“If I wanted a doctor’s opinion on whether or not people’s health is at risk, I would go to a doctor. Not Kieren Perkins.”
It takes a lot to push James Magnussen, the three-time Olympic medallist and two-time world champion in the 100m freestyle, out of his naturally relaxed and jovial demeanour. But that’s what happens when you ask the six foot six Aussie for his thoughts on comments from Kieren Perkins, CEO of the Australian Sports Commission, former Olympic gold medalist and one of the most vocal critics of the Enhanced Games, the project he is about to compete in.
In March 2024, at a sports conference in Melbourne, Perkins called the idea of the Enhanced Games “laughable” and “borderline criminal” before predicting that “someone will die” if the event was allowed to go ahead.
He was subsequently quoted by Reuters, the Associated Press, Time, the BBC, ABC and dozens of other major outlets in the English-speaking sports press. The headlines travelled. The mud stuck. Two and a half years later, much of the media conversation about the Enhanced Games still takes its cue from Perkins’s alarmist prophecy.
Magnussen was the first publicly named athlete to join the Enhanced Games when the competition was unveiled two and a half years ago. He is now thirty-five years old, in his second cycle of enhancements, and on Sunday evening will compete in two of the most stacked races on the programme, the 50m and 100m freestyle finals.
We spoke to him inside the press room at Resorts World in Las Vegas as part of a select group of global media credentialed for direct access to the athletes two days out from competition.
Outside the room, hotel guests in swimwear and flipflops pad past the doors, margaritas in hand. Not a care in the world. Quite a contrast to the men and women inside who have put their bodies and reputations on the line for someone else’s dream. We spoke to Magnussen, and others, to discover the true physical risks and rewards of being part of a sporting experiment under global scrutiny.
What Enhanced has released and what it means
On Wednesday evening, four days before the event, Enhanced posted its IRB-approved clinical trial to ClinicalTrials.gov, the public US government database of registered medical research. The trial, designated ASCEND001, can be looked up by anyone who chooses to read it. It is, by some distance, the most transparent clinical record of elite athletic enhancement ever placed in the public domain.
Of the forty-two athletes competing on Sunday, thirty-six took part in the trial. Two of those thirty-six are competing without any enhancement at all. The remaining thirty-four used substances drawn from five FDA-approved categories: testosterone esters, anabolic agents, peptides and growth factors, metabolic modulators, and stimulants – all banned under the World Anti-Doping Agency code. The aggregate figures, released by the company in the same Wednesday statement:
- 91% of trial athletes used testosterone or testosterone esters
- 79% used human growth hormone
- 62% used stimulants (primarily Adderall)
- 50% used metabolic modulators
- 41% used erythropoietin (EPO)
- 29% used an anabolic steroid agent
- 5% used hormonal support therapies
The intervention phase of the trial has now concluded. A five-year observational follow-up period began this week. Every competing athlete will be monitored for the next half-decade.
None of these substances are new. The Enhanced Games has ignited a media bonfire and crafted a commercial framework around compounds that already exist. Testosterone has been clinically prescribed for decades. EPO is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines. The difference is that they’re building data to back their case.
What you can’t extract from the numbers, however, is the human experience of what it feels like to be part of the world’s most controversial and fascinating sporting experiment.
How it feels to get enhanced
Magnussen is not shy about the difference between his Enhanced experience and his Olympic one. “At the Olympics, we’re sitting there, we haven’t been paid, we’ve been training in sub-par facilities, we’ve been flying in economy around the world,” he said. “The Enhanced Games is different. This is professional sport. We’re well paid, well looked after. You can see where we’re staying. We fly up the front of the plane. This is a different ballgame.”
He is one of several athletes we spoke to in Las Vegas this week. Others include the British sprinter Reece Prescod, the American weightlifter Dylan Cooper and the Icelandic strongman Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, known to most readers as Thor, or Ser Gregor Clegane (aka The Mountain) from Game of Thrones.
Each one of them comes from a different sport. A different country. At a different career stage. Yet all of them, independently, described some version of the same feeling; an appreciation of the care and attention they’ve received as part of the project and a dignified frustration that the same level of support and resource hasn’t been available to them outside the experiment.
Prescod, who retired from international athletics last year after Nike chose not to renew his contract, was specific about the gap. “The main difference is just the support,” he said. “I genuinely wish that in previous years of athletics, you got that additional support to just reach the next level. Everything you need is going towards one person. Anything that I’ve near enough asked for, I’ve been given.”
He lists the things he means. “Travel support. Really high-level accommodation. They’ve got nutritionists on site so we get three beautiful meals a day. If you’ve got any sort of issue there’s a person I can go to. The medical team’s great. I’ve got a lot of friends in other sports, like professional football, and when you look at their set-ups, these are things these guys are used to. But it’s just unfortunate that track doesn’t have the financial backing.”
