Today, Explained - The steroid olympics

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

The Enhanced Games are kind of like the Olympics except everyone is on performance enhancing drugs. The organizers want to push back on the shame of doping. But they're also trying to sell you something. This episode was produced by Ariana Aspuru, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King. Deadlifter Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson competes in the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas. Photo by Greg Doherty/Getty Images for Enhanced. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last weekend's enhanced games in Las Vegas, think the Olympics on drugs, organized by a company that sells performance enhancers used by the athletes who were, in fact, real athletes. Most of them had the bad luck of turning 30, but, you know, they still feel like they have a little bit more in the tank. It was a mess. It was the coochiest thing I've ever been to in person. They built this large outdoor stadium in Resorts World, which is this collection of casinos over there. But they neglected to put a roof over it.

It was over 90 degrees. The sprinters were just like asked to race on this like a hot track that I don't think you can like put human skin onto. And then the swimmers did fine. You know, you're in the pool. And like the atmosphere was less the Olympic Games and more like a Tao pool party, I think. On Today explained the organizers of the enhanced games

want to enhance you. This is Today Explained. Chris Gaiomali, a journalist who covers health, wellness, and human augmentation, says athletes at the games took performance enhancing drugs or PEDs provided by a company called Enhanced. They actually, like, came out of the gate a couple years ago really hot. They were like, we're going to dope up all these people and let them take whatever they want, and it's going to be this free-for-all.

We're building the modern version of the Olympic Games that, importantly, pays all athletes and does not have chart testing. But over the course of the next couple of years, they realized that was actually not a very business savvy move. So they moderated their messaging quite severely. The enhanced games will in fact be a safer sporting event because we're taking something that's done in the shadows in the darkness and shining light upon it so that it can be done safely under clinical supervision. and scientific guidance. They had very rigorous health checkups. They met with doctors who were supplying them with this menu of options that they would be able to take.

And it was all tailored to sort of their own unique biology. Like if you had something that would make you susceptible to heart problems or something, maybe some of the drugs were precluded from your regimen. And so it was uniquely tailored to like each of the athletes specifically. And it kind of like fell into a couple of baseline categories. The big one was anabolic steroids, which is kind of the big bread and butter and the one that you've probably heard of before. Stimulants like Adderall, basically day of to help you perform and focus. Human growth hormone was another big one.

Metabolic modulators, which sort of helped with energy and recovery. And the women were able to take some jugs that helped with hormone therapy. So I thought that was really interesting. Was there anything that was off limits? You're not allowed to take this? Yeah, so this guy named Gido Pellis, he's a cardiologist and a professor at the University College London. He was the one who heads up the sort of, I'm using air quotes here, independent medical commission, figuring out what the athletes are going to be offered.

And what I found fascinating, what he said, peptides, which are sort of everywhere right now, were off the table. Enhanced and we as scientific and medical commissions draw the line. We will not use them because not enough data has been put out there to say that they're really safe. And so I thought it was interesting that that's where they decided to draw the line because to my mind, peptides are the thing that everyone wants to buy right now and that they weren't capitalizing on that was really interesting to me. If I were a professional athlete, I hear you when you say they had the misfortune of turning 30, but believing like I got one more rodeo in me. But I don't know, even if I were 30, an ancient 30, I'd still be skeptical.

So when you talk to the athletes, what did you hear about why they did this? Yeah, you know, there were all sorts of personal reasons. But the big one was that enhanced treats this like sort of like a normal job for them. Like they receive a monthly paycheck. I was able to fly out to Abu Dhabi and stay at the luxury hotel where a bunch of them were training. And they basically were able to wake up, train hard, eat like amazing, healthy gourmet food, have all, like, the recovery treatments that they wanted and basically not worry about anything else in life. The Enhanced truly sort of saved me here because I have so much more to give to this sport.

And Enhanced was able to put me in a position where I can still compete. Enhanced is offering athletes, money to be professional. professional athletes that has never been on the table before. They're, I'm just going to say it, they're paying me a lot of money. I have no shame in saying that. And so in some ways, it's just like the appeal was they got a job, they had health care, both of like the futuristic and like the pedestrian. Like everyone deserves to like have health care variety.

