LAS VEGAS — When Shania Collins was first approached about taking performance-enhancing drugs last year, it made her nervous enough to contact two members of the Drug Enforcement Administration — her parents.
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Collins had enjoyed modest success as a sprinter, with contracts from Puma and Adidas. But by 2024, with her career stalled and earnings shrunk, she retired at 29 to begin a long screening process to follow her parents into working for the DEA.
Then organizers of the Enhanced Games, a controversial sports startup, got in touch last fall with an offer. The organizers were planning a one-day competition of sprinting, swimming and weightlifting in Las Vegas that would not only allow but encourage doping. And it paid the kind of money that might take some athletes years to make — six-figure salaries, on top of prize money of up to $250,000 for event winners and $1 million for a world record.
At first, Collins worried about the drugs’ effects and whether signing on could jeopardize her DEA career. She called her parents.
“‘How would you feel about this?’” Collins asked. “And their stance really was ‘Is it illegal, is it safe, and is it prescribed?’ And once I let them know it’s legal, it’s prescribed, I’ll work with doctors closely, they were all on board in support of it, for sure.”
In the lead-up to the competition, Collins spent more than two months taking a personalized cocktail of drugs under the supervision of Enhanced. She’d felt a few side effects, such as acne and hair growth — but no regret.
On Sunday, she was one of 42 athletes to compete at the inaugural Enhanced Games in Las Vegas, an event that has been a lightning rod in the sporting world, both for and against it. Both camps believe fervently that their position is morally, ethically and scientifically correct.
Organizers said they created it to allow athletes and everyday spectators to see how far their potential can reach by “allowing you to tap into a pocket of potential that you otherwise couldn’t tap into,” said the games’ chief executive, Max Martin.
Enhanced claims it has science on its side: “If you look at the data, the only logical conclusion is that it is unethical to not allow” PEDs, said Christian Angermayer, a German billionaire who co-founded the games and is their executive chairman. “Because it is the same as if we send people and say, ‘Oh, great, you’re a coal miner, but we don’t give you a helmet.’”
Anti-doping advocates, meanwhile, view the games as a “dangerous message” that is “utterly irresponsible and immoral,” the athlete commissions of both the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said last year.
They claim the organizers’ chief motivation is to sell supplements to impressionable viewers and entice younger athletes, all while gambling with athletes’ health.
WADA’s science director last year likened the Enhanced Games to a “Roman circus, you know. You sacrifice the lives of people purely for entertainment. What’s the value of this?”
A PED cocktail
From pay for college athletes to the tech-revamped rulebooks in baseball, sports have been reshaped in recent years in ways that at first appeared radical, only to be later accepted. How quickly the Enhanced Games are embraced, or whether they ever will be, remains to be seen, because they touch one of sports’ third rails — doping.
Ben Proud, a British swimmer who was one of Enhanced’s most prominent signings because of his silver medal at the 2024 Olympics, paused when he was asked how many peers would dope if they knew they would not be caught.
“You’d hope nobody,” he said.
British track sprinter Reece Prescod said, “Maybe half.”
Ivan Rojas, the weightlifting coach at the games, said: “I call this the Transparency Games, because let’s face it, I have been involved in weightlifting for 45 years, and enhancement has always been a part of the game. And now we’re doing it openly and honestly and in a controlled environment.”
Dr. Guido Pieles, a German cardiologist who chaired the games’ independent medical commission, said the organizers’ thought process “started off as saying, ‘Take anything.’” That later changed to offering only drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Of the 42 athletes who signed up, 38 elected to use drugs. As athletes trained in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates this spring, the games’ medical board began a clinical trial lasting more than two months to study what they took and their effects. Among the 34 doping athletes who took part in the trial, 91% used testosterone or testosterone esters, 79% used human growth hormone, and 62% opted for stimulants such as Adderall. EPO, a drug long preferred by cyclists in hope of boosting their endurance, was used by 41% of athletes. Athletes will now be part of a five-year observation period.
Athletes declined to divulge what exact mix of PEDs they received. Yet many described a surreal feeling before their first doses. They likened it to forever closing a door on their time as clean athletes. Proud said he called his brother, terrified about what he was about to do.
“To me, that was a day I go from the Ben Proud that I always knew to a new person, and that was a clear distinction between never going back to old sport,” he said. “So that was scary. The first injection was to me very, very emotional, very tricky to navigate.”
But few described any moral squeamishness after the protocol began. Proud said he felt more energetic, with a higher capacity for training, as he began his protocol, but no side effects. Australian swimmer James Magnussen gained so much muscle that he began sinking in the pool and could no longer find a suit that fit. His PED protocol was adjusted. Sprinter Mike Bryan described an up-and-down experience adjusting to his “new body.”
Colombian swimmer Isabella Arcila raised a concern with organizers that the drugs could affect her future fertility. She said they responded with an offer to pay to freeze her eggs.
She took that deal, and the drugs.
“The risks were explained,” Arcila said.
Money talks
Last year, U.S. sprinter Marvin Bracy-Williams was caught doping and was issued a 45-month ban. On the day the ban came down, he signed a deal with Enhanced. He called an Enhanced official to double-check the offer’s accuracy.
“I was like, ‘Hey, yo, you sure like this comma’s supposed to be here with all these zeros?’” Bracy-Williams said.
In Olympic sports, money is scarce, and contracts from sponsors often include clauses that reduce athletes’ payouts if their performances worsen. It was why there was no hiding the chief motivation for taking part, athletes said.
“It’s a lot of money,” said Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, who last year earned $1 million from Enhanced organizers after he broke the world record in the 50-meter freestyle in a private event while on its PEDs and wearing a banned speed suit. Like any record set in an Enhanced meet, it was not officially recognized because it did not take place in a sanctioned competition.
