Die „Steroidolympiade“ war ein Zirkus – und ein Fenster in unsere Kultur
https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/10/1138670/enhanced-games-doping-steroids-hormones-supplements-longevity/?utm_medium=tr_social&utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=site_visitor.unpaid.engagement
12 Kommentare
one whole new world record. can a get a slow clap please
There has been doping in professional and Olympic sport forever. Often times hidden or condoned by the organizations and the media in order to make more profits and entice more viewership.
At least the Enhanced Games are open and honest about what they’re doing. What’s really cool is how they’re giving athletes an opportunity to be competitive longer.
Going a step further and offering a version of those supplements to the general public of weekend warriors just trying to keep up with their kids or extend their activity range to continue taking on physical challenges longer brings this opportunity home to everyone.
*Edit: Also, in a world where News channels spin more hype than truth, Real Housewives top the entertainment charts, and people inject more plastic, Botox, and semaglutide pills being popped like candy, can the Enhanced Games even be called a circus? Seems more like a logical progression of today’s society.
All sporting events are a circus, idk why people want to act like some entertainment is more „pure“ than other entertainment. Ultimately it’s all just a bunch of genetic freaks performing impressive acts in return for pay.
>The day started with the weightlifters, under the blazing sun. But by 4 p.m., only one of them had even attempted a world-record lift. Two had pulled out injured. Some athletes were competing without taking drugs because of the money on offer, and as the competition went on, they had the better of their enhanced peers: Hunter Amstrong, a 25-year-old American swimmer and triple Olympic medalist, won the backstroke by more than a second. In the men’s 100-meter sprint, the non-enhanced US athlete Fred Kerley romped to an easy victory. “Man, they gotta do better than that,” he said of his doped opponents in his post-race interview. “They need to train a little harder, get on that shit a little bit more.”
Yeah, great encouragement for these right there. Even if the Olympic athletes were doing doping, they were probably doing it with more medical supervision than those loud about the fact. According to the doping advocates, they should have wiped the floor and instead they underperformed.
>At the same time, D’Souza made another big reveal: Enhanced Performance Products, a line of supplements available for a monthly subscription. The Enhanced Games now seemed less like a sporting event and more like a loss leader for selling testosterone injections, GLP-1s, or a range of peptides that are claimed, with little scientific evidence, to improve sleep or skin elasticity. Perhaps it was all a brilliantly executed marketing stunt.
I think this paragraph really summarizes the issue. This is not about making people healthier. It is about selling you pills without medical oversight.
These to me kind of fit into a category of sports that are just… gross in a way.
Like those ’slap‘ competitions, where it’s just trading concussions. Or that new one where it’s just two guys running full speed at each other, again, trying to knock each other out. Even UFC is similar. We’re just looking to see over the top human spectacle with suffering, no matter the human cost.
Fun fact, most athletes use some form of PED but they are used under doctor supervision and in ways to hide it from tests. This people were basically clowns performing in a circus.
>helping to build a world where we can all live better, longer lives.
I hate this shit right here. Selling the aesthetics of fitness and health while shipping out people who are doing the opposite to their bodies. They’re not dissimilar to fat couch potatoes, they’re just packaged differently.
Fitness, health, and wellness need a reboot to be actually about those things and not about the marketable aesthetic of those things.
You know what’s funny? A lot of guys can see this for what it is when they see it on women, i.e. Arianna Grande, Demi Moore, Kelly Osborne, etc. All these women going bananas with glp-1’s and it’s horrific how they’re skeletonizing themselves. Guys can see this and quickly point it out. But you hop onto fitfluencer social media and those same guys are defending and championing all the PED filled salespeople as „at least he’s healthy“. No. It’s the same shit the women are doing to themselves, just with a different aesthetic.
What does it matter? Everyone already does them. They aren’t permanently in your system. This is just promoting their use, when we already know damn well everyone uses them.
You cannot win Mr. Olympia natural. Same goes for numerous bodybuilding championships, weightlifting championships, The Olympics, wrestling, basically any sport, MMA. You just can’t be using them prior to testing. Lance Armstrong was doping most of his career (it’s not all about muscle mass).
I’m not saying you can’t, but it’s just dumb to criticize something like this when it’s already been happening. Everyone just turns a blind eye to it or doesn’t know how prevalent it is?
I have a video from the event: https://youtu.be/jAdG-iTilWU?si=SBTAZ3VKqINmXU_k
Isn’t this the same thing as any Olympics that Russia participates in?
Let me guess: It was a marketing scam for selling some sort of product.
Window into our culture? A fringe group did steroids. That’s not our culture