Several weeks out from the inaugural Enhanced Games, in a five-star longevity resort on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, fifty elite athletes are doing something almost no professional in their disciplines has ever done. They are training without worrying about money. They are eating without worrying about cost. They are recovering with access to medical care that costs more per athlete than most of them have made in years. And, for those who have chosen to do so, they are taking pharmacological enhancements under continuous clinical supervision, with their blood, organ images and biometric data tracked weekly.
What happens to elite human performance when you remove every variable that usually constrains it?
That is, in effect, the question Enhanced CEO Maximilian Martin‘s organisation is running an answer to. And the early data is striking. World records have been broken in the camp already. Athletes in their thirties are reportedly outperforming their twenty-something selves. A swimmer who was always told to swim distance is finally being coached as the sprinter he always was. A track athlete who chose not to enhance is here anyway, training to become, at this stage of her career, the best she has ever been, just to prove what was possible if she had had this kind of support all along.
The training camp story is the part of the Enhanced Games conversation that almost no one is telling. The headline coverage is mostly about the substances. The CEO interviews tend to focus on the controversy and the philosophy. But the athletes themselves, what they say, what they think, what their lives are actually like inside this experiment, gets very little airtime because the framing of the project from the outside has been so adversarial that the human-interest layer underneath has been almost completely forgotten.
In the second of our three-part conversation with Martin, recorded while he was still on the ground in Abu Dhabi, he describes what the camp actually looks like, what the athletes are saying about it, and the broader question of where the line between an enhancement and a baseline modern intervention sits.
The answer, when you reflect on it, is genuinely interesting, because it points at a future where a lot of what is currently being framed as performance enhancement gets absorbed into the way people live.
Read Part 1 of the conversation here, where Martin discusses world records, what success at the games looks like, and why he thinks anti-doping is the real danger.
What’s it been like working with the athletes in Abu Dhabi?
They’re enjoying it. They’re very grateful for everything that we’ve set up. Look, you have to think about it like this. Every athlete comes from a different country. The sports that we do are not high paying sports. Many of the athletes have struggled a lot just living month to month while maintaining a professional career. We’ve had others that had stopped their careers to focus on real financial income because the sport is not paying them.
So having set up this camp here in Abu Dhabi, we’re sitting right now at a five-star resort called Erth that is focused on longevity and wellness, with an Olympic-sized pool, a track, multiple football fields, padel courts, tennis courts, and insane recovery facilities. That’s a new environment for the athletes that we’re working with.
We also have nutrition available at a level to them that they’ve never had access to. We have three times a day everything that they need. They can completely eat entirely up to their calorie intake, protein, carbs, where we’ve created plans for them with our nutritionists. Then their additional exercise plans are optimised for them as an individual, with a focus on the specific event that they’ll be operating in.
And then overall from a medical care perspective, what the doctors are telling me is that the athletes are asking them about the simplest things that others wouldn’t necessarily ask about because they’ve never had access to so much care, so they rather overuse it.
What I think is also beautiful is that the athletes, even though every event is going to be a head-to-head race or competition, so all of the athletes are actually competitors, we’ve created this environment where they all feel part of a bigger mission. So the environment here is actually extremely friendly. The athletes are super supportive with each other. They help each other in training as well.
That’s amazing to see. They say, my start is a little bit off, let me show you what I’m doing, or they help each other become the best that they can ever be. And that I think for individual sports is something very amazing in itself.
Have any of them shared comparisons between their previous lives as athletes and the support they have now?
They do all the time. One this morning, one of our swimmers, he’s always been a sprinter, always focused on maximum 100 metres. Where he was training before with his home country in the US, even though he was always a sprinter, the coach would always make him swim the distance, never focused on short intensive sprint care, but always putting in the yardage, putting in the yardage, putting in the yardage.
And so under Brett Hawke, our sprint coach, who’s been coaching three world record holders in the 50 free, his approach to training and his personalisation to his stroke, but also the distance that he’s swimming, is just completely different.
So just having Brett as a coach is a massive enhancement for so many of our athletes. We had Ben Proud, for example, from the UK. When we negotiated a contract with him, one thing that he shared with me was that he’s so excited about getting coached by Brett. So this is on the coaching front.
The rooms, the food, they don’t have to worry about anything, that is also a massive enhancement. Just knowing that everything is paid for, but even at home they don’t have to worry about their rent, they don’t have to worry about their car payments. They can just focus on the thing that they love is such a big enhancement.
We also have a sprinter here, her name is Tristan. She’s choosing not to enhance, but she’s still here taking advantage of everything else other than the medical enhancements. She is also training to become, at her point in her career, the best that she’s ever been, to prove to the world, had I had from the beginning this X, Y, Z from my country, from my partners, I could have been a completely different athlete with a completely different career.
For the first time now, I’m actually able to access as the elite athlete that I am everything that you would typically think I can access.
So yes, there are these comparisons that athletes share, more for gratefulness reasons actually, rather than me trying to figure out what are we doing better. We’re not trying to be better, we’re trying to create an environment where the athletes are short of nothing.
Were you involved in the conversations with the athletes when they were deciding whether to enhance?
No. Many athletes, when they join us, they ask how is it getting enhanced. I’ve been enhanced for two years, so I can openly talk about it and share my own personal experiences with them. It’s never part of the contract signing whether they’re going to enhance or not. That’s not impacting any of the pay that they get or anything else.
