AINEWS
The steroid Olympics were a circus. The scoreboard told a stranger story.
At the first Enhanced Games, the marquee enhanced swimmer finished last in both of his events. The event's founders had promised an age of superhumanity.
At the first Enhanced Games, the marquee enhanced swimmer finished last in both of his events. The event's founders had promised an age of superhumanity.
The first Enhanced Games promised, in cash prizes and in marketing copy, that performance-enhancing drugs would produce superhuman results on the track and in the pool. The scoreboard disagreed.
On Sunday, May 24, 2026, in a $50 million open-air arena built in the parking lot of Resorts World Las Vegas, the Enhanced Games staged what its founders pitched as the most radical sporting event in modern history: the first sporting competition where athletes were explicitly encouraged to take testosterone, human growth hormone, EPO, and a long list of other substances, and were paid cash for breaking world records. The staging borrowed heavily from the Olympic template, with a six-lane 100-meter track, a four-lane Olympic-length swimming pool, inflatable arches, pyrotechnics, and an on-site product line delivering the roster of substances in patches, capsules, creams, and pills. The marketing language, per MIT Technology Review's on-the-ground reporting, ran toward "ushering in the age of superhumanity." The founders told MIT Technology Review they were "challenging dated sporting norms and helping to build a world where we can all live better, longer lives."
Then the racing started.
The marquee name on the entry list was James Magnussen, the Australian swimmer and the first athlete to publicly sign with the Enhanced roster. He had been one of the cleanest swimmers in the world for a decade, and he was the most visible test case for the central pitch: that the lab-built body would outrun the natural one. On Sunday, Magnussen finished last in both of his events. It was not close. Across the swimming field, competitors running a clean regimen frequently beat the ones running the enhanced one. The libertarian thought experiment had arrived at its first empirical test, and the data refused to cooperate.
The result is awkward for both sides. Critics spent the run-up calling the project an embarrassment and warning that it glamorized dangerous substances and put lives at risk. "The games themselves now seem almost secondary to what appears to be an online marketplace for hormones, peptides, and other performance-enhancing compounds," said Astrid Kristine Bjørnebekk, a steroids expert at Oslo University Hospital. The athletes who competed on Sunday were not visibly wrecked, and they were not, on the day, obviously superhuman. The medical literature on the substances in rotation is uneven. Some are well-characterized in clinical use. Others are not. The long-term effects of stacking testosterone, growth hormone, and metabolic modulators in elite training doses are not the kind of question one Sunday in May can settle. Critics who made that point were making a real one.
The harder question is why anyone expected one Sunday in May to settle it. The Enhanced Games were never really about whether one swimmer could out-touch another in a Las Vegas parking lot. They were a marketing surface for an idea that has been operating in plain sight for years: the steady normalization of enhancement as a personal choice, sold through clinics, telehealth platforms, longevity podcasts, and gym-floor conversations about testosterone replacement and microdosing. The Games did not invent that market. They gave it a stage.
That stage is the part the founders can claim, even with a losing scoreboard. The thought experiment is already running with or without the inflatable arches. What the Las Vegas meet produced, more than a result, was a reminder that the gap between enhancement marketing and enhancement reality is the same gap readers can see in the longevity newsletters, the clinic menus, and the biohacker feeds they are already swimming through.
The next thing to watch is whether the Enhanced Games come back next year with a different roster, a different substance mix, and a different result. The first round did not vindicate the founders, and it did not vindicate the critics. What it did was put a marquee on top of an industry that was already operating in plain sight, and gave it a scoreboard the marketing could not control. The clinic menus and the longevity feeds will keep running either way. The harder question is who pays for the next round of data, and what readers are willing to accept as evidence when the next set of results comes in.