{"id":922,"date":"2026-07-14T10:05:57","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T10:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=922"},"modified":"2026-07-14T10:05:57","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T10:05:57","slug":"rope-a-dope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=922","title":{"rendered":"Rope-a-Dope"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The largest person I met at the Enhanced Games, a mini Olympics for steroid users that was held in Las Vegas this past May, was a six-foot-ten, three-hundred-and-twenty-pound Russian man named Lukas Lakutsin. He was having lunch near the pool at the Fontainebleau. He wore a tank top, and I was staring, perhaps inappropriately, at the veins in his forearms. I shook his hand. I felt like a newborn clasping onto his father. The pecs, the traps. I asked him what he\u2019d ordered to eat. He replied, \u201cEverything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Voting Rights, Updated<\/a><\/p>\n

Lakutsin was in town to watch the competition; not everyone who was enhanced at the Enhanced Games was an athlete. The Games had a small slate of events: the hundred-metre dash, some swimming, and some weight lifting. Competitors could choose from a menu of performance-enhancing drugs, or P.E.D.s, which were banned in mainstream sports, as long as they had F.D.A. approval\u2014anabolics, human growth hormone, stimulants. \u201cEnhancement\u201d was the organizers\u2019 preferred euphemism for what the Olympics refers to, in its own loaded way, as \u201cdoping.\u201d The term did have a liberating effect. I found myself asking everyone I encountered if he was enhanced. Lakutsin: enhanced, but only before bodybuilding competitions. A life coach from North Carolina, whose biceps I wanted to touch: enhanced. Fabio, a Michael Jackson look-alike in town for the event: not enhanced, unless you count the rhinoplasty. Only one guy, Timothy Piatkowski, a researcher involved with the Games, suggested that my question might be a little rude. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t necessarily ask someone so openly, \u2018When did you inject meth and for how long?\u2019\u00a0\u201d he said. Piatkowski was enhanced, though: \u201cA whole bunch of androgens, growth promoters, peptides.\u201d<\/p>\n

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I got into Las Vegas on a Wednesday, as the athletes were acclimating to the venue, a temporary twenty-five-hundred-seat arena outside Resorts World. I stumbled onto powerlifters grunting in a hotel ballroom. Ripped guys with perfectly formed butts and bulging shoulders were swimming laps in the pool. The inaugural Games would take place on Sunday. The gathering also served as a product launch and a medical convention. Enhanced Group, the company behind the Games, had recently begun selling peptides, supplements, and testosterone, over the counter and by prescription, to the public. It was conducting a study on the effects of the drugs on its athletes and was holding events earlier in the week to proclaim the benefits of enhancements for everybody.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In mainstream sports, the aversion to P.E.D.s is so deeply ingrained that few people even discuss the topic. But athletes still use them. For obvious reasons, it\u2019s difficult to know precisely how many are doing so, but a 2024 survey found that between six and nine per cent of \u00e9lite athletes were doping. Most sports treat performance enhancers as they once did gambling: like an existential threat that undermines fairness and offends our shared humanity. Naturally, the International Olympic Committee wasn\u2019t a fan of the Enhanced Games. World Aquatics, the body that oversees swimming, compared the athletes to \u201cclowns juggling knives.\u201d Richard Pound, the founding president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA<\/em>, and a crusader against cheaters, told me, \u201cSport is essentially a form of social consensus as to what is O.K. and what is not O.K.\u201d He went on, \u201cYou don\u2019t start off in sport to become this artificial monster. You\u2019ll see some of the folks at the Games. I think you\u2019ll probably conclude that, if it\u2019s not grotesque, it borders on it.\u201d The leader of one sport federation predicted that, as a result of the Games, someone would die.<\/p>\n

