The Need for Speed: Inside the Rise of the Steroid Olympics

May 29

Somewhere between a syringe and a finish line, a new kind of athleticism is emerging.

Not the polished kind paraded in glossy Olympic promos. Not the weeping medalist thanking their parents on primetime. But something rawer. Louder. Less ashamed.

They’re calling it the Enhanced Games.
And they’re not hiding the steroids.

Welcome to the competition where doping isn’t the scandal…it’s the strategy.

The Games That Dare

The Enhanced Games is a proposed Olympic-style sporting event where performance-enhancing drugs aren’t just tolerated, they’re permitted.

Encouraged, even.
It's the Wild West of athleticism, inviting elite competitors to do what many suspect they’ve already been doing in secret: juice up and run faster, lift more, leap further.

It’s not satire. It’s not a dystopian thought experiment. It’s happening. Right now. And it’s backed by real money and serious ambition. As of 2025, the project boasts investment from Silicon Valley libertarians and transhumanist thinkers. The goal? Break every human limit that dares to stand in the way of gold.

But before we scoff or shudder, maybe we should pause.

Because what if this isn’t the end of integrity in sport?

What if it’s the end of hypocrisy?

The Quiet Pharmacy of the “Clean” Olympics

Let’s not pretend that steroids are new to the Olympics.

The modern Games have been plagued with doping scandals for decades. Ben Johnson’s disqualification in 1988. The fall of Lance Armstrong. The state-sponsored doping program exposed in Russia. These are just the headlines…scraping the tiny surface of what most insiders admit has been an open secret.

Athletes whisper about “undetectable” substances. Masking agents. Microdosing. And the cat-and-mouse game of designer drugs versus detection tech continues.

If you’ve read my article Why We Crave Chaos, you’ll understand this instinct to win at all costs. Athletes are not unlike gamblers or soldiers, they live on the edge of consequence.
And the Olympic podium is a siren song worth the risk.

As Victor Conte of BALCO fame once said, “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying hard enough.” What is a “Natty” (Natural) athlete to do when all of their competitors are already juiced out the gills?

Even with the strictest testing, the timeline matters. An athlete can train on steroids in the off-season, build impossible muscle, then cycle off in time for a “clean” test.

So what’s the difference between an Enhanced Games competitor and a regular Olympian?

Transparency.

People Will Always Want to Win

It’s easy to criticize the Enhanced Games as immoral. But is it more immoral than pretending elite performance comes only from clean eating and hard work?

Let’s talk about human nature. From gladiators to geneticists, we’ve always tried to hack our limitations. Roman charioteers ate animal hearts. WWII soldiers took meth. Today’s cyclists microdose EPO. Even weekend warriors at the gym pop creatine, pre-workouts, and testosterone boosters.

We want an edge.
We always have.

This is the spirit behind the Enhanced Games. Not the corruption of sport, but the admission that we’ve already corrupted it, quietly, systematically, and now someone’s turning up the volume.

It reminds me of The Enhanced Cow, engineered in Brazil to bulk up and feed more people. We’re building super-creatures all around us. Athletes are just the latest canvas.

The Tour de Farce: A Tale of Diminishing Returns

Here’s a story for you.

A man once entered the Tour de l’Avenir (often referred to as the "Tour de France for the young") pumped full of steroids. Not a whisper of moderation, he wanted to test how much of an edge science could give him. He trained hard, doped harder, and…came in 47th.

It wasn’t the fairy tale he’d imagined. But it was honest. Because steroids don’t make champions. They enhance champions. Steroids don’t work unless you are also working.

That’s the nuance so many forget. PEDs aren’t magic beans. They’re risk multipliers. You still have to suffer through the sprints, the shin splints, the 5 a.m. drills, and the blood in your socks. You still have to want it.

No pill replaces that.

Makes you wonder what the 46 people who placed above him were taking and what their training routine was.

What the Enhanced Games Promise

The Enhanced Games are shaping up to include five major categories: track and field, aquatics, combat sports, gymnastics, and strength events.

No drug tests. No bans. No moral grandstanding.

Just raw performance, measurable in numbers. Think 400-pound clean and jerks. 100-meter sprints clocked at warp speed. Swimmers slicing through water like torpedoes. If standing-only airline seats weren’t enough of a human endurance test, these events will be.

And yes, the risks are real. Heart attacks, organ failure, long-term health effects. But the athletes sign up knowing that. They know the price of pushing too far.

In some ways, it's the most honest competition we’ve seen in years.

Ethical Quagmires and Genetic Futures

But let’s get messy.
What happens when we start mixing enhancement with gene editing? Or neurostimulation? What if someone grows extra-fast muscle fibers or implants a chip to control fatigue?

Do we ban them? Or do we marvel?

Will we eventually see separate leagues: Natural vs Enhanced? Like we see in powerlifting today? This separation has wildly been criticized as being useless, as many “Natural” athletes fail their drug tests in their “off” season, or their blood markers show tampering with when running bloodwork pannels.

And when does enhancement become expectation? If the Enhanced Games grow popular enough, might the traditional Olympics feel outdated? Less thrilling? Less real?

We could be headed toward a cultural fork in the road: do we reward purity or performance?

If that sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve wrestled with this question in everything from farming to AI. We ask it when we choose Italian flour over American flour and when we stare at the stars through light-polluted cities, asking why we can’t see the cosmos anymore.

The Spectacle of Imperfection

Let me tell you what I think:
People don’t tune in to the Olympics for moral virtue. They tune in for awe.

The pole vault that looks like flight. The gymnasts bending gravity. The powerlifters who roar like gods. We want to feel amazed.
And the Enhanced Games will deliver that, like it or not.

Sure, it’s a bit Mad Max. But so were the first cars. The first airplanes. The first time a human strapped themselves to a rocket and said, “Let’s try.”

The future has always been a little unhinged. That’s part of its charm.

The Future of Sport

The real question isn’t whether steroids should be allowed. The real question is whether we’re brave enough to look at ambition honestly.

Because enhancement is here. It’s in our food, our medicine, our genes, our wearables. The Enhanced Games just dares to say it out loud.

We are the species that dopes. That tweaks. That rewires itself in the name of excellence.

And maybe, just maybe, that doesn’t make us less human. Maybe it makes us more.