Nathan McNamara | Hostility tribe
On the night of May 24, 2026, inside a designated arena at Resorts World Las Vegas, a man in a suit bowed at the feet of a swimmer and declared that humanity had been redefined. Maximilian Martin, CEO of the company behind the enhanced games, told a room of fitness influencers and biotech investors that they “changed the world.” He said this after five hours of competition that resulted in just one performance that broke the official world record, by seven-hundredths of a second, by a man wearing a swimsuit banned in real swimming, who was also using drugs.
This is the entire event in a sentence. Remove the neon and the smelling salts and the percentages of dosages flashing on the giant screen, and what you’re left with is a pharmaceutical company that hired some athletes, fed them banned substances, filmed the results, and is now using the footage to sell you those same substances.
The math didn’t work, and they knew it wouldn’t work
The stadium was simple and luxurious. Take the chains. Allow athletes to ingest large amounts of testosterone, human growth hormone, EPO, anabolic steroids and steroids under medical supervision, and watch the records fall in heaps. Founder Aaron D’Souza spent two years promising “superhumanity.” The screen bragged between events that the stadium was running on 90.5% testosterone esters, 78.6% HGH, 61.9% anabolic steroids, and 40.5% EPO, as if the steroid inventory was an admission rather than a confession.
Then they actually managed the events.
Only one world record fell throughout the night. Greek swimmer Christian Jekolomiev scored 20.81 seconds in the 50-meter freestyle, 0.07 below Cameron McEvoy’s legal mark of 20.88 seconds. He did it in a full-body leather suit that had been banned by World Aquatics years ago, meaning that even the time of steroids was powered by equipment, not just chemistry. World records in weightlifting? no one. Beatrice Perón missed her blitzing target. Boady Santavy missed the snatch record, was given a fourth try out of pity by the public address announcer, and missed again. Wesley Keats failed. Thor Bjornsson, the Game of Thrones strongman who was brought in during the draw, inhaled his smelling salts, pulled the bar up towards his knees, and was unable to push it any further to overcome the 510kg deadlift mark.
This is the part that should end the entire conversation. Three of the winners didn’t even dope. Fred Curley took the men’s 100 meters clean. Tristan Evelyn won the women’s 100 meters clean with a time of 11.25 seconds. Hunter Armstrong won the 50m backstroke clean, as he wants to maintain his eligibility for the 2028 Olympics. Drug-free athletes continued to beat chemically enhanced athletes. The whole premise of the project, that gentrification is the future and the rest of us are cowards for not embracing it, has been refuted live, on their own stage, by their competitors. James Magnussen, the first big name to sign up and who loudly promised to work his way to a million-dollar record, ended up last in the 100m final.
You can’t fail your thesis more completely than that.
There was no one for glory
The honesty of optimized games is the one thing their advocates cling to, and the one thing they got right, just not in the way they intended. There was no glory on offer in Las Vegas. There was only money.
Each event paid $250,000 to win. The world record carries a $1 million reward. The night handed out a total of $6.6 million in prizes. Ben Proud, a British Olympian, said joining was like winning a lottery ticket and walking away with a fortune of $375,000. His partner Emily Barclay, who had never competed in the Olympics before, took home the same amount. After his victory, Fred Curley did not talk about going beyond human limits. He told his rivals they needed to “deal with this bullshit a little more.” These are not pioneers chasing the edge of human potential. They are contractors who showed up to receive the check, and most of them said so clearly.
This is not a moral failure on the part of athletes. A swimmer who has not medaled in four Olympics and has a guaranteed quarter million is making a rational decision. The dishonesty lives on at a higher level, with people who dress this treatment in the language of sophistication and progress and then put it on the pay-per-view stage.
Follow the money, because the money is the point
This was never a sports league. It is a path to acquire customers in the drug trade.
The company, now publicly traded as Enhanced Group (NYSE: ENHA) after a SPAC merger that valued it at $1.2 billion, makes its money selling peptides, nutritional supplements, “performance medicine products” and telehealth subscriptions. The athletes are the show reel. Records, such as they are, are marketing. The company publicly predicted that tens of millions of regular customers would pay approximately $399 a month to be placed in their “boost” programs. The 250,000 people who streamed the event on YouTube were not in the audience. They were the leading sales list.
