014 an official \u201cno lift\u201d \u2014 and, with a look of animated dismay on his face, hobbles away, visibly cursing.<\/p>\n
Santavy is one of a small horde of 42 athletic contestants \u2014 weight lifters, swimmers, and track runners \u2014 that have gathered in Las Vegas over Memorial Day weekend to compete in the Enhanced Games, a unique (and, by now, quite notorious) athletic competition in which almost all of the participating athletes are on performance enhancing drugs.<\/p>\n
Broadly derided by critics as the \u201csteroid Olympics,\u201d the games have taken the deeply unprecedented step of juicing many of their athletes<\/a> to the gills \u2014 anabolics, testosterone, peptides, human growth hormones, and more are all in circulation. All of that chemical enhancement has taken place under the watchful eye<\/a> of a team of medical professionals. Indeed, the competitors \u2014 a hodgepodge of athletes from different ages, skill levels, and backgrounds \u2014 spent 12 weeks in the United Arab Emirates<\/a> at an elite compound, where they trained for the weekend\u2019s event while working closely with doctors who tailored their \u201cprotocols\u201d \u2014 or drug cocktails \u2014 to their individual needs.<\/p>\n The athletes are also being paid \u201cappearance fees<\/a>\u201d just to participate in the contest and, like Santavy, any competitor who happens to break a world record or place first during their competitive feats will be gifted extra cash \u2014 up to $1 million in the case of the 100 meter sprint and 50 meter freestyle.<\/p>\n In other words: Enhanced has taken the rulebook for professional athletic competition and aggressively spiraled it out the window. <\/p>\n Why am I, a technology journalist, covering this event?<\/p>\n Odd as it might seem for a place associated with weak-limbed nerds, Silicon Valley is largely to blame for Enhanced. Indeed, the bizarre spectacle is the work of a former startup<\/a> that was founded by veterans of crypto, AI, and biotech firms, and that has been backed by the likes of mega-investor Peter Thiel and former Coinbase executive Balaji Srinivasan. The event is also at the forefront of a growing industry that Silicon Valley has embraced with open arms \u2014 that of human enhancement<\/a>, in which injectable drugs and ingestible supplements serve as a source of both physical empowerment and good business.<\/p>\n Traditional athletic health organizations, of course, hate it. The World Anti-Doping Agency \u2014 the regulatory body for the Olympics \u2014 has called<\/a> the Enhanced Games \u201cdangerous,\u201d and Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, describes it as a \u201cclown show<\/a> that puts profit over people.\u201d<\/p>\n Steroids have long been viewed warily<\/a> by the international health community, and even federally approved consumer drugs have stirred some concern among health professionals.<\/p>\n However, Enhanced\u2019s organizers argue that they are actually the good guys \u2014 that they are trying to fix a persistent bug in organized sports that has existed since forever. That bug is that a whole lot of athletes are already doping \u2014 they\u2019re just doing it secretly. The secrecy increases risk, as there may be limited medical oversight of how the athletes are using them. Conversely, in the Enhanced version of sport, athletes self-admittedly do the drugs under the careful supervision of a team of medical professionals.<\/p>\n If Enhanced were merely trying to improve sports safety, that would be one thing. But the truth is that it isn\u2019t just an athletic competition \u2014 it\u2019s also a business. The games are the work of Enhanced Group, Inc., a newly public company that enjoyed an IPO earlier this month<\/a> at a $1.2 billion valuation. Enhanced sells personalized health treatments<\/a>, including peptides, GLP-1s for weight loss, testosterone injections, and other physically \u201cenhancing\u201d drugs. The company also recently partnered<\/a> with an AI company, Rezolve Ai, to launch a digital telehealth platform.