At Resorts World, no one seemed too worried. I saw enhanced men and women tooling through the casino on mobility scooters or sipping coffee in the rooftop pool. Large men delighted in meeting other large men. Lakutsin told me the gathering was affirming of humanity. \u201cIn Russia, people watching you, and they thinking you look like a freak,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you do not look like other people, they start hate you.\u201d At the food court, he\u2019d run into Mitchell Hooper, the reigning World\u2019s Strongest Man, who was in the dead-lift competition. \u201cHe says, \u2018What the fuck! You\u2019re so huge!\u2019\u00a0\u201d Lakutsin recalled. Some Enhanced employees were also enhanced. In the mornings, the hotel gym was packed with wired, shiny-skinned guys grunting by the squat racks, making the hungover treadmill joggers and stair steppers self-conscious.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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One problem with anti-doping enforcement is that it\u2019s been impossible to define what doping is. Athletes are people who seek physical enhancement, in one form or another. They practice. They train. This self-improvement has always included the intake of various substances: animal testicles, raw eggs, Gatorade. One Olympic swimming team in the nineteen-seventies is said to have considered administering helium enemas, for buoyancy. Cyclists have tried strychnine. Marathoners have drunk brandy. It turned out that most things other than water, protein, and some salts and sugar were performance impairers. Only recently have we developed drugs for athletes that work.<\/p>\n

At first, most sports allowed the drugs. Our attitude toward P.E.D.s has largely tracked public sentiment toward Big Pharma. In 1968, in response to a few athlete deaths that were believed to be linked to P.E.D. use, the Olympics began drug testing. The Olympic Committee introduced a definition of doping: the use of foreign substances in abnormal quantities to enhance performance. There were problems with this. It could be read, for example, to outlaw an excess of sugary snacks during a bike race. The drug tests were largely symbolic. Worldwide, about two Olympic athletes a year tested positive. When Mark McGwire broke the home-run record, in 1998, he kept a bottle of androstenedione in his locker. Major League Baseball had banned steroids, but it didn\u2019t test for them. Perhaps what did the most to turn the public against steroids was the sense that some athletes were breaking the rules and getting away with it. WADA<\/em> was founded in 1999. Pound, the founding president, told me that there weren\u2019t lengthy discussions about why a given substance should be banned. WADA<\/em> tried a new definition of doping. Using a substance is cheating if it meets two of three criteria: it enhances performance, it represents a health risk, and it violates \u201cthe spirit of sport.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to WADA<\/em>, the spirit of sport is \u201cthe celebration of the human spirit, body and mind.\u201d Pound told me, \u201cIt\u2019s a little fuzzy, but at least it gives you the warm feeling about what sport should be.\u201d The fuzziness, perhaps, allows for the fact that we\u2019re all enhanced in one way or another: Viagra, smartphones, Lasik, Claude. We eat enriched grains and receive flu vaccines. Some wiggle room helps. But WADA<\/em>\u2019s rules can be arbitrary: huffing supplemental oxygen (performance enhancing, but not harmful) doesn\u2019t violate the spirit of sport. Caffeine (performance enhancing and, like almost anything, a little bit harmful) once violated the spirit of sport, but now only extremely high levels of it do. The concept of doping isn\u2019t much of a thing in pursuits other than sports. Actors use Botox and hair plugs to stay camera-ready. Pianists with stagefright take beta-blockers. You could say John Lennon was doping when he dropped acid and wrote \u201cI Am the Walrus,\u201d but you wouldn\u2019t. The invocation of \u201cspirit\u201d seems to assert that sports have a special claim on the soul.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But the human spirit is a tricky thing. We cheat on our taxes, and we round up our height. N.B.A. players flop. Alva No\u00eb, a philosopher at Berkeley, has said that, though doping is technically cheating, in that it\u2019s against the rules, the doper isn\u2019t much different from the basketball player who commits a rough foul. \u201cIt is cheating that is consistent, in so many ways, with the spirit of self-actualization, creativity, and achievement that is the mark of all sports,\u201d he wrote. \u201cTo be willing to give your all even at the risk of injury to yourself and to others is actually what is required of any player who aims at excellence.\u201d When I talked to No\u00eb about the Enhanced Games, he said, \u201cIt poses an interesting question about our conception of what it is to be a human agent. Maybe a more honest way to understand human genius is to realize that we\u2019re very dependent on others and on technology.\u201d He continued, \u201cWhen do I forfeit my ownership of my own accomplishments because of something I ate or took? I think that\u2019s just a really open question.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aron D\u2019Souza, a founder of the Enhanced Games, is friends with Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI. Altman once described D\u2019Souza as \u201cruthlessly ambitious,\u201d a \u201cmonster networker,\u201d and \u201cobsessed with status and power in a way that is hard for me to relate to.\u201d In 2009, when D\u2019Souza was a student at Oxford, the venture capitalist Peter Thiel gave a guest lecture. D\u2019Souza managed to arrange a meeting. Thiel, who has a passion for immortality, introduced himself to D\u2019Souza by saying, \u201cHi, I\u2019m Peter, and I\u2019m going to live forever.\u201d D\u2019Souza recalled to the Financial Times<\/em>, \u201cI think I just replied, \u2018Hi, I\u2019m Aron. I\u2019m studying law.\u2019\u00a0\u201d D\u2019Souza schmoozed. On a walk around campus, he asked Thiel if he had any nagging problems. Thiel mentioned the news outlet Gawker<\/em>, which had recently outed him as gay. A year later, D\u2019Souza devised and orchestrated a plan in which Thiel secretly funnelled millions to the wrestler Hulk Hogan so that he would wage a defamation lawsuit against Gawker<\/em>. Hogan won a hundred-and-forty-million-dollar judgment. Gawker<\/em> filed for bankruptcy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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D\u2019Souza established himself in Thiel\u2019s inner circle, which comprised mostly men, most of whom were gay and most of whom were tech founders or venture capitalists. They held dinners and vacationed together. Some were transhumanists. In 2022, D\u2019Souza was in Miami, where Thiel was hosting a New Year\u2019s party. At a gym, he encountered an unusually muscled lifter. The guy told D\u2019Souza that he was on testosterone. During the next few days, D\u2019Souza worked up a plan for the Enhanced Games. At the New Year\u2019s party, he pitched Thiel, who later invested. (Eventually, so did the Winklevoss twins.) A German billionaire named Christian Angermayer, another member of Thiel\u2019s circle, became a co-founder.<\/p>\n