Prescod, the British sprinter, said Enhanced’s first-place prize of $250,000 would be the equivalent of the bonus his former shoe sponsor would have paid him for winning a gold medal at a global championship. Last place Sunday paid $20,000.
“I could come in last place here and walk away with more money than getting an Olympic relay medal to [Great Britain],” he said.
The money was big enough to even draw in four non-doping athletes, even though it could jeopardize their eligibility to race in sanctioned meets.
U.S. swimmer Hunter Armstrong was one of them. He walked away Sunday with $375,000, including a win in the 50-meter backstroke. It came less than a year after swimming’s global governing body enacted a bylaw to ban athletes, coaches and officials who “support, endorse or participate in sporting events that embrace the use of scientific advancements or other practices that may include prohibited substances.” Enhanced sued World Aquatics for $800 million, saying the rule had hindered its recruitment. The suit was dismissed last fall.
Armstrong is taking World Aquatics at its word that it would determine an athlete’s eligibility case by case.
“I’d be lying if I said there was no backlash at all,” he said. “This was not a protest of any sort. I simply just wanted to come here, swim fast, win some money and not lose the opportunity to hear our national anthem at the Olympics, especially on home soil.”
World Athletics, track and field’s governing body, said in a statement last week that the conduct of an athlete competing “clean” at the Enhanced Games “will be assessed against the standards within the Integrity Code of Conduct to determine whether any violations occurred.”
The games represented a potentially huge payday for not only the athletes.
Enhanced got off the ground initially thanks to venture funding from figures like Peter Thiel and a firm led by Donald Trump Jr. But on May 8, it went public, and now it wants to use its live events as a billboard to sell many of the drugs its athletes use. It lists for sale GLP-1s, supplement blends, peptides and multimonth supplies of testosterone injections and sermorelin, among other products.
Martin, the games’ chief executive, said what was offered to customers was a toned-down version of the athletes’ protocols, likening the difference to cars driven on a Formula 1 track and those sold on any lot.
Enhanced’s top officials were repeatedly asked about their concern about customers or kids wanting to emulate the athletes’ protocols without having access to the same level of medical oversight. Martin said some products require consultations with doctors before prescriptions can be issued.
Cody Miller, who won a gold medal at the 2016 Olympics as part of a U.S. relay team alongside Michael Phelps, is part of a coaches advisory board for a Missouri-based youth swimming club. If young swimmers told Miller, 34, they wanted to use PEDs like him, he would choose “brutal honesty.” He views PEDs as a tool to help older athletes recover more quickly during training, but teens “don’t need that,” he said. “When you’re a teenager, you already recover like a superhero.”
He believes a young athlete would heed that advice. Like many athletes, Miller came out of retirement to race Sunday, collecting $500,000 for two wins. Many others were years past their prime. Rather than believe that would dull interest for spectators, Angermayer felt it would make the athletes only more relatable to audiences and customers.
“Are we using sports to promote something and make business? Yes,” he said. “That is, by the way, the definition of sports. But I think we’re using it for good stuff, while the other sports are sponsored by the most evil companies out there.”
Inaugural event
On Sunday, the inaugural Enhanced Games were held at an open-air stadium, built at a cost of $50 million, between the Vegas Strip and a casino hotel pool.
Tickets were not sold to the public but were instead handed out by invitation only to friends, family members, sponsors and investors, who sat through searing heat thanks to free drinks and plates of wagyu beef sliders, chicken-and-waffle skewers and ice cream sandwiches. Content creators roamed, recording their interactions with other attendees. It felt like a made-for-TV event, the organizers hyperaware of how they were perceived by those outside the stadium.
Giving a tour of the games’ 2,200-seat venue, Enhanced’s public relations officer carried a measuring tape, saying it was to dispel doubt that the track was non-enhanced and truly 100 meters.
To facilitate big performances, the night often played by its own rules. When an enhanced weightlifter could not break his weight class world record within the standard limit of three attempts, a fourth was granted that also failed. The men’s 100 on the track began after multiple false starts that would have led to disqualifications at a sanctioned meet.
Doping did not help on the track, where non-enhanced runners won both 100-meter races. Fred Kerley, the 2022 world champion at the distance, is serving a two-year ban for allegedly having missed three drug tests, allegations he has contested. He was said to be one of the four clean competitors here. After his victory, he chided the doping competitors that they needed to “get on that s— a little bit more” to beat him.
Women’s winner Tristan Evelyn said her clean victory proved winning took “more than just chemistry” — but added she hoped it would not diminish interest in the games.
Collins finished second in her 100-meter sprint but smiled as though she had won. Her payday of $125,000 was “bigger than any contract I ever got my entire pro career,” she said. “In one meet, in 10 seconds.”
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In the pool, parsing out the benefit drugs provided was made difficult because superfast polyurethane “super suits” that have been banned since 2009 were allowed. Emily Barclay, a 28-year-old relative unknown from Britain, swam a time in the 50-meter freestyle that would have been fast enough to finish third in the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Martin, the CEO, acknowledged afterward that he had hoped the night would reset multiple world records. But he judged success by personal records broken and attention garnered, saying the games had “dominated the internet,” where the broadcast was streamed on free platforms.
Ultimately there was one world record, in the night’s final event, when Gkolomeev’s time in the 50-meter freestyle was seven-hundredths of a second ahead of a clean record set by Cameron McEvoy. (McEvoy later posted a meme of a shouting chef with the text: “Seriously?! Thats All You Got?”)
Martin bowed by the pool to Gkolomeev after he delivered the night’s signature result. Gkolomeev had earned $1.5 million in four hours. Before he could answer a question about what message he hoped his performance would send, his coach, Brett Hawke, cut in first.
“He’s rich,” Hawke said.