And, you know, they were just able to not worry about housing or any of the other like inconveniences that like plague being a regular person. And so I kind of see the appeal of that. Yeah, you know, you've convinced me. I would. And also, like, for a couple of the events, if they broke the world record, they were dangling a million dollars in front of them. So, you know, that's nothing to sneeze at. Did any of them break any world records?

You know, what was really funny? The whole night, we were just watching all these events, weightlifters in the hot sun. It looks a little bit slow as all. Not coming close to the world record. Sprinters, misfiring, not going. coming close. I'll start. And then the very last event, which was the men's 50 meter freestyle,

like that very last race, that last thing in the night. They broke the world record. And you could see the sigh of relief, like overcome all the executives who were invested in this thing. There was like, yes, we got one world record out of this thing. Yeah, it was kind of hotly contested online whether the record mattered or not. But I think they were just like, decided that someone broke it.

In the final events, we have our first world record. We have an idea that performance-enhancing drugs are cheating, and therefore it has always been against the rules to use performance-enhancing drugs. And yet, I realize, as I say this, I have no idea if that's true. Has that always been the case? It's actually a pretty recent invention that performance-enhancing drugs are seen as cheating. There's kind of this line that I was interested in investigating between what is an enhancement and what isn't. And in my research, I learned that the World Anti-Doping Agency, which is WADA, they actually came to fruition after this debacle at the 1998 Tour de France.

Basically, what happened is French officials found a car full of PEDs from someone associated with the French racing team. And in doing so, the cops were in this weird position. It was like, do we enforce this? Do we not? And so the IOC, which is the International Olympic Committee, they were like, all the countries were like, we don't want this to happen to us in the future. Doping was kind of like an open secret at this point. Everyone was like, everyone does it. But we don't want to be in a position where, you know, the rules and regulations are very unclear to us and what we can and what can have.

And so a bunch of these international organizations and countries sort of pressured the IOC into creating the world anti-doping agency, which is the governing body that develops regulations for what doping is and isn't. Okay, seems fair that there's one arbiter of what's right and what's wrong. But you could make the argument, and I'm sure people have, that like somebody who's born in a wealthy area has. you know, has access to like tennis courts or a pool, something that you're not going to find in a poor area. Like that is a performance enhancer and therefore that young person is always going to have an edge over some young person who doesn't have that advantage. Do you think that the organizers of these games, were they trying to nod to that at all? Like every person, maybe it's like Michael Phelps with his hollow bones and his 60 foot wingspan. Like everybody has some form of advantage.

So we're just going to like put it all out on the table and be like, go for it, guys. Yeah, that was actually like one of the big ideas underpinning this thing. Like you could take all the enhancements in the world, but you probably wouldn't score a point in a game of one-on-one basketball with like Victor Webbenyama or something like that. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, but Wada is like a Wada is very interesting because their definition of what is and what is an enhancement is actually really, really confusing. And also very invasive and punitive. Like they can basically jump out from behind a bush. and ask an athlete for a urine test and like a blood test, like, whenever they want.

And one of the athletes who actually competed at the games this week, his name was Hunter Armstrong, and he's a men's backstroke swimmer. He made the decision to compete without enhancing at all because he wanted to keep his Olympic dreams alive and still be able to compete in, like, sanctioned sporting events. What would the USA rather? Would they rather him not race here? And then he ends up retiring from the sport, becomes a teacher and gets on with his life? Did he race here? Maybe break a world record, get half a million dollars, funds him to go to L.A., and he's winning gold. So, doping officials were following Hunter Armstrong around all week before the games to solicit random drug and urine test from him.

He's been drug tested three times here in Vegas already. So they're on him, and he wants a piece of it. He's fine with that. It's interesting that, you know, these athletes don't have a very high view of water, but they've been like, they've had like the fear. of doping instilled in them very early on. Like a lot of them have spent their whole careers like not even taking aspirin or something like, or something like creatine because they've been scared of it infecting their blood test

and violating their ability to compete. So was the point of the enhanced games to actually force us to confront some of these big philosophical questions around what is fairness, what is enhancement, or was this actually as dumb as it kind of seen? You know, they would love it to be this big philosophical argument, but really it's just an effort to sort of normalize their use

even a little bit in the eyes of consumers and be able to like sell drugs that are widely available on their website that you can try. Journalist Chris Gaiomali, when we return, the company that brought us the enhanced games wants to make money off of you. How they plan to do that is coming up next. Support for J-Explain comes from ShipStation. When your company is growing fast, order fulfillment can make or break your success.

