LAS VEGAS - This past week, in a city built on risk and reward, billionaire biohacker Christian Angermayer went about his wellness routine.
He injected himself with weight loss drugs, testosterone, and legal-but-off-label growth hormones, designed to reduce deep layers of fat and regenerate his cells. To feel more outgoing, he added the peptide oxytocin, typically used by doctors to stimulate labor. For focus, he popped a pill of his usual stimulant, normally prescribed for sleep apnea. He logged tens of thousands of steps, sprinting to meetings at his hotel and doing circles around a large swimming pool.
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Angermayer was getting ready to show the world that the experimental health protocols embraced by longevity-obsessed business elites like himself can work for top athletes - and, ultimately, the entire world.
Angermayer, who at 48 looks a decade younger, is the co-founder and funder of the Enhanced Games, a Silicon Valley-backed athletic tournament that breaks a cardinal rule of sports by encouraging athletes to take steroids, hormones, peptides and any legal performance-enhancing drug.
The 42 inaugural participants who will compete Sunday in Vegas are elite swimmers, runners and weightlifters, some of whom are Olympic medalists. They are souped up on proprietary drug regimens prescribed by the organization’s team of doctors - an effort athletes hope will enable them to beat their personal records and earn millions in prize money.
But Angermayer, co-founder and CEO Max Martin, and their team of heavyweight investors have a decidedly bigger ambition for their new sports franchise. They aim to mainstream experimental therapies just as those treatments are gaining cultural momentum and political acceptance.
Enhanced, their telehealth platform, will sell testosterone and other supplements deemed “enhancements” to a wellness-crazed public. What better marketing for these therapies, the founders reason, than enabling the public to witness top athletes surpass peak performance goals, providing living proof that the science behind longevity drugs is real?
The company went public earlier this month with a $1.2 billion valuation and has ties to some of the biggest names in business and politics. One of its main funders is billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who has long been a fan of life-extension treatments, including a process called parabiosis, which involves older people getting transfusions of younger people’s blood. Another backer is 1789 Capital, a venture firm that counts JD Vance strategist Chris Buskirk and Donald Trump Jr. as partners.
Wellness and supplements are a $6.8 trillion global industry, fueled by celebrities, Make America Healthy Again influencers and the “manosphere” on social media, according to the Global Wellness Institute, an industry group. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - who said he takes testosterone, experimental hormones and amino acid chains known as peptides for antiaging - moved in April to legalize seven peptides that had been restricted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over safety concerns.
While sports officials and medical experts have raised ethical concerns with the unorthodox event, Angermayer, a serial entrepreneur who controls a $1.6 billion company dedicated to psychedelic medicine, had a different take. He said in an interview he believes it is immoral not to give athletes performance-enhancing substances.
Being a professional athlete “is very cumbersome and puts hard wear and tear on your body,” he said. Withholding drugs that could improve their performance is like sending a miner “into a coal mine but denying them a helmet.”
Enhanced Games executives insist the competition is a legitimate sports enterprise, but others have cast it as a carefully crafted marketing scheme, designed to turn athletics into advertising for a telehealth business that promotes controversial compounds whose benefits and risks remain unclear.
Travis Tygart, chief executive of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, has called the Enhanced Games a “dangerous clown show that puts profit over principle,” warning that the event could encourage children and young athletes to believe they need performance-enhancing drugs to chase athletic dreams.
Pieter Cohen, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and practicing internist at Cambridge Health Alliance who studies the boundary between drugs and supplements, said it was “really insidious” to use athletes as both test subjects and marketing tools.
“You can take any athletic performance, claim that it was based on these athletic-performing peptides, and then convert that into a marketing campaign,” Cohen said.
Chief executive and co-founder Martin, who at age 29 is also on a cocktail of longevity regimens, told The Post that he was completely against the “glorification” of supplements and opposed the black market that has emerged for longevity products. He said that “enhancements” should be taken with medical supervision, even when they are being prescribed off-label.
But he said it was unfair that an Olympian is banned from taking FDA-approved drugs that any person can buy at a pharmacy. If drugs are legal, “people should have their freedom of choice,” he said.
The company is not just built for athletes, Martin said. It is for anyone who wants to enhance their everyday life, including a grandparent seeking the energy to take a grandchild to the playground, he said, someone trying “to be the best 65-year-old they can possibly be.”
Biohacking the podium
Barring performance-enhancing substances has long been one of the most sacred rules of sports, a sacrosanct line that determines whether competition is fair, authentic and safe.