Asked what he wished the UK media understood, Prescod said: “I just wish people would take a broad perspective. When I trained in the Middle East, people asked me what the Enhanced Games was like and they said, this is really good, this sounds really exciting. Here in America, you tell everyone you’re competing in the Enhanced Games and they’re like, right on. They absolutely love it. I just think sometimes we’re quite reserved.”
You also get a sense of the emotional impact that the headlines have had. In January this year, UKA chief executive Jack Buckner called Prescod’s decision to join Enhanced “appalling”, something that took Prescod by surprise.
“It was really random,” Prescod says. “I retired before that. I’d been ignored. Then I popped up at the Enhanced Games and they’ve got an opinion. So it was a bit like an ex-girlfriend coming from the past.”
The American weightlifter Dylan Cooper, junior world champion in the 89kg class, has been similarly explicit about what Enhanced has given him. “Weightlifting in the United States is not a publicised sport,” he said. ” It’s kind of niche. The treatment we’ve got and the build-up to this has been unlike… I feel like an actual professional athlete for the first time in a 15-year career.”
He was the most candid of all the athletes about the impact enhancements have made on his performance. “I was expecting it was just going to be this magic pill that just gave you everything you wanted right away. And it wasn’t. You still have to make sure your diet’s dialled in. You have to make sure your sleep’s dialled in. Hormones will make your muscles very strong. They’re not going to make your tendons and ligaments thicker right away. That takes time. They’re not going to make your bones more dense. They will over time, but not in the span that we’ve been using them.”
“A lot of the weightlifters I’ve competed against internationally in the past have been caught [cheating] later on down the road. I think this [the Enhanced Games] is as level a playing field as you can possibly get. Because doping will be involved in sports no matter what. And here, at least we know what everyone’s doing because it’s not against the rules.”
Thor, who has been an openly enhanced competitive strongman for over a decade, is in a different category from the rest. Strongman has tolerated pharmacology for years. He is not crossing an institutional line by joining Enhanced but he is moving from a medically unsupervised context into a supervised one.
“When I was younger I just started using substances without really realising the long-term side effects,” he says. “By being in great supervision like I am today, I’m a lot more aware of my health. If I had the knowledge I have today when I was 20 years old, I would seek help. I would speak to a doctor.”
Ironically, he has had to reduce his drug intake in order to compete at the Enhanced Games. “I had to change my routine a little bit because I was using substances before that weren’t FDA approved. Substances like Trenbolone, that’s not allowed. Equipoise, that’s not allowed. These are the main substances I have used in the past that are not allowed here at Enhanced Games.”
He’s also honest about the financial component. “They pay us handsomely, so that definitely plays a big factor in why I’m doing it. I’m not going to sit here and lie and say I’m not here because of the price point.”
The doctor behind the enhancement protocols
The clinical operation behind the protocols is overseen in part by Professor Guido Pieles, a German consultant cardiologist whose specialism lies at the intersection of athletic physiology and inherited cardiac conditions. He chairs both the Enhanced Independent Medical Commission and the Independent Scientific Commission. He is currently unenhanced but told us he is exactly the kind of consumer that Enhanced is being designed for; over fifty, declining muscle mass, formerly a university 400m runner.
Pieles is also from East Germany, home to one of the worst cases of state-sanctioned doping in history and he has spent his entire career studying the cardiovascular consequences of athletic stress. “When we did the cardiac tests last week, I did not see any cardiac effects,” he says. “I expected to see at least something, that the heart muscle, like any other muscle, gets a bit thicker. I didn’t see anything. But they had the benefits. So in this respect, this small dose must have been a dose that induced the benefits without having side effects.”
That observation is preliminary. The intervention phase has only just concluded and the five-year follow-up has only just begun. Pieles is appropriately cautious about overclaiming but what he is willing to say is that the doses being used are calibrated for recovery rather than for performance maximisation, which is itself a structural contradiction of the media characterisation.
“If you give a sprinter, a swimmer, even a middle-range dose of testosterone they get just too heavy,” he says. “It’s quite clear it’s much more the recovery. The athletes, if you ask them, feel they can recover. It’s interesting if you talk to the coaches, they had to change their coaching programs because the swimmers could do actually more training sessions, so they had to really change their training.”
He is also critical of an academic community that has put stigma ahead of scientific inquiry. “We’re lagging behind,” he says. “Why is that? Because the stigma was there and we haven’t studied it. That’s why I think the science is so far behind. It’s ridiculous. We have these drugs for forty years, but we sit here and discuss this first ever small study.”
Christian Angermayer, the German biotech investor who co-founded Enhanced, was direct about the wider safety issues. “There is an abundance of long-term data. That is the definition of a drug approval process. Most of the stuff we announced has been out there for decades. The whole statement people are making that there are unknown side effects is, in itself, complete bullshit.”
For now, Angermayer’s techno-optimism serves as an unlikely motivational rallying cry in the hours leading up to an evening of athletic reckoning.