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Today, Explained. To the finish line. Today, explain. We're back with Chris Gaiomali. Chris, in the first half of the show, you told us that the enhanced games were much about making money for companies that sell performance enhancements. Fair enough, it was capitalism all along, as they say. Where did this all start? Who's behind the enhanced games? Okay, so the guy who came up with the idea for the enhanced games, his name is Aaron D'Souza. He's this Australian who's good friends with Peter Thiel.

He came up with it a couple of years ago. In the 21st century, the Olympics are going to be the natural sports competition where we're going to see what the best of a human 1.0 can do. And at the Enhanced Games, there will be what can the best unleashed human, superhuman can do. He had recently come out from his last big project, which was he was the litigator that helped Teal take down the gossip website Gawker. So DeSouza is kind of a scary dude if you're a journalist. I reached out to them a little over two years ago,

or maybe two years ago at this point. And then in February 2025, I got like this mysterious invite to come to this apartment on the east side of Manhattan on Valentine's Day, freezing morning. And it was like, do you want to meet with Aaron? And I was like, this sounds interesting, so let's go. He talks in these long, florid, perfectly composed paragraphs.

I'm a philosopher by training. And my job is to imagine how the world should be. I think the term I use in the GQ piece is his skin is so immaculess that he looks baddy-filtered. But truth be told, as a journalist, I was so scared that, like, I don't know, like a trap door was going to open under me at some point. And my goal that day was to basically sell him on being the guy to write a big magazine piece on the enhanced games. And here's my bona fides. And, you know, he liked me enough that they opened the door and let me into their word for a little bit.

What does he want this business to be? Does he want it to be like Amazon but for stuff that seems only adjacent to legal? And I'm going to ask who is this legal? Yeah. So I think they, like, thrive off playing in this gray area of what isn't and what isn't, like, technically legal. No apologies, no permission, no going back. The future of human performance has arrived. So the guys behind Enhanced are basically building this, like, telehealth business, which isn't so different from, like, hymns or ageless.

S-R-X. The games themselves are sort of this huge marketing spectacle that funnel you back to their site. And if you go on the site now, like, you know, they have peptides like Cermerellin, N-A-D-plus, which is like this co-enzyme that helps with cellular energy, tersepetide, which is a GLP1, and a ton of supplements that are, quite frankly, a little overpriced, but come in, like, really beautiful, like, techno-utopian packaging. And so their goal is that this sort of bolsters their business and they're able to scale this to a point where they are the company that everyone buys their peptides from at some point. The athletes who are taking this stuff, they're going to be monitored. You said they actually have really good medical care.

Were I to go on the website and start throwing testosterone into my cart, I would not get the same kind of medical care. So this strikes me as potentially a little bit dangerous. Do they nod to that at all? Do they acknowledge that at all? You know, for Normies and myself, I'm very Normie. I went on their website last night to try out one of their products. And I ended up ordering a Cimarrelin, which is this peptide that supports sleep and recovery. A lot of people talk about it, a lot of people try it.

And I was a little curious to see what their sort of telehealth funnel looked like. Basically, you just fill out a survey, you're like, I have anxiety. And you click a few things, you're like, I'm allergic to this, I'm allergic to that. You input your credit card or use Apple Play or whatever, and you get a brief window where they're like, consulting with our doctors to see if you qualify. And within like, you know, 20 seconds, they're like, you qualify, we're going to ship this out soon. I could use better sleep and some muscles, so.

I wish you luck. I wish you all the luck in the world. Thank you so much. Is this a growing market? Like, are there other companies trying to get in on this? Yeah, it's a huge market. You know, if you just like Google like, you know, NAD Plus, for example, and then at the top of your search bar, there'll be like any number of companies that are trying to sell you stuff. Let's see. Right now, there's like ageless RX, ready RX, a company called Fridays I've never heard of. Well, well, good life meds. You know, it's like there's all these companies that serve tiny injectables and glass bottles. And it feels like it's kind of a new normal in some ways.

