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SHANIA COLLINS IS having second thoughts. On an early morning in March, she sits in a conference room on the top floor of the futuristic Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City tower in Abu Dhabi. At the front of the room, flanked by a row of fellow medical providers, a doctor reviews in painstaking detail the benefits and risks associated with a substantial list of performance-enhancing drugs.
Collins glances at the collection of fellow athletes filling the seats around her and worries that she should be taking notes. She’s too focused on the feeling of her heart pounding in her chest to pull out her phone. When the presentation draws to a close, she walks down the hallway into a private room to learn how to administer her steroids in the months ahead. A nurse demonstrates how to use and reload her injector pen, and Collins wipes a pair of sweaty palms against her legs before giving it a try.
The hospital visit is something of a formality. Collins decided more than a week ago what she would take and had been excited about getting started. But now, 7,000 miles from home on the brink of a decision she can’t undo, reality sinks in hard.
Oh, this is real, she thinks to herself. Are we doing this or not?
Six months earlier, Collins had her first conversation with officials from a new company creating a stir in the Olympic community. They were offering six-figure salaries and eye-popping prize money for athletes to compete in the Enhanced Games, where PEDs are not only allowed but encouraged. The first event would be May 24 on the edge of the Las Vegas Strip. They told Collins she wouldn’t be required to take anything, but the company would provide medical supervision if she opted to juice. She had a chance to be a pioneer, they told her, helping to change how both sports and society use drugs for a healthier, happier existence. The idea sounded, frankly, a little crazy as she mulled it over. Or was the tightly regulated world she was used to suddenly the one that didn’t make much sense?
“It wasn’t an immediate yes,” Collins says.
For more on the Enhanced GamesDan Murphy joins E60 for a deep look at the Enhanced Games in a one-hour documentary premiering July 2 on ESPN.
At 29, Collins had retired from professional track a couple years earlier, cutting short what was once a promising career. In college, she set a school record in the 100-meter dash at the University of Tennessee. A year later, in 2019, she won a gold medal at the U.S. Indoor Championships. But as she should have been entering her prime, Collins started to lose a step on her regular competition.Her decline was infuriating, it felt inexplicable. Each year at the U.S. trials in Oregon, she remembers fuming before she even crossed the finish line. Sprinters she had been stronger than before had switched coaches and suddenly found a new gear that Collins couldn’t match. It wasn’t technique. She was certain some of them were doping, and she had no faith that they would be caught.”It just felt unfair,” she says.Rather than break the rules, she walked away. She decided to follow her parents into the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, where they had enjoyed long and action-packed careers. She passed the agency’s physical exam, strength test and mental evaluation. All that was left was her polygraph test when Enhanced made her an offer. She had to choose: four months at the DEA Academy at Quantico or four months training for the Enhanced Games in Abu Dhabi.Collins has always lived in a world of clearly drawn lines. The Enhanced Games felt gray. She worried about how using steroids would impact her heart or her ability to have children someday. She worried about acne and a deeper voice and what others might think. She worried about losing her new career at the DEA.Then again, she told herself, none of the drugs the athletes are allowed to take are illegal. They’re just banned in sports. She and her mother took to calling it the “Honest Games” as they debated the idea. At night, Collins would lay awake in bed, unable to shake her curiosity.She missed the moments leading up to a competition, the final hours when she would put on headphones, slip into her racing kit and quietly do her hair and makeup. It felt like preparing for battle, putting on her “war paint,” she called it. She wondered what it would feel like to be at the top of her game again. She wondered whether she could beat the times of the women she thought were cheating. Quantico could wait.Sprinter Shania Collins, a former national champion, walked away from track because she believed many of her competitors were doping. Natalie Naccache for ESPN, Getty ImagesNow, Collins is wondering one last time if she made the right call as she rides from the medical center back to the sprawling resort where Enhanced’s athletes are living during their training camp. The ultramodern, crane-filled Abu Dhabi skyline rolls past her window, but Collins can’t take her eyes off the clear plastic container the size of a pencil box sitting in her lap. The drugs she has been taught to fear stare right back at her.When it’s time to administer their first doses that afternoon, Collins and a handful of other female sprinters decide to take the plunge together. Weeks earlier, one of these women had held Collins’s hand as she slid inside an MRI