And look at who funded it. Peter Thiel, who bankrolled the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that destroyed Gawker, with D’Souza as the attorney directing it. Investment fund linked to Donald Trump Jr., cryptocurrency investor Balaji Srinivasan. Biotech financier Christian Angermayer, whose portfolio spans across longevity and drugs. This is a very specific slice of money, the kind that treats human biology as an asset class and regulators as a nuisance, and has found a mathematical shell to sell drugs directly to consumers. The libertarian framing that D’Souza likes, “my body, my choice,” is not a principle here. It is a shield of responsibility.
Supervision is theater
Advocates will say that it’s all medically supervised, the materials are FDA-approved, doctors monitor everything, and it’s safer than doping that’s already happening in the shadows. Doctors who actually understand this disagree, but doctors with reputations to protect have gone the other way.
Aaron Baggish, a professor of medicine who had spent twenty years with Boston’s athletic teams, was asked to be the enhanced games doctor and immediately declined. His ruling on the supervision court was that a doctor who watches you take these drugs makes it just as safe as a doctor who watches you smoke cigarettes. The material offered is not prohibited as some wise committee does not approve the submission. EPO thickens your blood and causes clots. Testosterone abuse is linked to heart disease and infertility. They are banned because they harm people, and the cover of clinical trials does not eliminate heart disease.
The head of the World Anti-Doping Agency called for the event to be stopped completely. USAID’s Travis Tygart called it “a dangerous clown show that puts profit over principle.” Sport Integrity Australia has condemned the risks to athletes’ health. Enhanced Games’ response to this wall of medical and regulatory opposition was an $800 million antitrust lawsuit against World Aquatics, USA Swimming, and WADA. When the experts say you’re putting people at risk, and your answer is to sue the experts, you’ve told everyone exactly what kind of operation you’re running.
What it was actually like
So here’s your honest scorecard from the night that supposedly changed the world. One beaten record, by a guy wearing illegal gear, doing drugs, by a margin you could blink and miss. Zero records in two of the three sports. A strong man who was beaten by his past. Clean athletes hit the juice more frequently. The main signature is finally finished. And a CEO leans on stage and declares victory over the reality he just spent five hours contradicting.
The improved Games are not the Olympics of the future. They’re a commercial with a starting gun. The athletes are not pioneers, they are paid extra and were honest enough to admit that they were there for the money. The guys funding it aren’t visionaries pushing humanity forward, they’re investors who figured out that you could sell steroids to the public if you staged a circus loud enough to drown out the doctors. The only people in the building chasing something bigger than a paycheck are the three who turned down drugs and won anyway.
They promise to redefine the human body. What they actually built was a storefront, and they called it a revolution because “We sell you testosterone” doesn’t sell tickets.
References
- Sean Engle, “Improved Games claim we changed the world but only one record has been broken and three athletes have won clean,” The Guardian, May 25, 2026.
- “First-ever ‘Enhanced Gaming’ concludes in Las Vegas,” WORLD (wng.org), May 25, 2026.
- “Improved Games results: Swimmer Kristian Jokolomiev breaks world record in final event to earn $1M bonus,” Yahoo Sports, May 24, 2026.
- “2026 enhanced games”, Wikipedia (accessed May 26, 2026).
- Jack Otway, “Enhanced gaming backfires as only one world record is broken during controversial Las Vegas event,” GB News, 25 May 2026.
- “Enhanced Games are on Sunday. Here’s what to know about the controversial event,” NPR, May 24, 2026.
- “Controversial pitch for new sporting event: Performance-enhancing drugs welcomed,” NBC News, May 24, 2026.
- “Enhanced game creator to go public via SPAC merger,” Crunchbase News.
- “Peter Thiel-backed Olympic alternative to steroids in talks to raise $300 million,” Fortune, July 5, 2024.
- “Welcome to enhanced gaming, where doping is encouraged,” Yahoo Sports.
- “WADA Head Condemns PED-Fueled Enhanced Games: ‘It Must Be Stopped,’” CBS Sports.
- “Anti-doping bodies condemn ‘dangerous’ enhanced games,” Malay Mail/AFP, 23 May 2025.
- “Enhanced Games files $800M lawsuit against critics” ESPN.
- “Doping Games Expects Tens of Millions of Customers to Receive $399 a Month,” Sporting Intelligence.
- “World’s Strongest Man Havor ‘Thor’ Björnsson Tries to Break Enhanced Games Records,” StockTitan. (The company is now trading as Enhanced Group, NYSE:ENHA, since May 8, 2026; APAD’s previous ticker was A Paradise Acquisition SPAC Shell on NASDAQ.)