I think of the enhancements as one of the different columns of support that we have for the athletes. Whether an athlete, for example, chooses to swim every day with Brett is also up to them. We’re not going to drag them into the pool or force them to swim. Some athletes take a different approach to training. We have some athletes that in weightlifting, for example, are really focused on their own regimens, they’re working with their own coaches.
These are elite athletes that have had coaching environments that have served them very well in the past. It’s not that they need to cancel that and go on to our coach.
Being enhanced is entirely up to them, just like taking advantage of the recovery facilities, taking advantage of the nutritional plans, taking advantage of the exercise plans. If the athletes choose to enhance as well, what we do is we first explain to them everything that we’ve set up under the medical programme and how that works. We go with them through all of the different substances and go with them through a baseline medical assessment on the basis of which they get recommended a protocol.
That protocol is recommended to them on two layers. Who are they as an individual, from every single one of us being different. Maybe I like milk, maybe someone else is lactose intolerant. So who are you as an individual is the most important thing. The second thing that the protocol is optimised for is what event the specific athlete is doing. Are they running the 100 metres or are they running a marathon? Each of those events require different skills to be excellent at them, and therefore protocols to help you become the best are very different.
Going back, these are the two layers, who are they as an individual and what event are they doing. We recommend the protocol of substances. And then it’s entirely up to the athlete on which substances they choose to take or not. They could also end up saying, thanks, I choose none of those. Perfectly fine as well.
Have the protocols been adapted as the camp has progressed?
Yes. The athletes have been in-house for three weeks and now we did another proper assessment, blood, everything, to see how the impacts were.
Why is this so important to continuously adjust? Every athlete is different. Some athletes, while being on similar dosages, some have seen uptake X, some have seen uptake Y. Some have seen incredible impact on recovery, performance from the beginning. For others, it’s been much slower.
What is so important is to constantly check in with the individual and then assess, is this protocol at this point, after we’ve seen this particular change happen, still the best? Do we want to keep them on those? Would we recommend a different one? Does the athlete want a different one? And then based on that, come up with a new recommendation or protocol that the athletes then go on.
Plus also the dosages that we started with are really, in recreational enhancement terms, very low dosages, because the athletes are genetically just built very different than a regular person like myself.
Can you see a future where, in pretty much all of the main sporting categories, the fastest people in the world are all enhanced?
Yes. It’s all down to the definition of what does enhanced mean. At some point we started putting on shoes. The track at the international events is getting faster every single event.
At some point we decided that caffeine is not a bad substance anymore and athletes are taking absurd amounts of caffeine before races. As a society, at some point we started washing our hands. At some point we started boiling water, putting a roof over our head, heating the home. Where do you draw the line of what is an enhancement versus what is natural?
The adoption of performance enhancing substances under the current sense, substances that would get you banned from international competition today, is going to be more widely adopted. I think it’s just a time question. I don’t think it’s going to be in the next two, three, four years maybe, but I think five is a reasonable time horizon to assume.
But then if you ultimately want to answer the question, just think in 200 years from now, are we going to use more science or less? I think the answer is clearly going to be yes.
Do you see Enhanced as being a little bit ahead of the curve and that, given time, what you’re doing will just be seen as inevitable?
It’s absolutely our ambition. And that’s the bigger objective of the organisation as well. Not just do this for a handful of elite athletes. We had 50 athletes in the first games. Say we keep the same amount, do this for 10 years, we’ll have enhanced and changed lives of 500 people. That is great, fun to watch, entertaining to watch, amazing for these 500 people. But in terms of societal impact, it’s nothing.
What we’re trying to look at is where the societal benefit is of the work that we’re doing. Look at the US. If you look at politics and the biggest problems that they’re facing, the biggest part goes to the healthcare system. The biggest part of the budget, everything is out of system. We have ageing populations throughout all Western developed economies. These are things like with people going to pension, how are we going to support those in Europe? It’s terrible.
What are the benefits that we can bring with preventative healthcare, personalised healthcare to people? If we are able to say the biggest benefits for me from enhancements are actually recovery and injury prevention, and we see that with the athletes as well, and that actually impacts performance the most because they can train more in the same amount of time and they can train harder because they’re less prone to get injuries.
Now, say recovery and injury prevention are the biggest benefits of enhancements. What does it do to people? Once you injure yourself, you’re going to recover quicker, less pressure on a healthcare system. You’re less prone to get injured, less pressure on a healthcare system. People are taking care of their health at a younger point in time, cutting sugar, cutting sodas, cutting unhealthy nutrition, eating whole foods, organic foods. All of these things have such massive benefits on our systems that we have over the past decades a little bit forgotten about because we just put everything in that we could get into our hands.
Being much more mindful about what we fuel our body with, it’s just another alleviated step, like starting to boil water at some point, and that just increases our healthspan so much.
The question arises, are we still on average as a society going to retire at 67, or are we going to be able to feel at 67 like we’re 57? If we’re able to feel at 57, do we still have the desire to retire right now or do we actually want to achieve more? And what kind of economic output can we achieve through that?
This is really what’s exciting in terms of the societal adoption of enhancements. And then just in general, what I think makes most of our employees so excited about working on this is having seen firsthand what enhancements can do to people and the quality of life. Even if you cannot increase healthspan, the quality of your life as you go through it enhanced is just so different than when you are not.
I don’t think that there’s anyone who will get enhanced and not change their diet and not change their exercise regimen and not try to optimise their sleep. With showcasing the benefits of enhancements, getting people excited about it, we’ll take care of these underlying three core layers of longevity as well, because they’re so important and the enhancements will not help you if you don’t take care of these three as well.
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