D\u2019Souza launched the Enhanced Games in 2023, with a trollish promotional video that aped the language of gay liberation. A voice-over announced, \u201cI am a proud enhanced athlete. The Olympics hate me. I need your help to come out. I need your help to stop hate.\u201d In the media, the Enhanced Games became known as the Steroid Olympics. I first talked to D\u2019Souza shortly afterward. He was thinking of inaugurating the Games during the Paris Olympics, as counterprogramming; the athletes could use any drug they wanted. The event didn\u2019t come together, but his provocations got a lot of attention. He pitched Lance Armstrong on investing. Armstrong declined.<\/p>\n

I was surprised to learn that D\u2019Souza is not a sports fan. \u201cI\u2019m not the kind of guy who will, like, go to the football on a Saturday,\u201d he told me. \u201cI\u2019m a philosopher. I read old printed books in my library at Oxford.\u201d Angermayer also began following sports only recently. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to be a fan of anything if I\u2019m not involved,\u201d he told me. \u201cNow that I\u2019m able to play in that world, I\u2019m super obsessed about it.\u201d In 2024, D\u2019Souza pitched the Games at an academic conference on doping in Denmark. His remarks were not what attendees expected. \u201cHe did not talk so much about sport,\u201d Verner M\u00f8ller, who organized the conference, told me. \u201cHe was talking about a future where we would not die because we have found medicine that would allow us to live eternally.\u201d D\u2019Souza told me that the Games were a proof of concept for a larger mission: \u201cMy thesis has always been, with the Enhanced Games, it works, we generate revenue, we can push that into scientific development, better drugs come out, and eventually, through capitalism, we cure death.\u201d<\/p>\n

In early 2024, Angermayer published an essay titled \u201cThe Future Is Enhanced,\u201d a manifesto predicting an era of science-aided human improvement which would arrive in waves: sexual enhancement, muscular enhancement, cognitive enhancement, happiness enhancement, and a final, transhumanist wave involving brain-computer interfaces. Angermayer calls this humanmaxxing. He rejects the idea of living forever\u2014\u201cStatistically, you\u2019re going to have an accident, and, if you don\u2019t have an accident, then someday the star system will end\u201d\u2014though he does think that we are a matter of years away from achieving indefinite life spans.<\/p>\n

