Photographs by Maggie ShannonIn person, they did not seem quite real. Gathered on a blue carpet under bright lights, inside a $50 million Las Vegas venue that had been built just for them, the athletes of the Enhanced Games—colloquially known as the “doping Olympics”—looked like action figures. When they stood next to other people, the effect was different but no less uncanny; it was as if they’d been Photoshopped, blown up 25 percent compared with the rest of their species.They were here competing in three sports—running, weightlifting, and swimming—under the banner of Enhanced, a sporting event and supplement company that has, over the past few years, raised more than $300 million in venture capital, including from Peter Thiel and 1789 Capital, which aims to fund “the next chapter of American exceptionalism” and counts Donald Trump Jr. as a partner. The games, once announced, quickly became one of the most controversial sporting events in recent history. The premise was that anyone could take any FDA-approved substance; whoever broke a world record would win up to $1 million. (Non-doping athletes were welcome to compete for the same prize pool, if they could handle the odds.) The event would be broadcast live on YouTube and Roku, but really, it was designed to be clipped into vertical video—“built for social media, not for television,” Enhanced’s CEO, Max Martin, told reporters proudly during a press conference on Saturday. Every competition would be less than a minute.The athletes were doping under the close supervision of a team of doctors, as part of a clinical trial conducted this past spring in Abu Dhabi. Each athlete’s regimen—Enhanced prefers the more science-y term protocol—is kept confidential as a matter of safety and trade-secret protection: no copycats. But collectively, the competitors were on some combination of 37 substances, including Adderall, beta-blockers, human growth hormone, and five forms of testosterone.They have reported various effects: mood swings, increased power, faster recovery times, new facial hair. Padding around the pool, the Australian swimmer James Magnussen, age 35 and a holder of three Olympic medals, was impossible to look away from, his head balanced atop a bulging neck, traps spilling out like over-risen sourdough from his bronze swimsuit, a state-of-the-art, super-buoyant model that is banned from mainstream competition. (As big as he was, Magnussen had actually been forced to dial back his enhancement protocols after encountering some practical issues: He had put on so much muscle that he was sinking in the pool, and he couldn’t find a swimsuit big enough to fit him.)Among the other athletes was the 32-year-old Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, who broke the world record in the 50-meter freestyle at a previous Enhanced event, earning the organization’s first million-dollar check. Megan Romano, a 35-year-old former world-champion backstroker, had been retired for almost a decade when she became the first woman and first American to sign up for the games; she said she did so to “see what’s humanly possible.” Hafþór Björnsson, a 37-year-old Icelandic weightlifter, wanted to break the world record for deadlift: 1,135 pounds, which is heavier than a yearling Angus steer, several refrigerators, or most grand pianos. Andrii Govorov, 34, a Ukrainian who holds the world record in the 50-meter butterfly (swum clean), is doing it for the paycheck, he has told reporters: High-end training costs at least five figures a month, and after Russia invaded his country, he needed a more stable way to support himself and his family.Boady Santavy, weightlifter (Maggie Shannon for The Atlantic)Each of these athletes had signed on to enhancement at least in part as a reaction to the cruelties of their chosen profession: the criminally low wages, the limitations of the human body, the math that makes a 35-year-old in elite condition basically a senior citizen, the fact that no matter how much any governing agency polices performance-enhancing drugs, some people will always find new ways to use them undetected, edging out athletes who have not taken the advantage. And they each did so knowing that they have made a choice from which there is essentially no going back.Because doping is prohibited and understudied, we do not have a clear understanding of what it does to the body, long term, although evidence suggests that it can be associated with mood disorders, high blood pressure, infertility, and organ damage. Perhaps of more immediate concern for athletes who’ve dedicated their life to a sport and its community is the reputational risk. The idea that doping is cheating and cheating is wrong is sports’ ground truth; until Enhanced, every professional sports league on Earth (and many amateur ones) had banned it.The mainstream sports establishment denounced the Enhanced Games, in many cases permanently barring from future competition anyone who admits to juicing—“excommunicated” them, as the two-time Olympic gold medalist Cody Miller, one of the stars of the games, put it. “There’s obviously a legacy impact for every athlete that joins,” Rick Adams, who spent 14 years working for the United States Olympic Committee before starting