Sporting with Steroids: The Enhanced Games Flop in Las Vegas

Take steroids, boy. You know you want to. That was the unvarnished message for the competitors in Las Vegas for the first all drugged games announced in 2025. Taking place on May 24 in Las Vegas and featuring 42 athletes, it had the benefit of at least being open about the use of steroids in sporting performance though its founder, Aron D’Souza, intended it to be far more than that. The Australian entrepreneur saw it as a matter of liberty and choice, with the event promising to “break world records and fundamentally change the trajectory of not just sport, but humanity as a whole.”

Here, the process could be genuinely transparent while being scientific, importing technological prowess into athletic sport. Sprightly claims, though given that it has the support of that most dedicated of billionaire misanthropes Peter Thiel and received promotional interest by the US President’s basket case of a son, Donald Trump Jr., some scepticism is in order.

Thiel is as good a starter for the sceptics as any. His position on the human species, for one, ranges from chillingly ambivalent to hauntingly creepy. In an interview with the New York Times published in June last year he was asked whether he “would prefer the human race to endure”. He hesitated, an obvious point remarked upon by the interviewer and columnist Ross Douthat. “Well, I don’t know. I would – I would … ” Eventually, after considering that there were “so many questions implicit in this”, Thiel offered a resigned “Yes”. What followed revealed a telling portrait of Thiel the digital eugenicist and fervent transhumanist. Humans should be allowed to endure, but in heavily modified form. “We want more than changing cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.”

Ahead of the games, the drug-use rates of 36 of the participating athletes were made public. Some are part of clinical study listed on Clinicaltrials.gov. Obviously wishing to make a go of the experiment, two of the 36 are included, while two of the six not included are not using performance enhancing drugs. Showing that the system is not unregulated and luxuriously libertarian, five categories of substances, all apparently compliant with US Food and Drug Administration regulations, were approved: testosterone esters, anabolic agents, peptides and growth factors, metabolic modulators and stimulants.

This act of sporting license is much in keeping with a Trump administration that favours self-enrichment and plunder over the drudgery of regulation and red tape. “This is about excellence, innovation, and American dominance on the world stage – something the MAGA movement is all about,” trilled Donald Trump Jr. in a statement accompanying the announcement of his support. Officials of the late German Democratic Republic (DDR) could be found uttering many similar comments, albeit behind a veil of authoritarian secrecy, which involved stuffing athletes with ruinous steroids in a sporting advertisement of proletarian paradise. What price irreversibly altered hormone systems, hardened arteries, increased risk of strokes or liver damage?

The sporting idealists, or what’s left of them, claim that these games have offered rich servings of deception and fudging. “We argue,” state Øyvind Sandbakk and Sigmund Loland in their sombre article from December last year published in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, “that many of the claims made by the advocates of the EG are flawed and the use of scientific rhetoric is often misleading.” They further contend that the games represented “a high-risk social experiment with potentially profound medical, societal, and ethical consequences that abandons the principles that govern current elite sports: respect for athlete autonomy and health, fair competition, and the quest for sporting and human excellence.” Striking a conservative note, the authors are adamant that such principles are to be revivified rather than abandoned. “Contrary to the EG, strengthening antidoping systems and investing in safe, evidence-based performance support are all viable paths forward.”

The sense that the spectators were witnessing a large, open-air laboratory venture was confirmed by the limited number of invitees, capped at 2,500. What they got did not quite measure up to the stratospheric expectations of the organisers. From the allotted 22 events, one world record was broken. Kitted out in futuristic aquatic clobber, Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev conquered the 50 metres freestyle event in 20.81 seconds, coming to 0.07 seconds under the official record. But commentators were quick to point out he had done something similar the previous year in a demonstration swim.

Things also did not improve with the revelation that three athletes had won events despite being free of any added enhancements. Fred Kerley ran the 100 metres event in 9.97 seconds, pocketing $250,000 for winning the event. (The American’s clean victory emboldened him to tell fellow competitors to hit the steroids with greater dedication. “They need to work a little bit harder, get on that shit a little bit more.”) Barbadian female sprinter Tristan Evelyn also beat her fellow competitors in the women’s 100 metres, crossing in 11.25 seconds. US Olympic gold medallist Hunter Armstrong won the 50 metres backstroke in 24.21 seconds.

In a crisp assessment about what the Enhanced Games left us, Byron Hyde, a researcher and philosopher of science, was devastating. “This wasn’t a sporting revolution but rather a one-night event in Las Vegas that didn’t visibly demonstrate a dramatic leap in athletic capability. The ethical question – whether the risks are worth it – has been answered not by philosophers or regulators, but by the market and the score board.”

There is much cynicism, some of it both pernicious and justified, about sporting bodies and the way athletes are treated in sport. Spectators, however, ultimately wish to see a worthy show, whatever risks are presented to the athlete. The Enhanced Games simply substituted a process of invigilation by doctors and administrators overseeing the use of performance-enhancing substances for a process of general invigilation against the taking of any such substances in other competitions. The results of this apparent example of transhumanism in the field ended up falling flat. The clean proved more than able victors.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: [email protected]