Angermayer runs Apeiron Investment Group, which has invested heavily in biotech and longevity. Its companies research therapeutic psychedelics and treatments for premature ejaculation. One afternoon in Las Vegas, he invited me up to his hotel suite. When I arrived, he was nibbling on nigiri. He is forty-eight and makes intense eye contact. I couldn\u2019t detect a single pore in his face. Angermayer told me that he takes the peptides GLP-1 (for weight maintenance), tesamorelin (for growth-hormone production), and GHK-Cu (for skin regeneration); the anti-aging hormone DHEA; and a number of sleep supplements. He has been on testosterone-replacement therapy since his thirties. On busy days, he takes modafinil, a wakefulness drug used to treat narcolepsy. This week, leading up to the Games, there were many busy days.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Enhanced\u2019s drug study, which will track the athletes over five years, was preparing to release early data, and Angermayer was excited. \u201cWe\u2019re going to change the debate, and then the debate will be: Is it actually morally acceptable that we\u2019re not<\/em> allowing these drugs?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Angermayer had pushed D\u2019Souza to moderate his initial anything-goes instincts. Enhanced now encourages the use only of drugs that have F.D.A. approval. \u201cThey\u2019re the best agency in the world to decide what should be in the human body or not,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not the arbiter\u2014nor should WADA<\/em> be.\u201d Enhanced says it tests for health, not for drugs. Athletes with unsafe levels of certain biomarkers wouldn\u2019t be allowed to compete, regardless of how they got that way. WADA<\/em>, which views taking P.E.D.s, safe or not, as cheating, rejects the approach. But it\u2019s popular among philosophers. Peter Singer is a fan.<\/p>\n

I told Angermayer that I thought his approach was rational, but that enjoyment of sports was an irrational endeavor. (Peter Singer told me that he was intrigued by the Games intellectually but added, \u201cIt\u2019s not something that I\u2019m going to say, \u2018Oh, great, the Enhanced Games are on! I must make sure that I can watch.\u2019\u00a0\u201d) Angermayer asked, \u201cWhy do you think we like sports? Have you ever thought about that?\u201d<\/p>\n

I said I thought that most people watch sports, basically, to feel something.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you look at it scientifically, we are actually evolutionarily primed for comparing our skills,\u201d he replied. \u201cGo to the zoo and watch gorillas, or any form of apes. They keep that raw display of who\u2019s the strongest, who\u2019s the fastest.\u201d When Enhanced athletes proved to be faster and stronger, why would anyone watch anything else? This put pressure on the Enhanced Games. \u201cFor it to be a success, there need to be world records,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The next morning, I caught a training session at the pool. It was difficult to discern the outward effects of enhancement on the athletes. The swimmers looked like swimmers\u2014sinewy and long, with huge hands and feet. An exception was James Magnussen, an Australian who\u2019d been the first person to sign up with Enhanced and had promised to \u201cjuice to the gills.\u201d In an attempt, last year, at a world record, he\u2019d put on too much muscle and had basically sunk. He\u2019d slimmed down since then, but, as he swam laps, his lats still oozed out of the sides of his swimsuit. One person commented online, \u201cYou can see his back from his front.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Most of the athletes were Olympians who\u2019d retired or were at the back ends of their careers. A few were serving WADA<\/em> bans. A small number were competing clean. A clean swimmer named Hunter Armstrong told me that his decision to forgo P.E.D.s was about celebrating the talent given to him by God. Also, he wanted to maintain his Olympics eligibility. He was trailed all week by anti-doping officials, who took urine and blood samples. Money was a major draw for everyone there. Enhanced paid the athletes salaries, and each winner would get a quarter-million-dollar bonus. A world record would pay an extra million. After the swimmers finished up for the day, I met with Megan Romano, a former world-champion swimmer who\u2019d retired ten years ago. She was now thirty-five and living in Las Vegas, where she made money doing odd jobs, betting on sports, and working loopholes at the slot machines. Romano had no realistic shot at a world record, but Enhanced was hoping she\u2019d demonstrate that drugs could shave years off your biological age. Romano hadn\u2019t trained for a decade. She\u2019d done some hard living. She told me, \u201cIt\u2019s crazy, because the warmup pool that we\u2019re using, it\u2019s at Ayu,\u201d one of the hotel\u2019s day-party clubs. \u201cA year ago, I was partying in that pool.\u201d<\/p>\n

