But God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?”
(Luke 12:20)
The Definitive, Insane, Record-Smashing Story of the Enhanced Games
I felt embarrassed for the protagonists of this story as I remained glued to the story, like one would be unable to rip themselves away from the worst reality TV show. Highlights:
Neither Thiel, D’Souza, nor Angermayer are huge sports fans. (“We’re three gay guys,” D’Souza says.) But over roast lamb, Yorkshire pudding, and fine wine the group got to talking about human enhancement, longevity, and all the rest of it, and by the end of the meal both Angermayer and Thiel had agreed to invest. D’Souza has proved to be a savvy fundraiser. He has the valuable ability to keep a straight face while saying something obviously ridiculous—engaging with him is “like talking to a bar of soap,” one doping expert told me…
I met D’Souza at a plush coworking space in West London where Enhanced had set up a small office. Looking at the website back then, it was hard to take the idea seriously. D’Souza had co-opted the language of the LGBTQ community for his venture—the site talked about “coming out” as enhanced. There was a section devoted to covertly editing Wikipedia articles to, for instance, change the word “cheated” in an article about an athlete caught doping to “fought for science and bodily sovereignty.” On the official Enhanced Games Discord channel, which was mainly populated by bodybuilders sharing before and after pictures, I found a zip file called “The Arsenal” which was full of memes bashing the International Olympic Committee, the details of which are actually too cringe to describe…
It turned out that the pool manager at the club where Hawke normally worked didn’t want Magnussen training there either. So they ended up doing the majority of the preparation for the world record attempt at the 25-yard swimming pool in Hawke’s apartment complex—the one open to all residents. There were no lane markings and no blocks to dive from. There were no splash-over areas for the water to go into, so Magnussen was constantly fighting his own turbulence. “We would get a crowd sometimes. People would walk past and stare in amazement and sit and watch,” Hawke says. The only saving grace was the weather: a cold wet winter by California standards meant that they never had to share the pool with the other residents, although they did sometimes have to shoo away some ducks…
He started his regimen of daily injections in mid-October, and his body soon started to change. In hindsight, he thinks he is a “super responder” to performance enhancements. “My strength was through the roof,” he says. “I was squatting 250 kilos, which I would say is at least 20 percent stronger than any other swimmer in history. It was insane.” Every few weeks, he would drive to a clinic in Los Angeles for a battery of blood tests and heart checks. Mostly he just trained—twice a day, every day for the first seven weeks in the US. But while the drugs helped his muscles bounce back quicker, the intense workload left no time for his central nervous system to recover. He was burning out.
In December, just when he should have been nearing his physical peak for the record attempt, he got a toothache, and his face “swelled up like a balloon.” He spent Christmas Day in the hospital, having an abscess drained and a root canal operation. The attempt had been pushed back from December to February, and for Magnussen what was meant to be an eight week stint away from friends and family became five months. He spent New Year’s alone in an Airbnb, thousands of miles from home…
Enhanced began finalizing a deal to host the Games in Las Vegas not long after the election. “A hundred percent the reason they’re happening in the US is because Trump won,” says Angermayer. A few months later, he secured investment from 1789 Capital, Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, and Enhanced would find itself ideally positioned to align itself with RFK Jr.’s crusade to “Make America Healthy Again.” (“He takes enhancements himself,” D’Souza says of Kennedy. “He is very pro–human enhancement.”)…
Far from throwing off the shackles of the World Anti Doping Agency, it seemed as if Enhanced had simply re-created it, with a slightly different red line. The great irony of the Enhanced Games is that athletes who take part are likely to be tested much more often than they would have been had they stayed in clean competition…
After Magnussen recovered from his root canal surgery, he and Hawke tried to counteract some of the effects the enhancement program was having on his body shape…
The Enhanced team had been scouring the country looking for 2009-era supersuits for Magnussen to wear—contacting former swimmers, paying thousands to buy their old gear and have it flown to Greensboro. They managed to find four: two for Magnussen, two for Gkolomeev. But Magnussen had put on so much muscle that he physically couldn’t fit into the suit. The night before his first attempt at the record he tried one on and it ripped. Then the second suit ripped as well…
All through my reporting I’d been struggling to understand what was in it for the investors—why billionaires with no interest in sport were so interested in disrupting it. Toward the end of the presentation in Vegas, it all clicked into place when D’Souza announced the launch of Enhanced Performance Products—a new line of supplements inspired by the ones athletes will be taking to prepare for the Games. This pill helped me run 100 meters in nine seconds, and now you can buy it too. The model isn’t the Olympics or the World Cup. It’s Red Bull.
“They buy sporting assets to sell an energy drink,” D’Souza told me. “That energy drink is 90 percent gross margin. They don’t do the bottling or manufacturing, that’s all done by outsourced service providers. And Red Bull is a multibillion-dollar company owned by two families…
I’m not ruining any of the amazing narrative arc with any of these, I just wanted to pull some the most surreal vignettes.
I was reminded first of a St. Vincent song from her 2007 debut Marry Me: The Apocalypse Song
All of your praying
Amounts to just one breath
Please keep your victory
But give me little death
Then I thought of her more recent track, Broken Man
On the street, I’m a king-sized killer
I can make your kingdom come
On my feet, I’m an earthquake shakin’
So open up, my little one
Hey, what are you looking at?
Who the hell do you think I am?
And what are you looking at?
Like you never seen a broken man
“People would walk past and stare in amazement…” Hey, what are you looking at? Who the hell do you think I am?
I just remembered St. Vincent got Bowie’s last drummer for that record, I didn’t realize he was also playing live. She’s summoning some Bowie here.