<\/p>\n Enhanced wants to take what it\u2019s done in Vegas and transform it into a global business: a distribution network for consumers looking to bulk up and make themselves more youthful. The drugs that Enhanced sells have been cleared by the FDA, but there is some concern that by normalizing steroid use, the company could have a trickle-down effect on the wider culture, leading some consumers (notably young ones) to seek less regulated, more dangerous compounds that could end up having disastrous results. This concern hangs over Enhanced\u2019s athletic competition, which has largely been read as a big advertisement for its own business \u2014 as well as the peptide industry itself. <\/p>\n I am one of some 200 journalists from around the world who touch down in Vegas two days prior to the games. Enhanced, which provides us with a dedicated workspace, regular meals, and press time with athletes and Enhanced executives, is exceedingly nice to us but one can\u2019t escape the nagging suspicion that it\u2019s because we are an integral part of their business plan. As the skeptical oglers of this Barnum & Bailey-esque curiosity, our job is to report back to the masses, who will then know of its existence. In other words, we are free marketing for Enhanced\u2019s business.<\/p>\n That business is part of an industry that is due for a gold-rush-like boom later this year, should a certain deregulatory deliverance occur. <\/p>\n In February, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on The Joe Rogan Experience and said he was a \u201cbig fan\u201d of peptides<\/a>. Kennedy (who, himself, can look enhanced<\/a> at times) also implied that he planned to encourage the FDA to make<\/a> some peptides more accessible to the public. Kennedy appears to have made good on that promise because, in July, the FDA will convene<\/a> a pharmaceutical advisory committee that considers whether restrictions on certain previously banned peptides will be loosened.<\/p>\n Since then, the peptide industry has stood at a bizarre crossroads, in which some startups are reportedly conjuring products based on chemicals that currently reside in a legal \u201cgray\u201d zone<\/a>, in the hopes of being first-to-market if and when the government eases up on them. Others are sticking to only FDA-approved products. A hot spot of this frenzy has been Silicon Valley<\/a>, where techies are both using and investing in peptides with mutually aggressive gusto. Companies like Superpower, an AI longevity startup that sells FDA-approved peptides, and Noho Labs<\/a>, a peptide startup backed by Elad Gil, have risen in prominence, while elite clubs like the AGI House have begun hosting peptide injecting \u201cparties\u201d<\/a> \u2014 as personal use among the valley\u2019s elite booms.<\/p>\n But peptides aren\u2019t just gaining steam in the Bay Area; they\u2019re also seeing a groundswell of use throughout the country, as fitness culture sees an aggressive upswing<\/a>. Recent reports<\/a> show that teens and twenty-somethings are turning to peptides to \u201clooksmax<\/a>\u201d \u2014 the trendy new term that denotes any extreme effort to beautify one\u2019s self \u2014 while the gym<\/a> is increasingly seen as one of the key hubs of cultural life for young people. This country-wide push for self-improvement has been fueled by a social media landscape that champions the superficial. The progenitor of \u201clooksmaxxing,\u201d the 20-year-old online influencer \u201cClavicular,\u201d has been a prominent, not to mention controversial<\/a>, figure in the popularization of peptides<\/a>. Yet he is only one in a sea of online voices, including podcasters like Joe Rogan<\/a> and Andrew Huberman<\/a>, who have recently promoted or platformed the topic.<\/p>\n Peptide producers \u2014 including the executives at Enhanced \u2014\u00a0have sworn that their primary concern is consumer \u201chealth.\u201d At the same time, they don\u2019t seem to mind admitting that they\u2019re also interested in money.<\/p>\n Maximilian Martin, the 29-year-old CEO and co-founder of Enhanced, is a calm defender of his company\u2019s unconventional practices. Martin, who previously founded a bitcoin mining company and is always impeccably dressed in a suit and has an affable salesman\u2019s smile, meets with journalists for a press conference on Saturday, where he answers questions with an even-keeled good nature, speaking soberly about how his company plans to monetize the creation of a new generation of chemically-altered mutants.<\/p>\n Appropriately, X-Men<\/em> comes up. <\/p>\n \u201cPeople have been using performance enhancements for a long time. If you look at, for example, Hollywood, and you look at Marvel superheroes, they\u2019re all enhanced,\u201d Martin offers. \u201cLike Hugh Jackman doesn\u2019t look like he looks at his age because he has such a clean diet and sleeps eight hours a night, right? So that market is already there. The peptide market in the U.S. today is already 85 million people. Most of that market is served by unsupervised, unregulated substances that people are taking. What we\u2019re doing is we\u2019re entering that market with a pathway for people to get to those benefits that they\u2019re looking for in a safe and medically supervised way.