Enhanced This!

Geoff Girvitz· May 29, 2026 · 4 min read

I don’t know if you followed the Enhanced Games - the All-Drug Olympics, but they landed with a dull thud and I couldn’t be more delighted. Sit down, pour yourself a cup of Haterade and let’s talk about it.

First of all – and this is important – most health-related grifts tend to be about supplements. So, whether it’s an Herbalife protein formulation, an untested peptide, or good, old-fashioned anabolic steroids, the promise is aesthetic and/or athletic success, and then to sell you the dream at a high markup.

Anyone selling supplements will charge more for the assembled ingredients than the cost. That’s fine. That’s business, baby! If they exaggerate the benefits, that’s ethically gross but it may or may not cross a legal line. That’s why grifters like to imply incredible change without stating it explicitly. What really pushes things over the top, from predatory to sociopathic, is when the ingredients cause harms – or at least haven’t been carefully vetted to ensure they don’t cause harms. That’s where we are with direct-to-consumer peptides – many of them are not doing what they’re claimed to do. Others appear to be harmful without any upside.

What does grifting look like on steroids? You attack trust in pharmaceuticals, public health, and science writ large. And then you go after the regulations designed to protect consumers. And then you sell your own solutions. Do these solutions actually need to work? The folks behind the Enhanced Games don’t burden themselves with those kinds of petty details. The cast of characters includes, of course, Bond villain Peter Thiel, who, in a very on-brand choice, has just moved to Argentina.

Thiel is part of a group of guys who were really good at exploiting technical loopholes and/or a specific type of coding to make money, so people started to think of them as geniuses with a broad-reaching understanding of the world. And that’s a problem because their ideas are stupid and bad. They are also prone to running roughshod over everything that civilization has toiled to create in service of the common good. But that’s only because it’s harder for them to make money that way. But no, I don’t have any strong feelings about them.

And what of the performances at the Enhanced Games? The one world record set was in swimming and made use of a highly buoyant suit that’s banned in the Olympics. That’s as good as it got. Two of the first-place finishers won without the use of drugs, which is amazing and hilarious. Sprinter, Fred Kerley notably finished well ahead of his competitors – albeit light years behind the world record. Sports reporter (and Bang alum) Morgan Campbell put the performance of last-place finisher, Michael Bryan, into context: “Bryan’s 10.87 would have placed him fourth at the Toronto Catholic school board senior boys final.” The times may have been better but three false starts will drain a runner’s energy. Tell that to the guy whose shoelace came untied.

Do I think the drug-assisted athletes could have performed better? Yes. Do I think that middle-aged athletes could return to Olympic glory? No. Health risks notwithstanding, the problem wasn’t the drugs so much as a lack of cohesion, organization, or execution (see “stupid and bad” above). For example, Haftor Björnsson (not exactly a PED newbie), should have been able to best his previous 510 kg (1,124.4 lb) world deadlift record but the lifting platform was, by some accounts, more slippery than it should have been. Small details matter at the level of world-class performance. But maybe not to the organizers. For example, they lost the signal on the first of the events during the telecast.

But what does the stock market say?

LOL

Schadenfreude aside, what I really want to tell you is that the basics work. If you are trying to minimize your health risks and strengthen your overall energy and function, then doing the basics (combined with a hospitable environment that includes access to healthcare) will take you 85-90% of the way there. You don’t need a serum produced by supervillains and you shouldn’t need to be rich. Move and exercise consistently. Eat reasonably. Sleep sufficiently. Find community. Avoid obvious risks. And get support where you need it. And if you want to take things further? Experiment with, iterate, personalize, and then perfect those same health practices. That will take you to the 99.9% mark of whatever genetic hand you were dealt. You may have some life priorities that get in the way of that perfection – careers and families and all that stuff. So, you may be actively trading perfection for other personal values, which is fine and pretty adult, actually.

And that final 0.1% (plus a bonus point or two?) If your livelihood is based on aesthetics or athletic performance, make the choices you need to make. But no matter what, beware of grifters because it’s one thing to sell your soul to the devil at the crossroads, but it’s really embarrassing when you’re still not that great at guitar.

GG

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