as Enhanced’s chief sporting officer, told me. The ones who decided to participate, he said, did so after careful consideration. They are doing it for glory, or for fun, or to make $1 million in 30 seconds, or to remember what it feels like to be the best in the world, even if that best comes with an asterisk.In the lead-up to the weekend, the event’s organizers—their ambitions high, their stadium expensive, the Killers scheduled to play after the events—had invoked the Super Bowl as their template. But at a press conference the day before, they downgraded it to Wrestlemania. The comparison seemed an apt one to me. Both are interested, in different ways, in notions of artifice and authenticity. Both are stunts as much as sporting events. Both are fun to watch at least in part because they carry with them the distinct possibility that someone could get hurt.You can guess what kind of person goes to an event like this. Start-up guys. Longevity guys. Bodybuilder guys. Diplo.But mostly, it seemed, the kind of person who goes to an event like this was the kind of person who Enhanced thought could help it go viral. Some attendees had paid for their own travel to Vegas, but everyone had a free ticket and had been hand-picked to be there. “I do social media,” a 21-year-old named Wyatt Aube told me, “like, I guess, a lot of people here.”Aube doesn’t care much about sports or biohacking, but he has 162,000 followers on Instagram. His manager had a bunch of tickets and offered to fly him out from Los Angeles in a private jet. He was enjoying the spectacle. “It’s fun, it’s cool,” he said. “It’s kind of like a circus for athletes. They’re, well—not freaks but—” he paused. “Out of the ordinary.”Max Martin, CEO of Enhanced, third from left (Maggie Shannon for The Atlantic)A fitness influencer with very white teeth gamely said hi to a stranger’s friend on FaceTime—the friend, it turned out, was a fan; the influencer, it turned out, was very famous. Scrums of boys—YouTubers, if I had to guess—roved the grounds, taking video mostly of one another. The food and drink were lavish, free, and evidently appealing: Though organizers had promised 2,500 spectators—fewer than attend your average minor-league baseball game—the stands had big empty patches all night, even as the areas behind them were clotted with people in fascinating, impractical outfits, taking selfies and eating sun-warmed shrimp cocktail. The vibe was neither Super Bowl nor Wrestlemania—it was a brand activation. Back in the arena, the announcer begged us to “make some noise” so many times, I started to feel bad for him.If the sports themselves felt like a bit of a sideshow, it’s possible that this was by design, that the games were mostly a vessel (or a Trojan horse) for Enhanced’s broader business—the one that went public via a SPAC earlier this month, and the one that, theoretically, will have Enhanced taking the checks instead of writing them. The first thing you see when you go to Enhanced’s website is not information about the games; it’s a link to the company’s online store, where you can get all manner of peptides, supplements, and prescription medications. Many of the product names are recognizable from the clinical trial of the athletes, and many are sold by other companies, with direct-to-consumer storefronts all over the internet.But while those other companies need to pay for advertising against major sporting events in order to reach their would-be consumers where they are, for Enhanced, the sporting event is the advertisement. “At the first Enhanced Games, athletes will break world records,” Aron D’Souza, an Enhanced co-founder, told Joe Rogan about two years ago. “When that happens, everyone’s going to say, What is he on? And how do I get it?” It is a holistically integrated cultural-commercial enterprise, and the product it is selling is the supposed future of the human body.In this, the games were remarkably well timed. In the years since Enhanced announced its existence, humanity has entered a new era of body modification and augmentation. Cosmetic surgery has gone from something to keep secret to something to post about on Instagram. One in eight Americans is, reportedly, on a GLP-1. Gray-market peptides are a massive business. Dentists are taking testosterone, and 20-somethings are getting Botox, and in the future, no one will be bald. “People are going to be hotter, smarter, younger,” a spectator, Lisa Gonzalez-Turner, told me. “That’s just the reality.” (Naturally, she runs a supplements company.)Kyle Kirvay is a New Jersey cop turned bodybuilding influencer; his biceps were the size of small watermelons and he wore a black tank top with the word ANIMAL printed on it in yellow (the name of a supplement company he works with). He was there watching because he hopes to compete in next year’s Enhanced Games. He told me something similar: “The way we’re going, and the way the new generation is, it’s like, who cares?”Kyle Kirvay, bodybuilding influencer (Maggie Shannon for The Atlantic)This culture shift is what makes the games possible as an event and as a business, as an entertainment product and a product product. Often, in the arena, those things were the same. On the giant screens suspended over the