Heat rises off the pavement.
Cody Miller stands on a block that wasn’t built for him, yet there he is. Lane one. Vegas. The sun feels like a hammer blow. MC Hammer blasts. The crowd waits. He wins. 50 meters. Breaststroke. Personal best. $250,00 lands in his pocket faster than you can say doping.
He screams. Veins pop. It looks intense. It looks real. Is it? Maybe the swimsuit helps, a banned tech relic from 2008. Or maybe it’s the cocktail in his veins. Miller doesn’t care to pretend. He’s proud of the pills, the injections, the protocols. Doctors nod. Family cheers. At 34, he shaved seven-tenths of a second off his best.
“The last lap, my body shut Down. Stopped working.”
That’s why he quit clean swimming. That’s why he’s here now. Enhanced. Not broken. Fixed. Improved. He swims another heat, wins another bag. Jumps out. High fives. Never tired. Just enhanced.
The Steroid Circus
Aaron D’Souza called it a game. Christian Angermayer helped build it. Peter Thiel and Donald Jr. put up the checks. The pitch? Sports without the moral hangup.
They invited 42 athletes to Abu Dhabi first. Locked them in. MRIs. Blood panels. Scans upon scans. If you want to dope, you need clearance. Not just any dope though. FDA-approved. Doctor-prescribed. A menu of options tailored to your sport and your biology.
Maximilian Martin runs the show. He looks like he was carved from granite, which probably isn’t an accident. He’s 29. He hates the word “sick.”
Traditional medicine fixes you. Puts you back to baseline. That’s boring. Enhancement takes you past. Past what? Who knows. But Martin calls it scientific evolution. Others call it biohacking. Silicon Valley guys shooting peptides. Wellness influencers selling vibes on TikTok. Bryan Johnson, doing whatever the hell he does with his body, lives in that space.
It’s not just athletes anymore. It’s a lifestyle. A brand. And the sports world hates it.
The Hate Mail
Travis Tygart doesn’t mince words. CEO of USADA calls the Games a dangerous clown show. Profit over principle. The IOC agrees. The World Anti-Doping Association agrees. Basically, if it has a rule book, they think Enhanced broke it.
“I want us to be the steward of enhancement.”
Angermayer insists on safety. On transparency. On science. Critics see science-washing. The Games are just the flashy storefront for a telehealth scam. Buy a subscription. Get legal peptides. Get hormones. Look what the athletes do, they say. Imagine what it can do for your midlife crisis.
Here’s the twist. Some stuff available to consumers? Off the menu for the athletes. GLP-1 weight loss drugs. Copper peptides. Keep the pure competition pure? Or keep the brand image shiny?
James Magnussen, former Australian star, decided to play. He went from swimmer-lean to linebacker-thick. He got too heavy. Literally sank. Had to cut back because he was dragging in the water. Now he posts before-and-after pics online, laughing at the absurdity of it all.
Martin and Angermayer think you’re stupid if you judge them. They compare the Games to Formula One. Sure, F1 cars are insane. But that tech trickles down to your Corolla eventually. Same logic applies to bodies. You can drive a Camry, sure. But why wouldn’t you want to go fast?
Technical Difficulties
Fifty million dollars. A decent budget for a disaster.
The speakers screeched. The livestream froze. The jumbotron glitched during a race that no one really understood anyway. The stadium appeared from a barren lot a month prior, a shiny plastic box under a 94-degree sun. Empty seats. Why buy tickets when you don’t have to? Invite-only. Media. Family. And a sea of influencers posing for the flex-cam instead of a kiss-cam.
Bryan Johnson stood in the corner, shielding his eyes from aging ultraviolet rays. Dancers in leotards moved slowly, sweating through the ceremony. “O Fortuna” played on electronic keys. Before one race, the “Numa Numa” song hit. Then Eminem. Random. Jarring.
Weightlifters failed mid-day under the heat dome. Magnussen wore gold trunks and last place in every swim. No world records fell until the final heat. Tension built. Silence hung.
Kristian Gkolomeev touches the wall. Red lights explode.
WORLD RECORD.
He beat the old record by seven-hundredths of a second. The arena roared. Mostly relief that something happened.
The Medical Shield
Dr. Guido Pieles works for Manchester United. FIFA respects him. He sits on the independent medical board for Enhanced. He knows steroids aren’t for vanity. At least, he insists they shouldn’t be.
“It’s about optimization, not maximization of health.”
He hates the gym rat idea. Taking steroids just to look ripped is dumb. Dangerous. Useless. You don’t need to enhance. Sleep well. Eat food. Your genes are likely enough.
But here is the catch. No one knows what happens to your heart after five years of optimized doping. The data doesn’t exist. That scares him. The lack of data pushes kids to buy off the street. To guess. To hurt themselves.
Enhanced offers a different path. Clinical trial. Five years long. Institutional Review Board approved. Publish the results.
We don’t get the exact menus for the athletes. They won’t tell you what Hunter Armstrong injected. Privacy reasons. Safety concerns. They don’t want teenagers trying this at home. But they gave us averages. Roughly:
- 91% on testosterone.
- 79% on human growth hormone.
- 62% on stimulants.
- 50% on metabolic modulators.
The list goes on. Pieles says erythropoietin makes no sense in a 50-meter dash. It boosts red blood cells, sure. Good for marathons. Useless for speed? Maybe. Experts argue. Data accumulates.
Clean athletes like Fred Kerley won easy. He teased the doped field after. Joked about it. They laughed. Or pretended to.
The experiment has begun. The lights are flashing. The records are thin air, yet broken anyway. We watch the enhanced body become something new, something strange, and wonder where it ends.
Does it matter?
