27 minutes ago
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Opinion
May 20, 2026 — 5:00am
For boys like me in the 1970s, Evel Knievel was everywhere. On TVs and T-shirts, in toy shops, pinball parlours and school playgrounds. Wannabe Evel Knievels were riding bikes over home-made jumps every day after school and on weekends. These were the days before mobile phones, social media and the manosphere, when smashed bones were the result of accidents, not DIY cosmetic procedures self-inflicted by looksmaxxers.
The New York Times in 1974 reported on a spike in accidents in boys from imitating Knievel. Broken bones, a perforated intestine and a ruptured liver were among the injuries sustained by junior daredevils. The doctors treating the boys attributed their behaviour to a desire to be “macho” like their hero.
Risk-taking like this is a masculine trait that stems from social influences and our biology. Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to end up in hospital with a broken bone, partly because they’re more likely to be participating in high-risk activities. We know that it’s not just little boys who hurt themselves while copying the dangerous behaviours of their idols – there’s a strong relationship between TV ratings for NASCAR races and car crashes where speed is a factor: there’s one extra speed-related car crash for every 595 people who watch a NASCAR race on TV.
Enter the Enhanced Games, the latest iteration of this phenomenon, whose backers have found a way to monetise the imitation impulse directly, with equally unsafe results.
The inaugural event, which will take place this weekend in Las Vegas, features track events, swimming, weightlifting and “strongman”, with athletes unencumbered by rules that prevent the use of potentially dangerous performance enhancing drugs. In fact, they’re encouraged to take them.
What few realise is that this event is less about competition and more about selling peptides, testosterone and supplements.
The event is the brainchild of Australian lawyer and entrepreneur Aaron D’Souza, who pitched the games as “ushering in a new era of mankind” and a “transition to superhumanity”, with financial backing from PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr.
Longevity advocate and self-experimenter Bryan Johnson is part of the Enhanced Games broadcast team as the “first-ever human enhancement analyst”, one who will “translate each athlete’s enhancement protocol into plain terms for viewers”. The company behind the games has a dual offering: “Enhanced Group is an elite sports competition and performance products company” that markets its own branded range of peptides, hormones, weight loss drugs, supplements and an erectile dysfunction medication (yes, you read that correctly). Its monthly subscriptions for branded products at inflated prices are designed to appeal to looksmaxxers and other vulnerable people with unrealistic and unhealthy body image goals.
When the Enhanced Games was launched, it was promoted as a demonstration of the potential of human physical performance, with athletes allowed to use substances usually banned in sport. There was an immediate backlash from sporting organisations like World Athletics, World Swimming, the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Authority. The IOC and WADA Athletes Commissions described the games as “utterly irresponsible and immoral”. The athletes, coaches and officials participating risk life-long bans from official competition.
Enhanced hasn’t been able to recruit all the 60 athletes that it anticipated. Perhaps first prizes of $250,000, and $1 million for breaking a world record (in addition to appearance fees) are just not worth the potential health cost (or the end of official competition) for most athletes. But there are a few like retired Australian Olympian James Magnussen, the first to sign up, who said he’ll “juice to the gills” to break the 50-metre freestyle world record for $1 million.
Enhanced states that medical supervision of substance use by athletes for the games makes it safe, but exercise scientist and academic Professor Ian Boardley from the University of Birmingham says such reassurances are “incorrect and misleading”. The well-established negative long-term effects of using steroids make for a lengthy list. They include cardiovascular disease, liver and brain damage, severe skin problems, erectile dysfunction, mood changes, infertility and early death. In April, Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration deemed increasingly popular peptides a safety risk, with no evaluation of quality or effectiveness, but increasing reports of adverse side effects.
According to Boardley, by “giving the impression that this can be done safely”, the event increases the likelihood that people will be encouraged to use these same substances themselves.
We don’t know exactly which athletes are taking what in preparation for the games, as only some details about the trial are available. According to Enhanced, the secrecy is necessary as part of “an institutional review board-approved clinical trial” (the athletes who are competing in the games are participants in the trial).
The two groups of athletes in the trial are those whose substance use will be devised and supervised by Enhanced, and others who either will not use substances or already use them without Enhanced’s involvement. This far-from-perfect clinical trial design might be useful for generating data that can be used for marketing, but it’s not really science, and outcomes will not be relevant to anybody else’s use of the same substances.
Strange diets, supplements, peptides and questionable health advice are all over social media. This “fitspiration” content has a veneer of being beneficial but an analysis of evidence published recently in the journalHealth Communication found it “does not lead to positive health-related outcomes; instead, it fosters comparisons that intensify negative self-perceptions and inspire individuals to engage in dieting and exercise, which if intensified, can develop into disordered eating and exercise behaviours”.
The Enhanced Games is fitspiration on steroids – literally. Influencers and promo codes are replaced by athletes, branded merch and products, and an unscientific clinical trial provides a veneer of legitimacy to disinformation.
Kids’ injuries from mimicking Evel Knievel were an unfortunate consequence of entertainment. For the Enhanced Games, encouraging dangerous behaviours – and profiting – is the whole point.
Dr Tim Moss has a PhD in physiology and manages health content and research for Healthy Male, a leading organisation for evidence-based information on men’s health.
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