Angermayer\u2019s manifesto had credited transgender activism with inspiring Enhanced. \u201cThe trans movement will ultimately extend to the ability to shape and enhance one\u2019s own body and mind according to individual desires and aspirations,\u201d he wrote. But the Games didn\u2019t have any trans athletes. The competition categories were not men and women but, rather, XX and XY chromosome groups. Angermayer, who as a young man had hidden that he was gay, told me, \u201cIf you\u2019re trans, do you really need to go into sports? Maybe that\u2019s your passion, but don\u2019t you have, also, other passions? And is it worth it? It\u2019s at least what I asked myself: Is it worth it to shout out from the rooftops that I am gay? No fucking not! My life would be destroyed for nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Before the Games, Enhanced had put its athletes in a fifteen-week performance-enhanced training camp at a resort in Abu Dhabi. (The Emiratis had agreed to regulate the drug study.) The participants underwent a battery of physical exams, and then were put on personalized protocols, prescribed by doctors, before receiving their first pills and injections. \u201cThat first day on the protocol was the hardest,\u201d Ben Proud, a British freestyle swimmer who won a silver medal in Paris, said, after a practice. \u201cI was terrified, because, to me, that was the day that I went from the Ben Proud that I always knew to a new person.\u201d I\u2019d spoken with Boady Santavy, a Canadian weight lifter, when he was three weeks into the protocol. He\u2019d noticed that his sleep had improved, and that his recovery after training sessions was faster. Nonathletes often conceive of performance enhancers as the lazy option, but it\u2019s typically the opposite: athletes take them so they can train even more. Santavy had already put on bulk. \u201cThey\u2019re more full and thick,\u201d he told me, of his muscles. He thought he might be able to put up a world-record weight already.<\/p>\n

Max Martin, Enhanced\u2019s twenty-nine-year-old C.E.O., would not disclose his personal enhancement protocol but explained that he takes six times the dosage of some of the athletes. (He has previously said that he takes testosterone. \u201cA byproduct of taking testosterone is that it takes down your fertility,\u201d he told GQ<\/em>. \u201cI\u2019m not at a point in my life where I want to have kids, so actually taking down my fertility is a great thing.\u201d) Mitchell Hooper, the deadlifter, said that he was taking testosterone, Anadrol, nandrolone, and Halotestin\u2014all anabolic steroids\u2014plus Adderall on competition days, for focus. Hooper, who set his own protocol and wasn\u2019t part of Enhanced\u2019s study, said he used to take higher doses. He\u2019d sometimes found himself crying inexplicably at his kitchen counter from the Adderall. \u201cIt\u2019s a bad idea,\u201d he said. \u201cPerfect, optimal health right now? Don\u2019t do them.\u201d But, for him, the trade-off\u2014money, a platform\u2014was worth it.<\/p>\n

Read more New York Is a Pickle Kind of Town<\/a><\/p>\n

WADA<\/em> was founded around the time of the war on drugs, and authorities warned that steroids would kill you. EPO, a naturally occurring hormone that is used by athletes to increase endurance, can dangerously thicken the blood. (WADA<\/em> allows athletes to use non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as hypobaric chambers, to raise EPO levels.) Anabolic steroids can cause mood swings, shrunken testicles, baldness, and infertility, and can suppress the body\u2019s ability to produce testosterone on its own. Heavy doses over a long time are linked to a higher likelihood of heart disease and stroke. But steroids aren\u2019t going to kill you, at least not in the short or medium term. Norman Fost, a pediatrician and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, and a longtime opponent of the anti-doping regime, told me, \u201cThere\u2019s literally a hundred times more documented deaths from playing football than from using steroids.\u201d<\/p>\n

