GoKawiilThis is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here.
At this time last week, I was getting ready to ask people what drugs they were on. I was waiting in a conference room at the Hilton Resorts World Las Vegas. In my hands was a sheet detailing the schedule of the roughly 40 elite athletes participating in the Enhanced Games — an athletic event where using legal performance-enhancing drugs was the name of the game. Soon enough, there would be a media scrum where the press could go up to each athlete, shove a microphone in their face, and ask, “Hey, what are you taking?”
None of the athletes disclosed their unique, personalized cocktail of performance-enhancing substances. They just told us that they felt good, that training was easier, and that recovery was faster. Enhanced, the company behind the Games, only shared an aggregated, nonspecific list of what athletes were using, to prevent copycats from taking the same drugs without medical supervision.
Much has already been said about the results of the inaugural Games. How three of the four unenhanced athletes beat their “enhanced” rivals in their races. How only one world record — arguably the main marketing draw of the event — was broken. How, in the end, it seemed the Games itself was a shady scheme aimed at convincing a susceptible public to buy supplements, hormone therapies, and (legal) peptides from Enhanced’s direct-to-consumer telehealth platform.
I walked away from the Games with many questions. But from all my interviews and conversations, the biggest one was: How do we decide what’s safe to put into our bodies?
James Magnussen had some choice words for press at a media scrum before the Enhanced Games.
Both wellness influencers and athletes are obsessive about what goes into their bodies. It makes sense. Their bodies — how they look and perform — are their livelihood. This universal and human desire to optimize has led to a wellness industry worth $6.8 trillion, expected to hit $9.8 trillion by 2029. That desire is why you see incessant ads for telehealth apps that compound GLP-1 medications, influencers hawking ads for supplements, and dubious podcasters singing the praises of testosterone replacement therapies.
But there’s one thing that’s always felt baffling: It’s so often the same people who decry vaccinations backed by a ton of scientific evidence who are perfectly happy to inject themselves with unproven substances that might make them stronger, thinner, or faster.
Related Roids were all the rage at the Enhanced Games
“We all took an injection a couple years ago that it’s impossible to know what the long-term effects are. I’m not sure that that many people ask questions about that one,” James Magnussen, a retired swimmer and three-time Olympic medalist, said at the Enhanced Games media scrum. He was referring to the covid-19 vaccine, in response to a barrage of press questions regarding the potential health risks of doping. (Magnussen is incorrect here — researchers continue to study the long-term effects of the covid-19 vaccine, and the existing evidence shows serious complications are rare.)
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