I went to the so-called steroid Olympics, to understand why Silicon Valley is obsessed with peptides

The man is Boady Santavy — a two-time Olympic weight-lifting contestant from Canada — and he has muscles that look culled from the Marvel Cinematic Universe: massive, cartoonish arms that might as well belong to a superhero rather than a real human.

Santavy is attempting to beat the world record for the men’s snatch — a lift of 183 kilograms, or approximately 403 pounds. After a tortured few seconds, Santavy drops the bar — an official “no lift” — and, with a look of animated dismay on his face, hobbles away, visibly cursing.

Santavy is one of a small horde of 42 athletic contestants — weight lifters, swimmers, and track runners — that have gathered in Las Vegas over Memorial Day weekend to compete in the Enhanced Games, a unique (and, by now, quite notorious) athletic competition in which almost all of the participating athletes are on performance enhancing drugs.

Broadly derided by critics as the “steroid Olympics,” the games have taken the deeply unprecedented step of juicing many of their athletes to the gills — anabolics, testosterone, peptides, human growth hormones, and more are all in circulation. All of that chemical enhancement has taken place under the watchful eye of a team of medical professionals. Indeed, the competitors — a hodgepodge of athletes from different ages, skill levels, and backgrounds — spent 12 weeks in the United Arab Emirates at an elite compound, where they trained for the weekend’s event while working closely with doctors who tailored their “protocols” — or drug cocktails — to their individual needs.

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – MAY 24: (L-R) Kristian Gkolomeev, Shane Ryan and James Magnussen are seen during the Enhanced Games at Resorts World Las Vegas on May 24, 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Image Credits:(Photo by Greg Doherty/Getty Images for Enhanced)

The athletes are also being paid “appearance fees” just to participate in the contest and, like Santavy, any competitor who happens to break a world record or place first during their competitive feats will be gifted extra cash — up to $1 million in the case of the 100 meter sprint and 50 meter freestyle.

In other words: Enhanced has taken the rulebook for professional athletic competition and aggressively spiraled it out the window.

Why am I, a technology journalist, covering this event?

Odd as it might seem for a place associated with weak-limbed nerds, Silicon Valley is largely to blame for Enhanced. Indeed, the bizarre spectacle is the work of a former startup that was founded by veterans of crypto, AI, and biotech firms, and that has been backed by the likes of mega-investor Peter Thiel and former Coinbase executive Balaji Srinivasan. The event is also at the forefront of a growing industry that Silicon Valley has embraced with open arms — that of human enhancement, in which injectable drugs and ingestible supplements serve as a source of both physical empowerment and good business.

Traditional athletic health organizations, of course, hate it. The World Anti-Doping Agency — the regulatory body for the Olympics — has called the Enhanced Games “dangerous,” and Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, describes it as a “clown show that puts profit over people.”

Steroids have long been viewed warily by the international health community, and even federally approved consumer drugs have stirred some concern among health professionals.

However, Enhanced’s organizers argue that they are actually the good guys — that they are trying to fix a persistent bug in organized sports that has existed since forever. That bug is that a whole lot of athletes are already doping — they’re just doing it secretly. The secrecy increases risk, as there may be limited medical oversight of how the athletes are using them. Conversely, in the Enhanced version of sport, athletes self-admittedly do the drugs un