Athletes use drugs because of financial pressure, because of injuries, because everyone else seems to be doing it. One afternoon, I talked with Marvin Bracy-Williams, a sprinter who signed with Enhanced after failing a drug test for steroids. Bracy-Williams told me that for the first ten years of his career he never considered doping. Then, in 2021, he injured his hamstring at the Olympic qualifiers. For years, he tried to regain his form. \u201cI was doing everything, and still coming up short,\u201d he said. \u201cYou start to have weak moments.\u201d He began to feel like a sucker for competing clean. A friend of Bracy-Williams told the Guardian<\/em> that the runner called him to vent. \u201cEverything I\u2019ve done, I\u2019ve done the right way,\u201d he said, according to the friend. \u201cDog, there ain\u2019t no way these boys are that much better than me.\u201d Bracy-Williams told me, \u201cI took the opportunity, and then it bit me, so here we are.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Drugs help, but only on the margins. As skill increases, the effectiveness of P.E.D.s decreases. Any baseball player could take steroids\u2014and thousands likely have\u2014but none would be Barry Bonds. The big aid is in recovery and career longevity. The immediate effects are most pronounced in sports like weight lifting, cycling, and sprinting, where there is a more direct relationship between raw physical ability and results. Some sprinters believe that steroids can trim one stride, equal to about two-tenths of a second, off the hundred-metre dash. Of the top five fastest times in the dash, only one was set by a runner who never failed a drug test: Usain Bolt, who holds the record, at 9.58 seconds. The next closest time was 9.69\u2014less than one stride slower. Bracy-Williams told me that Bolt\u2019s run had moved him emotionally. \u201cI\u2019ve probably contributed a million views myself to the YouTube video of the world-record race, trying to figure out how,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a work of art.\u201d I asked him if he would be saddened if Bolt were revealed to have used steroids. \u201cThink about it,\u201d he said. \u201cHe still moved his body in 9.58 seconds, regardless of what was in there.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the morning of the Games, I met Aron D\u2019Souza in the lobby of his hotel. He was feeling triumphant. \u201cMy advice to entrepreneurs is, like, You can just do things,\u201d he said. Last year, he\u2019d stepped down as C.E.O. He said he wanted to focus on new things. During New York\u2019s mayoral election, he\u2019d spoken to Andrew Cuomo\u2019s team, to float his name for sanitation commissioner. \u201cIf I could have two years, I could clean up all the trash,\u201d he told me. (He envisioned street-sweeping drones.)<\/p>\n

Almost reflexively, I asked whether he was enhanced. \u201cNot presently, but I feel like I should be,\u201d D\u2019Souza said. He explained that, though he wasn\u2019t enhanced pharmaceutically, he did follow some of the teachings of Bryan Johnson, the longevity-obsessed tech founder, who strictly limits his sun exposure, gets transfusions of his son\u2019s blood plasma, and scrupulously logs his nighttime erections. (After the Games, D\u2019Souza reported that he\u2019d begun taking an enhancement, but he wouldn\u2019t reveal what it was.)<\/p>\n

D\u2019Souza told me that the opening of the Games was a landmark for humankind. \u201cPeople see this as the start of the biotech salvationist movement,\u201d he said. We talked about the ways in which the world might orient itself toward an enhanced era of indefinite life spans (we\u2019d need to rejigger social security and pensions), but discussing eternal life at the Enhanced Games felt, at times, like discussing reaching low Earth orbit at the pole-vaulting championships. D\u2019Souza had appeared on Joe Rogan\u2019s podcast and compared the Games to the Apollo program. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to the moon,\u201d Rogan replied. \u201cYou\u2019re just getting a bunch of guys juiced up running really fast.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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D\u2019Souza\u2019s vision was that each annual Games would bring incremental advancements. \u201cThis is the first threshold of enhancement,\u201d he said. The second threshold might include bionics. The third level would include brain-computer interfaces\u2014\u201cintegrating physical intelligence,\u201d D\u2019Souza said. An athlete might be able to download new competencies: Michael Phelps\u2019s swimming mechanics, Steph Curry\u2019s jump shot.<\/p>\n