machine as part of an exhaustive battery of medical tests. Now, they crack nervous jokes as they tear open alcohol wipes and try to remember the procedures. Collins preps her injector pen.”No crossing back now,” a teammate says. Collins laughs and swabs a spot on her abdomen. She braces herself for pain, for a jolt of energy running through her body. The needle gives her a tiny pinch. She barely feels it.”OK, now you’re enhanced,” she says. “We’ll see what happens from here.”CHRISTIAN ANGERMAYER HAS no doubt he’s right.By the time the first Enhanced Games ends Sunday night, the company expects to have spent more than $50 million on its dramatic introduction. Twenty million is coming from Angermayer, making the German-born biotech billionaire Enhanced’s biggest investor by a significant margin.At 48, Angermayer is fit. He has no creases in the corner of his eyes or bags underneath them. He has a full head of dark hair. He says his testosterone levels, thanks to regular injections, are exactly the same as they were when he first had them tested around the time he turned 30. His brain, sharpened by the dose of modafinil he deploys on long days, whirs along at an intimidating pace.He is certain the world is on the cusp of joining him in embracing PEDs, and he is betting big that Enhanced will help push us there. The company is not just aiming to destigmatize steroid use for elite athletes, but for regular people like you and me as well. They plan to use the games as a marketing vehicle to sell supplements and prescription drugs on their online telehealth marketplace.”I think we’re going to look back already in two or three years and we will have changed a lot,” Angermayer says.He says he has already had discussions with professional sports owners in the U.S. who are keeping an eye on Enhanced. Imagine the upside, he says, of NFL players who can recover well enough to add an extra game to the calendar or NBA stars who are less concerned with load management during their lengthy seasons.Angermayer is prone to casting outlandish, attention-grabbing statements and then steadily reeling them back toward reality, which is partially what attracted him to Enhanced Games in the first place. The company’s founder, Aron D’Souza, initially pitched the Games as a competition that would “smash world records” while inspiring a new era of “superhumanity.” The introduction inspired dystopian visions of a drug-fueled free-for-all. In reality, athletes are limited to using FDA-approved substances from a handful of categories: mostly stimulants, anabolic steroids such as testosterone, human growth hormone and other peptides. Rather than passing drug tests, the athletes are required to clear a medical screening before they can compete.Editor’s Picks
The concept troubles medical experts such as Martin Chandler, who has studied PED usage as a research fellow at the University of Birmingham for the last 20 years. Chandler says that while therapeutic doses of testosterone (about 400 milligrams per month) are relatively low-risk, we know very little about the long-term impact of taking larger quantities for lengthy periods of time. He says testosterone can act as a “supercharger” for building muscle, but it can also harm the cardiovascular system and cause other organs to age faster. The limits of a safe dose can vary widely from one person to the next.
Enhanced asked its athletes to refrain from sharing their specific regimens to avoid copycats, but Angermayer and Enhanced CEO Max Martin both say they have personal prescriptions to take larger doses of testosterone than what many of their athletes are receiving. The company is conducting a five-year clinical trial with the athletes to see how their bodies are impacted by PEDs.
This week, Enhanced revealed that 36 of its 42 athletes participated in the clinical trial. Among them, the majority took testosterone (91%) and human growth hormone (79%) during training camp. Other popular substances included Adderall (62%), erythropoietin (41%) and the anabolic steroid Deca-Durabolin (29%).
Chandler says the handful of athletes who were part of the trial without using PEDs — a very small control group — and the large number of other variables in how the athletes trained make it hard to take any of the data the company collects seriously.
Angermayer says he’s confident the study will confirm these PEDs are safe when used under proper medical supervision. Enhanced, which was valued at $1.2 billion when it went public in May, is banking on it. The boom of drugs such as GLP-1s led Angermayer to believe Enhanced is jumping into a market headed toward exponential growth in the next 10 years, with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. Soon, he says, we’ll view doctor-prescribed substances that help us with everything from muscle recovery to an IQ boost as not much different than taking a daily multivitamin.
But cultural shifts are not fueled by data. Enhanced wants to change our instincts about steroids, to reverse the feelings of danger and shame that have been drilled into sports fans who’ve witnessed decades of drug abuse and scandal. They’re hoping Sunday’s competition is a major first step in getting there.
“The ordinary person, the non-sports person, thinks, ‘Oh there must be something wrong, that’s why they are banned,'” Angermayer says. “It’s a big opportunity to really shape the zeitgeist.”
