Are steroids the future? At the Enhanced Games, that future is now
CHRISTIAN ANGERMAYER HAS no doubt he's right.
By the time the first Enhanced Games ends Sunday night, the company expects to have spent more than $50 million on its dramatic introduction. Twenty million is coming from Angermayer, making the German-born biotech billionaire Enhanced's biggest investor by a significant margin.
At 48, Angermayer is fit. He has no creases in the corner of his eyes or bags underneath them. He has a full head of dark hair. He says his testosterone levels, thanks to regular injections, are exactly the same as they were when he first had them tested around the time he turned 30. His brain, sharpened by the dose of modafinil he deploys on long days, whirs along at an intimidating pace.
He is certain the world is on the cusp of joining him in embracing PEDs, and he is betting big that Enhanced will help push us there. The company is not just aiming to destigmatize steroid use for elite athletes, but for regular people like you and me as well. They plan to use the games as a marketing vehicle to sell supplements and prescription drugs on their online telehealth marketplace.
"I think we're going to look back already in two or three years and we will have changed a lot," Angermayer says.
He says he has already had discussions with professional sports owners in the U.S. who are keeping an eye on Enhanced. Imagine the upside, he says, of NFL players who can recover well enough to add an extra game to the calendar or NBA stars who are less concerned with load management during their lengthy seasons.
Angermayer is prone to casting outlandish, attention-grabbing statements and then steadily reeling them back toward reality, which is partially what attracted him to Enhanced Games in the first place. The company's founder, Aron D'Souza, initially pitched the Games as a competition that would "smash world records" while inspiring a new era of "superhumanity." The introduction inspired dystopian visions of a drug-fueled free-for-all. In reality, athletes are limited to using FDA-approved substances from a handful of categories: mostly stimulants, anabolic steroids such as testosterone, human growth hormone and other peptides. Rather than passing drug tests, the athletes are required to clear a medical screening before they can compete.
The concept troubles medical experts such as Martin Chandler, who has studied PED usage as a research fellow at the University of Birmingham for the last 20 years. Chandler says that while therapeutic doses of testosterone (about 400 milligrams per month) are relatively low-risk, we know very little about the long-term impact of taking larger quantities for lengthy periods of time. He says testosterone can act as a "supercharger" for building muscle, but it can also harm the cardiovascular system and cause other organs to age faster. The limits of a safe dose can vary widely from one person to the next.
Enhanced asked its athletes to refrain from sharing their specific regimens to avoid copycats, but Angermayer and Enhanced CEO Max Martin both say they have personal prescriptions to take larger doses of testosterone than what many of their athletes are receiving. The company is conducting a five-year clinical trial with the athletes to see how their bodies are impacted by PEDs.
This week, Enhanced announced that 36 of its 42 athletes participated in the clinical trial. Among them, the majority took testosterone (91%) and human growth hormone (79%) during training camp. Other popular substances included Adderall (62%), erythropoietin (41%) and the anabolic steroid Deca-Durabolin (29%).
Chandler says the handful of athletes who were part of the trial without using PEDs -- a very small control group -- and the large number of other variables in how the athletes trained make it hard to take any of the data the company collects seriously.
Angermayer says he's confident the study will confirm these PEDs are safe when used under proper medical supervision. Enhanced, which was valued at $1.2 billion when it went public in May, is banking on it. The boom of drugs such as GLP-1s led Angermayer to believe Enhanced is jumping into a market headed toward exponential growth in the next 10 years, with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. Soon, he says, we'll view doctor-prescribed substances that help us with everything from muscle recovery to an IQ boost as not much different than taking a daily multivitamin.
But cultural shifts are not fueled by data. Enhanced wants to change our instincts about steroids, to reverse the feelings of danger and shame that have been drilled into sports fans who've witnessed decades of drug abuse and scandal. They're hoping Sunday's competition is a major first step in getting there.
"The ordinary person, the non-sports person, thinks, 'Oh there must be something wrong, that's why they are banned,'" Angermayer says. "It's a big opportunity to really shape the zeitgeist."
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