stadium, guests could scan a QR code, which would lead to a website that would transform the subject of a selfie, using AI, into an Enhanced athlete, as yoked-out as the ones in front of them. In the broadcast booth, the entrepreneur and influencer Bryan Johnson—who is most famous for his intensive, multimillion-dollar effort at lifespan extension—served as a commentator. (He sat under an umbrella, presumably to avoid all the UV radiation.) Good get: His presence reminded viewers that you don’t need to be an elite athlete to be optimizing. You just need to have some money to burn.All sporting events are, fundamentally, freak shows. They are about watching superhuman bodies doing superhuman things, genetic marvels being pushed in unnatural and dangerous ways for strangers’ enjoyment.The Enhanced Games are the Super Bowl, and Wrestlemania, but Martin, the CEO, is fond of name-checking a different sporting event, too—another that achieved startling cultural force very quickly: Formula 1. In Enhanced’s schema, the scientists are the engineers, and the athletes are both the driver and the car—the professional custodians of expensive, beautiful, fastidiously maintained, performance-optimized vehicles, purpose-built by experts to defy the laws of science.It’s an interesting way to talk about sports, and maybe a more honest one. Although the establishment loves to talk about determination and force of will—what the World Anti-Doping Agency calls “the spirit of sport,” what every Olympics ad weaponizes to make you cry—the obvious fact is that every elite athlete is already enhanced in some way. The Patriots offensive tackle Morgan Moses slept in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber when he was recovering from a knee injury two seasons ago. The Olympic rower Liam Corrigan shared last year that his supplement stack included 11 different vitamins, minerals, medications, and corticosteroids. Shohei Ohtani is the most naturally gifted baseball player in a generation, but he has also had his elbow rebuilt and reinforced by some of the best doctors in the world, using state-of-the-art industrial materials—twice.Some years ago, a team of Swedish scientists, using sophisticated methods, developed a system for increasing glucose-molecule storage in marathoners’ bodies. That was in the 1960s; they called it carbo-loading, and it is now so commonplace that people you know do it before a fun run. “To explore and then exploit the benefits afforded by new knowledge and new technologies,” the UC Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë has written, is not only natural, it’s in the true spirit of sports.Maybe even more natural than regulation. Deep into the 20th century, “there was simply no concept of doping, let alone the opinion that it constituted cheating,” April Henning and Paul Dimeo write in Doping: A Sporting History. But in 1967, the IOC first started banning certain substances, and since then the rules have been draconian, even as they have been ever-shifting. (I am writing this article, and you may be reading it, with the help of caffeine, which was banned by WADA for two decades.) The act of administering sports competition involves enforcing a collection of arbitrary lines; the act of watching sports involves seeing what athletes can do within those lines. Enhanced is attempting to obliterate both of those constructs at once. When I asked Johnson what he was hoping to see at the games, he told me he was looking forward to nothing less than “the piercing of the taboo that there’s a right and wrong. That there’s some authority in the world that says this is allowed and that is not allowed.”(Maggie Shannon for The Atlantic)In the end, only Gkolomeev broke a world record, by seven-hundredths of a second, in the final event of the night, the 50-meter freestyle. When the time was confirmed, the big screens flashed WORLD RECORD, and the stadium lights went blood-red. The mood was electric, in the way a mood can be anything when big, expensive screens are lit up. Martin, watching from the sidelines, jumped so high in the air, I thought he might fall in the pool.But if the goal was to unambiguously locate the future of human performance, that was more elusive. This was not exactly the “multiple” broken records that Martin had spent the weekend promising. In several cases, non-enhanced athletes handily won their events, complicating the sales pitch. Björnsson dropped the barbell. Magnussen, whose giant neck had been appearing all over Enhanced’s ads, finished dead last in both of his races. The event peaked at 250,000 concurrent YouTube viewers, per Enhanced; the last Super Bowl, by contrast, had about 125 million viewers across platforms.When Gkolomeev emerged from the pool, he gazed out upon people who did not entirely seem to know why they were there. He was rich—much richer than he had been that morning, having earned more in a single day than any other swimmer in the history of the sport. He picked up his young son, kissed his wife. The Sphere glowed yellow behind the stands. And the crowd—such as it was—cheered for a record that will, rightly or wrongly, be questioned and caveated as long as it exists.When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.