\u201d<\/p>\n Christian Angermayer, Enhanced\u2019s billionaire co-founder and executive chairman, is more succinct. \u201cI\u2019m a capitalist,\u201d he tells journalists bluntly. He doesn\u2019t see a disconnect between profits and health. \u201cThere is no reason why something that is good should not also be a business.\u201d<\/p>\n May 24th, the actual day of the games, is a sweltering blur of events \u2014 all of which take place inside a miraculous $50 million open-air stadium that has been constructed in a matter of weeks for the express purpose of hosting the games. The complex houses a track, swimming pools, and an expansive pavilion for the weightlifters. Surrounding risers are filled with an audience that cheers enthusiastically despite the hot sun.<\/p>\n Yet while the scene may superficially call to mind the Olympics, the vibe is much less a serious sporting event than it is an uncomfortable cocktail of America\u2019s Got Talent, WWE, and Gladiato<\/em>r. Beautiful influencers fill the stands in youthful, colorful herds, and\u00a0an announcer narrates the day\u2019s events with a sonorous boom that makes it feel vaguely like we\u2019re all sitting court side at WrestleMania. Later in the evening, The Killers \u2014 a staple of Vegas entertainment culture \u2014 will play a brief concert to close out the games. <\/p>\n The athletes, meanwhile, stalk the grounds like mythical titans, their bulking, unreal muscles glistening in the sunlight. <\/p>\n Martin is seen throughout the day, walking to and fro in his impeccable suit. This suit becomes progressively more wet throughout the evening, as he keeps rushing down to the pool to hug the swimmers who win their races. Angermayer glides about the event with a breezy energy, a tranquil smile affixed to his face. He drops by the press tent briefly to glad-hand.<\/p>\n Other staples of the tech industry \u2014 like Bryan Johnson, the mega-wealthy biohacker who plans to live forever \u2014 are also involved. Despite no known professional athletic achievements, Johnson spends the night commentating on the spectacle<\/a> in a Charles-Barkley-esque, retired athlete kind of way. Later he and his girlfriend (whose vagina Johnson regularly tweets about<\/a>) are seen walking past the media tent; Johnson is dressed in a bizarre outfit<\/a> that makes him look a little bit like the Sleepytime Bear<\/a> from Celestial Seasonings.<\/p>\n The actual competitions are thrilling enough \u2014 and, in general, there seem to be a couple categories of athletes that have come to compete. <\/p>\n There are people like James Magnussen, a retired swimmer from Australia who has won Olympic medals in the past and sees the games as an opportunity to get back in on the action. Magnussen, an image of whose massive body<\/a> spread virally throughout the web earlier this year, has spoken supportively of the peptide industry, and once said<\/a> that the combination of peptides and testosterone made him feel like he was \u201c18 again.\u201d He will fail to break any records, however, and places last in two races<\/a>. <\/p>\n Then there are people like Hafthor \u201cThor\u201d Bjornsson \u2014 a massive Nordic body builder and competitive weight-lifter who has self-admittedly done a lot of steroids in the past<\/a> and sees this competition as an opportunity to do them under closer, safer supervision.<\/p>\n Bjornsson is recognizable to many because he starred in Game of Thrones<\/em> as Ser Gregor Clegane, the brutal knight who does the dirty work of the Lannister family and whose go-to fight move is to crush his opponents\u2019 skulls with his bare hands. (On press day, a female journalist asks Bjornsson if he will crush her skull, and he politely obliges with a pantomimed head combustion.) During the games, Bjornsson thrillingly attempts a world record deadlift of 1,135.4 pounds<\/a>, but ultimately fails to muster the strength.<\/p>\n Finally, there are a few competitors like American swimmer Hunter Armstrong, who are abstaining from any supplemental intake altogether. Why is Armstrong even competing? It\u2019s pretty simple: the money, Armstrong tells journalists. That\u2019s the answer that a lot of athletes have given for their participation, in fact. Armstrong has Olympic ambitions and wants to keep himself in the running by not tainting his record. He also has a personal aversion to doping.