Cody Miller won two medals at the 2016 Olympics, including as part of the iconic U.S. relay team that delivered Michael Phelps his final gold. He remembers exactly what it felt like to move through the water that day. Natalie Naccache for ESPN, AP PhotoCODY MILLER’S JOURNEY to the Enhanced Games started on YouTube.In 2004, Miller was 12 years old at home in Las Vegas as he watched a teenage Michael Phelps explode into stardom with six gold medals at the Athens Olympics. Shortly after, his local swim team got to meet Josh Davis, co-captain of the 2000 Olympic squad. For Miller, it was “like meeting Spider-Man.” He wanted to be an Olympian. Their power was a mystery. He wished there was some way to learn how they reached the pinnacle of their sport.A dozen years later, Miller was there with them. He stood next to Phelps on the gold medal podium at the 2016 Rio Games as a member of the 4×100-meter medley relay team that helped the Olympic legend capture his final career medal. He also won bronze in the 100-meter breaststroke. He struggles now to describe what it felt like to celebrate alongside his childhood heroes. But ask what it felt like to actually be in the water, and he bubbles over with excitement. He remembers “like it was yesterday.” In swimming, he says, it’s called perfect kinetic alignment.”Your rhythm is in flow. Your stroke is fully connected. You’re powerful but smooth, you’re fast but not forced and you’re just riding high on the water.” He’s looking off into the distance now, thinking back at his 24-year-old self moving in perfect harmony.”It’s like you’re always chasing that dragon, right?”Chasing dragons in the pool was a memory for Miller by the time he hit 34 with a pair of young boys and a mortgage. He built a successful YouTube channel by teaching others how to train. He talked about swimming, looking into the computer camera in a home office with the newspaper clips and trophies from his career neatly captured and framed behind him.Then last May, swimming message boards lit up in controversy when the Enhanced Games revealed one of its first athletes, Greek Olympian Kristian Gkolomeev, had claimed a $1 million prize for surpassing the 50-meter freestyle world record after just a few weeks of training with PEDs. They shared video of Gkolomeev’s swim at a Silicon Valley-inspired launch event announcing their plans to host the first Enhanced Games in May 2026.Miller chimed in on his channel. It was an impressive time. It was crazy money. He laughed at the idea that he would join himself. But the premise intrigued him. He wasn’t interested in condemning it. If nothing else, it was good content.He and his wife, Ali, a swimming coach, batted the concept around in conversation in their kitchen. Steroids, they had always been taught, were incredibly dangerous — a risk not worth taking. But Miller had buddies from the gym now who had doctors prescribing them testosterone therapy. What was safe? Where was the line? What about the teenagers who idolized swimming stars? What kind of message did it send? Cody asked Ali to come on camera to talk about it.”It scares the living daylights out of me,” Ali told his subscribers.German billionaire Christian Angermayer has spent $20 million on Enhanced Games, which he believes will help normalize steroid use in sports — and society. Greg Doherty/Getty Images for EnhancedCOLLINS WAKES HER first morning on PEDs with the uneasy feeling that something is wrong. She had trouble falling asleep the night before due to heart palpitations.”I actually feel my heart in my chest,” she tells Enhanced’s on-site doctor.You’re nervous, he says, it’s only anxiety.The first days on their new protocol bring more mental changes than physical ones for the athletes in Abu Dhabi. Some feel stronger and faster immediately, a placebo effect. Some are nervous and sluggish as their bodies adjust.Collins notices swelling in her legs, painful at times. She tweaks her diet, adding more electrolytes to offset the impact of what she’s taking. Soon, the protocol becomes a regular part of her routine. Three weeks in, Collins steps up to a barbell loaded with 80 kilograms during an afternoon lifting session — more weight than she has ever moved for a hang clean. The bar flies off the ground. Dang, she thinks, Now I see it.Her worries start to fade too. She had downloaded an app to test if her voice was getting deeper, and her pitch remains the same. Her skin is clear of acne. She notices hair growing in a little faster, but otherwise her nerves are fading.”I feel more at ease,” she says in early April. “I’m sleeping better, I’m lifting better. I feel like I’m a little more diesel looking.”TOM MURRAY PRESSES a scoop of freshly ground coffee beans into the stainless steel portafilter of his favorite new toy — a gleaming Italian-made espresso machine. It occupies the countertop in his home at the end of a quiet street on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He has been tinkering for years in search of the ideal shot of espresso.We sit at the kitchen counter with our cups as his wife produces a plate of homemade pistachio biscotti. Fewer and fewer people call on Murray now, she says, to tap into the wisdom he has gathered in a lifetime of trying to protect athletes and their sports.Murray is president emeritus of the