D\u2019Souza said that Enhanced would draw a line somewhere. No jet packs to zoom down the track. I wondered how he\u2019d avoid re-creating WADA<\/em>\u2019s definition problem. \u201cThe end conclusion of this project may be that Enhanced becomes the definitional regulator of what it means to be human,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Games kicked off in the mid-afternoon. The gold Trump International\u00a0Hotel loomed over the arena. The venture-capital firm of Donald Trump,\u00a0Jr., was an investor, but the event conflicted with his wedding, in the Bahamas. (Angermayer told me that the Trump Administration\u2019s friendly stance toward alternative medicines\u2014psychedelics, peptides\u2013\u2013had been a boon for the enhanced movement: \u201cTrump winning was definitely a decisive factor in holding the Games here.\u201d) At one end of the pool was a desk for the television commentators. Bryan Johnson had signed up to do the color commentary. The temperature was in the mid-nineties. Johnson held an umbrella and had on sunglasses that looked like the goggles scientists once wore during nuclear tests. Tickets weren\u2019t for sale. Instead, Enhanced had invited a battery of influencers. Martin, the C.E.O., explained, \u201cWe\u2019re built for social media, not television.\u201d Lakutsin, the large Russian man, had come with Zoop, a social-media network created by a founding executive of OnlyFans, which had partnered with Enhanced. In the concourse, content creators filmed other content creators creating content. There was free food and drinks at kiosks labelled \u201c+SOLIDS\u201d<\/em> and \u201c+LIQUIDS<\/em>.\u201d Perhaps because of the filming frenzy in the concourse, or the transgressive aim of the competition, an air of permissiveness presided. I cut the +SOLIDS<\/em> line and snagged a Wagyu slider.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The Games began. In the first event, a weight lifter named Beatriz Pir\u00f3n just missed a world record in the snatch, in which a lifter pulls a barbell over her head in a single motion. But no one seemed stressed. The major record attempts would happen later. Hunter Armstrong, the clean swimmer, won the fifty-metre backstroke, but it wasn\u2019t a record. After he was finished, he went off with anti-doping officials, to give more urine and blood.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I was excited to see Santavy, the weight lifter, who had boasted to me that the world record in the snatch should be no problem. None of the Enhanced Game records would be recognized in mainstream sports, but, he told me, \u201cI\u2019ll consider mine the record for sure.\u201d Enhanced was following standard competition rules: lifters had three chances to put up their best weight. Weight lifting is the sport where steroids should help the most: get stronger, lift heavier. But the other lifters kept failing. Santavy attempted the record on his second try, but he bailed out as the bar went overhead. He looked shocked. He had one more shot. The final attempt, though, wasn\u2019t even close. He fell to the floor and slammed his fists on the mat. An announcer declared, \u201cLadies and gentleman, we have a surprise for you. We\u2019re going to give Boady one! more! chance!\u201d There was laughter in the arena. Santavy failed at that one, too.<\/p>\n

It was early, but the lack of records threatened disaster for Enhanced. If the drugs couldn\u2019t help a lifter lift more, what was the upside for the rest of us? Interestingly, Santavy\u2019s failure affirmed that you could stage a sporting event with drugs and not lose the drama. Pound had told me that performance enhancers ruined sports because they effectively fixed the results: \u201cThe key about sport is the inherent uncertainty of the outcome.\u201d I wondered if WADA<\/em> and Enhanced both overestimated how much the enhancements helped. Sports are fun because the better physical beings don\u2019t always win. People choke and get inspired. If sports have a spirit, it\u2019s in the recognition that our time is finite. We peak and we break down. Chances are, we\u2019ll die. We have limited opportunities, so each failure is a little tragedy. What matters is the moment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Enhanced\u2019s moment was turning out to be pretty boring. It was beginning to feel more like an exhibition than like a sporting event. Most of the weight lifters were in different weight classes, so they were competing against themselves. In the track events, there were three false starts, each of which typically means an automatic disqualification for the violator. But the runners simply lined up and went again. One runner decided to skip the preliminary heat and just run in the finals.<\/p>\n

The swimming events were more successful. Swimmers set sixteen personal bests. Megan Romano, the slot-machine player, won the women\u2019s hundred-metre freestyle. She beat her previous best time by .28 seconds. Bizarrely, the Enhanced Games had allowed the swimmers to use \u201csupersuits,\u201d full-body swimsuits engineered with extra buoyancy that have been banned in mainstream competition. It was difficult to tell whether the personal bests were attributable more to the drugs or to the suits. And, still, no records.<\/p>\n