Enhanced organizers say elite athletes have always searched for an edge - through training, technology, nutrition, equipment and banned drugs. Their argument is that the Enhanced Games will make the last part transparent, medically supervised and financially rewarding.
Of the 42 athletes expected to compete Sunday in a newly constructed competition venue at the Resorts World hotel and casino in Las Vegas, event officials said 36 have been doping in preparation for the event. (Four athletes are competing “naturally.”)
The athletes were stationed together this spring in Abu Dhabi, where they trained and were administered doping regimens that would violate traditional rules and earn hefty bans from competition under normal circumstances. The individualized protocols included performance-enhancing substances and regular medical testing, according to Enhanced Games officials. An Institutional Review Board-approved clinical study is tied to the company’s medical program.
Organizers have not released individual athletes’ regimens but revealed this past week that 91 percent used testosterone, 79 percent used human growth hormone, 62 percent used stimulants such as Adderall, 50 percent used metabolic modulators, 41 percent used EPO and 29 percent used an anabolic steroid agent such as Deca-Durabolin.
The athletes are not just aiming to challenge the limits of human potential: They are lured with hefty financial rewards. Athletes who manage to break certain records can earn a $1 million bonus, a life-changing sum in a field where even Olympians often struggle to build financially secure careers.
“I’ll be very straightforward: It’s about the money,” said English swimmer Ben Proud, who won a silver medal competing at the 2024 Olympics in Paris. “This is not what an Olympic athlete would say is the epitome of sport.”
Even before the first event Sunday, organizers say they already have proof of concept. In February 2025, an early signee named Kristian Gkolomeev, a Greek Olympic swimmer who had finished fifth in the 50 freestyle at the Paris Olympics, swam 20.89 seconds in a secret time trial in Greensboro, North Carolina, topping Cesar Cielo’s official world record time by two hundredths of a second. Enhanced celebrated the swim as a breakthrough and awarded him the bonus money, though the mark is not recognized as an official record.
Enhanced’s defense starts with a simple claim: its medically supervised protocol is safer than the secret doping that athletes have been doing for years.
According to Enhanced officials, athletes in the study were permitted to consider substances across five categories: testosterone esters, anabolic agents, peptides and growth factors, metabolic modulators and stimulants.
Medical and anti-doping experts say Enhanced’s framing leaves important questions unresolved. A drug can be legal. A doctor can prescribe it. A study can monitor athletes for short-term harms. But none of that proves that powerful substances are safe for athletes using them to chase records, especially when used off-label, in combinations or doses that have not been well studied.
The World Anti-Doping Agency polices drug use across the sprawling Olympics world, and a spokesman for the global body called the Enhanced Games “a dangerous and irresponsible concept.”
“Just because a drug is FDA approved … or is provided under medical supervision, does not mean it can be taken risk-free,” said WADA’s James Fitzgerald. “These are powerful drugs and they can cause serious harm - sometimes immediately, sometimes months or years later.”
He noted that steroids, testosterone, human growth hormone and EPO can carry serious risks, including heart attack, stroke, blood clots, liver damage, diabetes, hormonal disruption, infertility, psychiatric effects and sudden cardiac death.
“The reality is that sports medicine still doesn’t fully understand the long-term consequences of stacking multiple substances together at the doses elite athletes might use to chase records,” he said.
While Enhanced officials aren’t detailing individual athlete protocols, James Magnussen, the Australian Olympic medalist who became the first prominent athlete publicly tied to the games, spent months on a regimen of daily injections in his stomach and backside. Magnussen told the Sydney Morning Herald that regimen included testosterone, the peptides BPC-157 and thymosin, and ipamorelin and CJC-1295, which are used to stimulate growth-hormone release.
That kind of stack is precisely what worries medical experts. Cohen, the Harvard professor, said while many of these compounds “might have significant benefit,” it could take years to understand their full effects, with dangers often not obvious in the moment.
“Risks are usually subtle, and it takes time and scholarship and studies and costs a lot of money to try to sort it out,” he said.
A convert to enhancement
Angermayer isn’t the most obvious person to make a career selling controversial drugs. He describes himself as maniacally cautious by nature. Growing up in the 1980s in a small town in the German countryside, where heavy drinking is a rite of passage, he abstained from alcohol and mind-altering substances. He tried coffee for the first time at age 29.
Self-control was a survival skill, he said, honed during childhood by fear that imbibing any such product might cause him to slip up and reveal the secret of his homosexuality.