world-renowned Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute. He was assigned to study the ethics of performance-enhancing drugs when he began his career in the 1970s and has served as a leading voice on the controversial topic.In the 1980s, he joined the U.S. Olympic Committee’s medical commission to help set doping policies. The assignment was immediately frustrating. Drug testers were woefully behind in a cat-and-mouse battle with drugmakers. Leaders of the Olympic movement were not eager to shine a light on a problem they could not solve. Coming up with a clear method for determining what substances should be allowed in sports had been a vexing problem since the Olympic movement’s first attempts to create regulations.Collins was on her way to a career in fighting drug trafficking in the DEA before joining the Enhanced Games. A month into taking PEDs, she reported she was sleeping better and lifting more. Natalie Naccache for ESPN”To define doping is, if not impossible, at best extremely difficult,” wrote Sir Arthur Porritt, who led the first IOC commission on doping in the 1960s. “And yet everyone who takes part in competitive sport or who administers it knows exactly what it means. The definition lies not in words but in integrity of character.”It would be nearly 40 years before a cycling scandal prompted the IOC and several countries to create a more concrete standard by forming the World Anti-Doping Agency in 1999. The organization assigned a small team of lawyers and sports officials to write WADA’s first code in the early 2000s based on three criteria. Along with banning substances that would make sports unsafe or unfair, the group also wanted to find a way to prohibit any changes that would violate the “spirit of sport.” For help to define the nebulous concept, they went looking for a philosopher. They called Murray.”What we seek in sport,” Murray says from his Cape Cod living room, “is outstanding performances that are a result of both natural talents and how the athlete perfects that talent through things that we think are admirable.”LASIK eye surgery, for example, does not violate the spirit of sport even if it results in an athlete with better than 20/20 vision. Sewing webbing between a swimmer’s fingers to create fins would seem to be an obvious no. Those lines get blurry as we move away from the extremes. Why are the supersuits that led to an avalanche of swimming world records banned while the running shoes that have recently helped push humans under a two-hour marathon are celebrated? The same questions arise with what athletes put in their bodies. Creatine is OK. At one point, too much caffeine was outlawed.
The Enhanced Games is built on the premise that WADA’s lines are outdated and arbitrary. FDA approval is a more logical barometer for safety, Angermayer and his team argue. And what is the spirit of sport if not the constant pursuit of making ourselves a little bit better?
Murray acknowledges that the human-drawn lines he helped to craft will always be somewhat imperfect and subject to change. But anabolic steroids, he argues, are firmly on the wrong side of the line because they prevent athletes from “being the cause of their own brilliance.”
I tell Murray that ever since learning about the Enhanced Games, I’ve wrestled with whether that brilliance will feel any duller when it comes time to actually watch the athletes compete. The magic of sports lies in our ability to watch great athletes straining for a finish line, screaming in joy or agony, and to feel those same emotions ourselves. We can marvel at their otherworldly talent and still dream about being in their shoes. It’s no different than a great piece of art or music that can inspire both awe and a deep, universal understanding of the emotion behind it. The science already infused into our sports hasn’t cheapened that feeling for me. But where’s the line?
Murray is certain where his line is drawn. He has no plans to watch the Enhanced Games. He says he’s not offended by the debate. It’s one he has had many times in the past. What does offend him, though, is his belief that Enhanced is making its arguments in bad faith. They’re not exploring human potential, he says. They’re a marketing scheme designed to sell drugs on the internet.
“They’re not really upsetting the meaning and value of sports. They’re misunderstanding it,” he says, looking down at his hands in his lap. “It makes me sad.”
THE COUNTERTOP IN the sitting room of Miller’s hotel suite in Abu Dhabi looks like a GNC sidewalk sale, occupied from one end to the other with more than a dozen bottles of supplements. All of them are substances he was allowed to take during his career in traditional swimming.
He’s sitting nearby inflating a new, large exercise ball with a hand pump. Miller starts his mornings with a series of chest-opening stretches on the exercise ball. Other than his time in the pool, he’ll typically fill his day with a weightlifting session, a massage, a trip to the sauna or time in the sun while wearing a set of large, above-the-knee compression boots to help restore his leg strength. When he walks past a hyperbaric chamber set up in the hotel hallway, he eyes it with the type of lust normal people reserve for a bakery case full of pastries. It turns out training to be a world-class sprinter is largely an exercise in moving as little as possible.