Chances came and went: the hundred-metre dash was a bust. Fred Kerley, the seventh-fastest man of all time, was the headliner for the men. He was serving a two-year track-and-field ban for missing three drug tests, but he said that he was competing clean. (\u201cI don\u2019t need it,\u201d he explained.) He won, with a time of 9.97 seconds. Afterward, he said his enhanced competitors needed to \u201cget on that shit a little more.\u201d Yet his own time was slower than that of a high-school sophomore at this year\u2019s Texas school championships. Haf\u00fe\u00f3r Bj\u00f6rnsson, the Icelandic man who played the Mountain on \u201cGame of Thrones,\u201d was trying to break his own world record for the dead lift, at eleven hundred and twenty-four pounds. But he failed, too. Angermayer had told me that he expected two to five world records. I ran into him midway through the Games. \u201cI\u2019m getting nervous,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

I wondered if I could find some drugs. This was a crowd, mainly, of bio-hacking, sleep-obsessed healthmaxxers for whom the typical delights of Las Vegas held little appeal. Angermayer, who pointed out that alcohol, physically and societally, is much more unhealthy than anything the athletes were taking, told me he\u2019d never had a drink in his life. Las Vegas\u2019s economy has had to contend with a public whose interests are trending away from depravity and toward wellness. I was curious if the city\u2019s market for substances had adapted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I began following up my inquiries about enhancements with one about how to score some. Under the bleachers near the +LIQUIDS<\/em> kiosk, I found myself in conversation with a group of content creators. A thirtysomething guy named Jake told me that he was an investor in Enhanced, which had just gone public, via a SPAC<\/em>, or special-purpose acquisition company. \u201cI own eight thousand shares,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe have a mimetic economy. I\u2019m, like, We\u2019ve got some mimetic material here. Now, given the fact that we\u2019ve broken no world records, I may have to sell immediately.\u201d Jake was enhanced: \u201cI actually know a guy who\u2019s a big juice head. Former arm-wrestling world-champion contender. The guy told me when I went over his house, \u2018I killed so many people\u2019\u2014he was in the Army. He said, \u2018My way of doing good in the world is making people feel better.\u2019\u00a0\u201d This involved peptides and anabolics. Jake asked if I wanted an intro.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I\u2019ve never had a problem with athletes using pharmaceuticals. And yet I found myself rooting for the unenhanced athletes. I was happy when Armstrong won. I\u2019m also very much unenhanced; I don\u2019t even drink coffee. Among the syringe fillers, this gave me a feeling of superiority that I was a little ashamed of. D\u2019Souza predicted that in the future there would be a small group of the unenhanced. \u201cThat will be a status symbol in itself,\u201d he explained. I asked Jake what the enhancements felt like.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust imagine yourself but with ten to twenty per cent more energy,\u201d he said. \u201cAre you a calm, chill guy? Do you want to be less chill?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDo I need to be less chill?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was very chill, but if you\u2019ve never experienced being the guy who\u2019s, like, \u2018I will fight you!\u2019 you should try it once in your life,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty fun.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I declined. The final event was about to begin. It was the fifty-metre freestyle. Last year, Kristian Gkolomeev, a decently credentialled Greek swimmer, had swum a record time at a private Enhanced event, while wearing a supersuit, a feat for which Enhanced paid him a million dollars. This March, Cameron McEvoy, an unenhanced, un-supersuited Australian, beat his time, at 20.88 seconds. If Gkolomeev could surpass that, he\u2019d get himself another million. Fifty metres is just one length down the pool\u2014a frenzy of thrashing arms and legs. It was going to be close. I felt genuine suspense. When Gkolomeev touched the wall, the clock said 20.81\u2014a new record, of sorts. Martin, the C.E.O., had watched from the pool deck, and he hugged Gkolomeev, soaking his double-breasted olive suit.<\/p>\n

There was a brief closing ceremony, at which Enhanced had arranged for the Killers to play a set. The front man, Brandon Flowers, called out, \u201cCongratulations, whoever deserves it!\u201d I looked for Jake, hoping to wish him well. Maybe the swimming record meant he\u2019d avoid some stock losses. He was still under the bleachers when I found him. He hadn\u2019t been watching.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Meet the Minion-Maker<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are the Enhanced Games an existential threat to fairness or a cure for death? Zach Helfand reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":921,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-sporting-scene"],"yoast_head":"\nRope-a-Dope - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=922\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Rope-a-Dope - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Are the Enhanced Games an existential threat to fairness or a cure for death? 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