All right. This all smacks of one Peter Thiel, who you said is in fact involved in this. Who else? Where's the rest of the startup money coming from? So Peter Thiel is one of the first investors in this. But one of the other notable ones is Donald. Trump Jr.'s 1789 capital. They kind of flouted him as like one of the big investors in the enhanced games.

It's actually like a publicly traded company now. So they have a lot of shareholders, I'm told. Christian Engermeyer, that a German billionaire is one of the big investors in it. It's like all these billionaires who have a much different relationship to money than you or I probably have. So, you know, they're very concerned with longevity and extending their prime years for for much longer than the ordinary person, which is something that I confronted them about a couple times.

And if they were worried at all about creating sort of this, you know, caste system where some people would have enhancements and some were not. And Aaron actually brought up this metaphor that I found quite confusing where he said, you know, I think of the enhancements as like organic vegetables. And I was like, oh, say more about that. And he was like, you know, it's a status symbol to buy organic produce. And I was like, okay, I get it, Arrow 1 and all of that. That's cool.

But then he was also like, and there could very much be a world where maybe the elite status symbol is I am not enhanced. And I don't like touch any of this stuff. And I was like, isn't that counterintuitive to the business you're trying to build? But, you know, he wouldn't expand on that one. This is very much like the Silicon Valley mindset, right? Right. Some people are going to get wildly rich selling a thing, creating a thing. The rest of us will use the thing but will not ever be trillionaires. And that just is the way of the world right now. Am I misreading who these guys are, who they belong to? No, no. That's exactly it. And you have to imagine that, you know, the enhanced target audience, right, is a guy who goes on YouTube. Maybe he's in his late 30s, feeling. some knee pain and he's Googling around for like ways to feel younger and get served an ad

then goes down a rabbit hole and it's like, huh, I would very much like to try this thing out and like order something like I did in the middle of the night just to see if it works. And what was interesting about it is at the games themselves, like they, it was invite only. You couldn't secure a ticket even if you wanted to attend this thing. And half the people that enhanced invited, I kid you not, were like Gen Z content creators who looked very much to be teenagers in some ways. Guys, I'm getting ready. We're going to the intense game.

So, so excited. I'm here in Vegas. I'm excited to show you guys every step of the process. Here's the arena. It was so cool. Don't be fooled, though. It was like 90 degrees, I think, so I was melting. And I was like, if you're marketing this thing to like watch millennials who have, who can't

sleep at night. Why are you inviting the kid who's doing a fortnight dance, like, on the, right outside the pool and, like, getting filmed by all his buddies. Like, that's just an affront to being a wash dad. You know what I mean? So. Yeah. But it makes you wonder, yes, this is a very good observation on your part. It makes you wonder whether they know who their customer is and whether they will, in fact, succeed. Because all of the beauty and the maxing and the mugging, people are very, very into it right now, especially young people. Washed millennials are just trying to get out of bed in the morning. That's where I'm at. Same. Same. My God. And so do these guys know who their target audience is? One, and two, do you think this succeeds? Do you think this business, this type of

business becomes the next big thing? When I've posed this question to them several times over the last year, you know, the goalpost was always moving. The short answer is like, it's, it's for everyone, you know, and to my mind, it's like, your healthiest market is probably, you know, the wash millennials, the people who are starting to run marathons in their 50s, like that sort of thing. But maybe there is a market for like some 18-year-old law soul who, you know, watches clavicular Twitch streams or whatever and is peptide curious himself. Like, maybe that is, maybe that is something that has some money attached to it. I don't know why you wouldn't just go on Reddit

in order to cheap from China if you're like a broke teenager, but who am I to say? Who are any of us? Chris, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. Cool. No, thank you so much for having me. This was so fun.

Chris Guyomali is a journalist. Ariana Espudu produced today's show and Jolie Myers edited. Gabriel Dunatub check the facts and David Tattashore is our engineer. The rest of the team Hattie Mawagi, Danielle Hewitt, Bridger Dunigan, Kelly Wessinger, Miles, Brian, Peter Ballin, Dustin, Dustin, DeSoto, Avishai Artsy, Miranda Kennedy, Sean Ramos

from Brickmaster's Cylinder, does the music. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC, and this show is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. For more award-winning podcasts, check out podcast.com. You want to skip the ads, sign up at Vox.com slash members. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.