“There is a lot that’s hard work ethic, but just as important as that is rest ethic,” Miller explains.
The PEDs he’s taking are largely aimed at helping him rest and recover. One more dial to tweak in an equation that has served him well since his time as an Olympian. Two weeks into his cycle in April, Miller is thrilled that the biggest change he has noted is his sleep quality. The goal is not to pack on as much muscle as possible. He’s closely monitoring his weight, which has inched up from the low 190s close to 200 pounds. He’s not interested in getting any bigger.
“It’s not as crazy science experiment-y as people want to believe,” Miller says. “…I understand why people would be a little freaked out by it or, like, see it as this radical thing. I get that, but it’s really not that. My body’s like a Formula 1 car. We’re just trying to fine-tune everything, man.”
Miller starts his day with a series of chest-opening stretches on an exercise ball. He says PEDs mainly help him with rest and recovery. Natalie Naccache for ESPNIt is, of course, easier and safer to fine-tune with a pit crew of experts and a budget of roughly $100,000 per athlete for testing and medical care. Chandler, the University of Birmingham researcher, says his bigger concern is what impact the Enhanced Games could have on a general population that is dramatically more interested in using drugs to improve their lives than a generation ago.Miller and his wife had wrestled with the same question in conversations in their family kitchen when he started seriously considering joining the new company. Would his teenage YouTube fans understand the line between safe use for an adult and steroid abuse? How would they explain the difference to their sons when they got old enough to ask about it?They reached a consensus: Highlighting the safe and responsible ways to use PEDs under medical supervision could do more good than harm. Miller says he likes watching UFC fighters pummel one another in the octagon and Alex Honnold climb mountains without a rope, but wouldn’t recommend that most people try them at home either. And while he is collecting a paycheck from a company that very much encourages average people to try PEDs, he says he’s more comfortable promoting their business than the fast food and sugary soda sponsors that fund the Olympics.Justifications? They’re trade-offs. In return, at 34, he has another chance to chase the magic feeling of being in perfect kinetic alignment. He’ll never have another Olympic gold medal draped around his neck, but he has a chance to once again drop into the water and feel at the very top of his craft. This time, his sons will get a chance to watch him compete. The boys each gave their dad a stuffed animal to help when Miller misses them during training camp. They sit at the foot of his bed, a pair of dragons.Most of the Enhanced athletes trained for three months in Abu Dhabi, where they also received their PEDs. Natalie Naccache for ESPNCOLLINS IS STANDING at the window of her hotel room at the Resorts World Casino in Las Vegas a week before the inaugural Enhanced Games. She can see the custom-built venue for the competition down below, undergoing its final stages of construction. The weightlifting platforms are set. A four-lane pool runs parallel to the straight 100-meter stretch of track where she’ll race.A day earlier, Collins tried on her new black one-piece racing kit with her name printed down the spine. It was her first time wearing one in more than two years. She beamed at the E+ logo on her chest in the mirror.She is visibly stronger, sculpted shoulders and biceps that weren’t there before. No heavy heart beats, no sweaty palms. She is certain where she stands now. As long as a doctor prescribed it, as long as she can confidently describe it in a polygraph test for the DEA someday, she sees nothing to fear with performance-enhancing drugs.”It was the unknown for me, venturing into the unknown. Is this going to work? Is it dangerous?” she says. “Now, I’m on the other side. I know myself more. That girl and this are two totally different women.”Collins has found answers to countless questions since joining the Enhanced Games — from reporters, loved ones, track fans and herself. I’ve asked her about what’s fair. As sports fans, we have accepted many of the technologies and substances — from protein powders and hyperbaric chambers to carefully engineered running shoes — that help athletes reach new peaks. Is this a step too far?I’ve asked her about what’s safe. We’ve made peace with the inevitable short- and long-term health risks all athletes face to be the best in any sport. Is this substantially different?I’ve asked her about how she feels about representing a company that sells controversial products online. We don’t turn away from other sports funded by vices like alcohol and gambling. Is this any more morally objectionable?I ask how she thinks it will feel — for herself, for us — when she takes her mark Sunday night.”Oh, that’s a good one,” she says, gazing out her window at the arched scaffolding and video boards that frame the Enhanced venue as she rolls it over in her mind. Down below, a small crew of workers is just starting to draw fresh, white lines on the track.
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