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Olympic movement is something that is very important to me,\u201d Armstrong tells the journalists. \u201cOutside of personal reasons, if I were to go into some kind of protocol I would lose that opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n Armstrong is one of several competitors who will win their races (in the swimmer\u2019s case, the 50-meter backstroke) despite not being \u201cenhanced.\u201d <\/p>\n The day\u2019s events unfold at a steady pace and, despite organizers\u2019 promise of a titanic extravaganza of unlocked human potential, the event, while entertaining, largely pales in comparison to the Olympics or even, say, a really thrilling football game. The whole thing ends on a weirdly convenient high-point: the competition\u2019s last race of the night \u2014 the men\u2019s 50-meter swimming freestyle \u2014\u00a0culminates with Enhanced\u2019s first and only world-record. Kristian Gkolomeev, a hulking colossus from Greece (he is six feet, eight inches tall), cuts across the pool at a breakneck 20.81 seconds, besting the previous record by 0.07 seconds. The entire crowd erupts in cheers and the venue\u2019s lights blare red in a gameshow-style spasm of celebration. The other swimmers pump their fists in the air victoriously, and Martin again rushes the field in his suit, intent on hugging the dripping Gkolomeev. <\/p>\n The critics of the Enhanced Games say it isn\u2019t really about health, it\u2019s about money. Yet it\u2019s difficult to escape the sense that the games are also about something else, which is vanity \u2014 both that of America and the event\u2019s organizers. America has always been the country where fitness culture<\/a> extends beyond health into the realm of self-aggrandizement, and the Enhanced Games \u2014\u00a0a showy pageant embodying that principle \u2014 fits right in with the next big era of American self-regard. After all, the location of the event \u2014 the nation\u2019s hedonism-fueled \u201cSin City\u201d \u2014 hardly screams \u201chealth.\u201d Las Vegas is the locale of spectacle and consumption \u2014 of barely-remembered nights in which revelers live for the moment, not the long-term. The organizers could have set the games in the symbolically purifying environs of the Swiss countryside or Joshua Tree, but instead they chose to set it in a place where people commonly risk their futures over a game of cards for a fleeting chance at glory.<\/p>\n Similarly, injecting yourself with drugs to make your muscles big doesn\u2019t necessarily seem to be about long-term wellness as much as it\u2019s about looking good in the moment \u2014 tomorrow\u2019s potential health consequences be damned.<\/p>\n The glory for the event\u2019s organizers, meanwhile, resides in their ability to usher in a new industry, commemorating it \u2014 as they have \u2014 with an extravagant ritual that, in their own words<\/a>, heralds future \u201cscientific breakthroughs\u201d and \u201chuman advancement\u201d (not to mention revenue). The gamble for them is on whether this industry does or does not blossom in the coming months, but like the consumers of their supplements, they appear to be living in the moment. <\/p>\n One place where limited glory is felt is the press corps towards the end of Enhanced\u2019s three-day extravaganza. Around midnight, when the games are finally over and the crowd is dispersing, our hot and tired cohort retreats blearily to the media center \u2014 a florescent-lit workroom in the nearby Resorts World hotel. As I\u2019m readying to leave, I make a pitstop to the bathroom and, after some necessary relief, turn a corner and run smack into Martin. He appears to be in a brand new suit (or perhaps the one he\u2019s been wearing has simply dried), and he is admiring it in the bathroom mirror. He is undoubtedly preparing for the late-night press conference that\u2019s scheduled to occur soon.<\/p>\n Having not actually spoken to him yet, I am at a bit of a conversational loss. What sort of patter can two men who are essentially strangers offer one another in a public bathroom late at night? How can I sum up the last 72 hours? \u201cCongratulations,\u201d my tired brain lands on, as I head for the door.<\/p>\n \u201cThank you,\u201d he says, nodding briefly, then turns back to the mirror.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/GettyImages-2278055144.jpg?w=680\")
One nation, under peptides <\/h2>\n
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This is all about \u201chealth,\u201d right? <\/h2>\n
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Let the games begin <\/h2>\n
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The future is enhanced? <\/h2>\n