“Where I come from, heavy drinking starts at age 14,” he said. “I was popular, but I was like, if I drink alcohol, I’m gonna spill it. … That’s when I decided I would never touch anything.”
A competitive overachiever in everything except sports, he did make an exception for one product: fructose, a crystallized fruit sugar that is popular in Germany. He kept a pack on his desk every time he took a test at school.
But overachievement was also a form of self-protection. Even if people did find out he was gay, “you’re kind of protected by success.”
By his late 20s, he had left Bavaria behind and had become a successful entrepreneur. One evening in 2013, he was invited to a dinner party where he happened to be sitting next to a scientist studying the potential of psychedelics to heal trauma and improve mental health. The men spent the evening in animated conversation, but Angermayer said he left feeling deeply skeptical.
He also wasn’t interested: He felt that he was a generally happy person without psychological wounds.
Instead, he asked the researcher for recommendations for what might improve his looks, along with his physical and cognitive performance. The researcher recommended the stimulant modafinil, which he takes to this day.
He became fascinated by the subject, doing his own research. A year later, at an Easter party, he was offered homegrown “magic” mushrooms containing the compound psilocybin. He called the scientist, who had been sending research for a year, “and he was like, ‘Do it!’” Angermayer recalled.
He said his trip was unexpectedly powerful, the most profound experience of his life. He connected to inner truths about the person he was becoming, he said. From that moment on, he was a believer.
While most friends thought he was crazy to start a pharmaceutical company to develop psilocybin - years before author Michael Pollan published a best-selling book on magic mushrooms - Thiel and cryptocurrency investor Michael Novogratz backed his plan.
By 2023, he had become one of Europe’s best known biotechnology investors and his psilocybin company, Atai, had gone public on Nasdaq. Around that time, an Australian businessman, Aron D’Souza, approached him about a different idea, a sports tournament that he framed as a libertarian challenge to the anti-doping system.
“He came to me saying … you’ve done it once with psychedelics,” Angermayer recalled. Here’s “another similarly crazy idea.”
D’Souza needed helped raising money. So Angermayer went to Thiel and other friends in the billionaire’s network of libertarian techno-futurists. A year later, Enhanced publicly announced its seed round of financing, which included Thiel, Angermayer’s Apeiron Investment Group, former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan, brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and a Saudi prince. The venture firm 1789 Capital, where Trump Jr. is a partner, became a major investor in 2025. A spokesman for Trump Jr. did not respond to a request for comment.
The first Enhanced Games were initially floated for late 2024, but they never happened, feeding skepticism that the venture would never move beyond provocation. D’Souza left the company last year, and Angermayer tapped a mentee from his investment company, co-founder Martin, to become CEO.
Martin said they spent much of the past year recruiting athletes, scientists and doctors to join the league. At first, this was slow going, but over the past two years, the enterprise slowly added athletes to its roster - including Proud, American sprinter Fred Kerley and the burly Icelandic weightlifter Hafthor Björnsson. Now Martin says he has world record holders, doctors and Olympians “in my Instagram DMs.”
The company’s U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings suggest Sunday’s event is less the core business than the billboard. Enhanced noted that the competition is a way to build brand awareness, generate media content, engage athletes and acquire consumers.
“What works for a world record holder informs what works for consumers,” the company said in a recent news release.
Angermayer and his team have spent months building out a $20 million competition venue on the Vegas Strip, and on Sunday they’ll host 2,500-invite only spectators - including 16 luxury boxes - and stream the spectacle to the world, including a post-event concert by the Vegas rock band the Killers.
The athletes have long ago come to terms with what the competition is - and what it isn’t.
“It should be seen for now as entertainment, in the future as human optimization and human performance,” said Magnussen, the Aussie swimmer.
Magnussen made his comments Friday in a hotel ballroom, meeting with reporters and explaining his journey from Olympic swimming to Sunday’s doped-up pool. His veins were popping and muscles nearly busting through skin. At 35, he said he’s never felt healthier in his life.
“For the past decade, it’s really only been available to the elite. We’re bringing this to the everyday person,” he said. “I want everyone to have the potential to live longer and have access to these products, like we do.”
Angermayer said that he was watching the FDA, which has begun reconsidering whether some restricted peptides could be produced by compounding pharmacies, a move that Kennedy said could bring powerful substances out of the black market. It could give Enhanced a whole new set of products to sell.
But the billionaire said only handful of the peptides noted by Kennedy had enough scientific data to consider them worth selling.
“The power of the idea is that we’re going against everything people were told for decades [about] how sports should function,” he said. “But we have science, ethics, and morals on our side.”
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