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

May 29

Written By Michele Edington (formerly Michele Gargiulo)

Disclaimer: This article discusses the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports. It’s for informational purposes only and does not promote, encourage, or condone illegal or unsafe activities. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making any decisions related to your health or fitness. I’m literally a sommelier, not a doctor.

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

Obviously the polished kind of athlete that’s been paraded in glossy Olympic promos has been along forever, but that’s not what I’m talking about. The weeping medalist thanking their parents on primetime is still not where I’m at, but a little closer. No, I’m diving into something a little rawer, much more loud, and less ashamed.

They’re calling it the Enhanced Games, and they’re not hiding the steroids this time around.

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 from around the world to do what many suspect they’ve already been doing in secret: juice up and run faster, lift more heavy ass weights and leap further.

It’s not satire or a dystopian thought experiment, it’s honesty brought into the light. 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 is basically to break every human limit that dares to stand in the way of gold.

Before you scoff or shudder, maybe take just a moment to pause with me, because what if this isn’t the end of integrity in sport, it’s just the end of hypocrisy?

Steroids are not new to the Olympics.

The modern Games have been plagued with doping scandals for literal 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, barely scraping the tiny surface of what most insiders admit has been an open secret. Athletes talk online about “undetectable” substances or masking agents and microdosing. The cat-and-mouse game of designer drugs versus detection tech continues on as more and more athletes online claim they’re “natty”, even though the most natural thing about them is the dirt stuck in their shoes.

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 totally live on the edge of consequence. The Olympic podium is a siren song worth the risk. Injecting something illegal into your ass and suddenly getting millions of dollars of sponsors practically banging down your door for attention? Yeah, that’s like trading a few years or health for an entire life of ease.

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? Don’t even get me started on the bullshit being spread on Instagram and YouTube of people who’ve clearly been enhanced, yet saying they’ve never in their lives touched anything like a steroid or a sarm.

Even with the strictest testing out there, 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 really any more immoral than pretending elite performance comes only from clean eating and hard work?

Human nature from gladiators to geneticists, have always tried to hack our limitations. Roman charioteers ate animal hearts, WWII soldiers took meth (don’t recommend this whatsoever, the anecdotal reports are not good), today’s cyclists microdose EPO, and even weekend warriors at the gym pop creatine, pre-workouts, and testosterone boosters. I was shocked when my husband Zakary Edington told me that the Bromelain I was taking was actually a PED (performance enhancing drug) because it promoted muscle healing…I was taking it for my shin splints and there are no athletic competitions for sommeliers out there, so don’t worry, I won’t piss hot.

We all want an edge though, and 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 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.

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 little hint of moderation either, 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 completely honest. Steroids don’t make champions, they enhance champions. Steroids don’t work unless you are also working. That’s the nuance so many forget as people reach out on YouTube to bash bodybuilders and Pro Wrestlers like my husband all the time, 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, going to the gym when you’re sick with the flu, and the blood in your socks. You still have to want it. No pill will ever be able to replace that.

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

The Enhanced Games are shaping up to include five major categories: track and field, aquatics, combat sports, gymnastics, and strength events. No drug tests or bans on any substances, and absolutely no moral grandstanding.

These gams are looking for just raw performance, measurable in numbers. Think 400-pound clean and jerks and 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.

Yes, the risks are real too, I’m not downplaying this, and I certainly am not condoning any sort of PED use whatsoever. Heart attacks, fertility issues, organ failure, and long-term health effects stack up by the mile as soon as we start introducing any sort of chemical substances into our systems en masse, but the athletes sign up knowing that. They know the price of pushing too far and have probably been walking that line for years of their lives already.

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

Quagmires and Genetic Futures

Let’s get messy, because I’m the kind of gal who splashes around in the mud with white sneakers. 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? How can we prove someone had their genetic code altered?

Will we eventually see separate leagues like 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 panels. When does enhancement become expectation? If the Enhanced Games grow popular enough, might the traditional Olympics feel outdated or less thrilling? I think the regular Olympics might feel less real and more fake.

We could be headed toward a cultural fork in the road where we wonder if we reward purity or performance more.

Let me tell you what I think (because you care so much about that), people don’t tune in to the Olympics for moral virtue, they tune in for awe. The pole vault that looks like flight is pure magic and the gymnasts defy gravity, all while the powerlifters 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 and the first airplanes. The first time a human strapped themselves to a rocket and said, “let’s try,” most people probably though they were insane. 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, literally more than you realize. The Enhanced Games just dares to say it out loud.

We’re the species that dopes and tweaks here or there, and that rewires itself in the name of excellence.

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

The Games That Dare

People Will Always Want to Win

A Tale of Diminishing Returns

Quagmires and Genetic Futures

The Future of Sport

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