Athletes Take Drugs But Lose to High School Runners

We were promised world records, freakish performances, a new era of sport that would redefine human potential. Instead, we got an Enhanced Games that somehow gave athletes a boatload of drugs and didn’t enhance much of anything. Which, if I’m honest, is quite the feat. The East German regime of the 1980s would be disappointed. But that’s the larger point. The Enhanced Games is a sports story. But more so it’s the latest entry in a larger pattern: a tech culture that tries to convince us to “hack” everything without really understanding what drives actual performance whatsoever.

Coming Up Short

First, let’s get to the lack of enhancement. There was a single world record that was barely beaten in swimming. And the star of that show was almost certainly the banned super suits, which previous research shows gave up to a 5.5 percent boost in performance on elite performers. In other words, the thing that ‘broke’ the record wasn’t the drugs, it’s that they used banned tech.

In the track sprints, the results were much more grim. In the men’s event, despite promising world records, every man that was enhanced in the final was closer to the women’s world records than to the men’s. On both the men’s and women’s side, athletes ran on average about a half-second slower than when at their peak. And more concerning, significantly slower than they did their most recent season of competition in either 2024 or 2025.

In both cases, the final results were slower than the Texas high school state meet. The 6th place finisher who scored a $20,000 payday would have been beaten by over 700 high school boys this year alone. It’s hard to convey to a non-track person how slow this meet was. Even for people past their prime.

What happened? How in the world do you take near world-class athletes, give them drugs, and see little to no improvement?

The Promise and Pattern

The ‘move fast and break things’ mentality collided with the messy reality of human biology. They thought that if they could just throw drugs at the wall, they’d take people with world-class talent and get some records.

What they neglected is that even with steroids, which absolutely work, in the grand scheme of things, they make a very small difference. We can see this with past performers. The famed cheat Ben Johnson was a world-class talent before drugs took him to another level. Tim Montgomery of BALCO fame was a consistent 9.9 to 10.0 sprinter dating back to JuCo before drugs gave him ~0.2 seconds to run 9.8. Marion Jones set the national high school record in the 100, and after six years of natural maturity and the most sophisticated drugs at the time, ran a half-second faster in her prime. At the top of the top level, that difference is significant. It’s the difference between winning and losing medals. But in the grand scheme of things, even the craziest drugs are the final part.

And we saw it with the Enhanced Games. They assumed that if they gave a bunch of slightly past-their-prime athletes a bunch of steroids, they’d transform into supermen. That’s not how it works. You need an inordinate amount of talent and work ethic as a prerequisite, even if you’re on drugs. Instead, they gave them a few months, with lots of hype and apparently not much work that would actually have made a difference.

It’s the fallacy of the cult of optimisation. The story we’re sold is that what makes the biggest difference is the supplement stack, the exacting two-hour morning routine, the cold plunge every day, or the latest peptide. Look, most of those things make zero difference, some may give a tiny boost. But when we obsess over the minutiae, we neglect the work that gets us 99 percent of the way there.

When you don’t understand performance, you fall for shiny objects.

Excellence is Boring

And we’ve actually known what creates real performance for decades. We just keep refusing to listen.

In the 1980s, sociologist Daniel Chambliss spent years embedded with swimmers at every level, from club teams up to the Olympics. He wanted to see what made a difference. Why did some improve and make it, while others stagnated and faded away? His conclusion? “Excellence is mundane.” What the best of the best did was figure out how to do all the boring, repetitive work that made a difference for a long time. Or as one of the central figures in his study, Mary Meagher, a three-time Olympic gold medallist put it, “People don’t know how ordinary success is.”

Jumbo Elliott, a man who coached athletes to 66 world records, came to a similar conclusion in track. He said his best athletes “lived like a clock,” which to his athletes meant do the simple things well day after day. Or as Elliott put it, “Run, eat, sleep.” When Sports Illustrated profiled him to try to understand the success, they concluded his methods were “simple and mundane—too basic for those who desire an exotic formula.”

We’re always going to look for secrets. It’s part of human nature. But what’s changed is that the desire for the hack or secret can now be monetised to a degree that was unfathomable just decades ago. You can monetise people’s insecurities, selling them a solution that ultimately makes little difference.

You can monetise people’s insecurities, selling them a solution that ultimately makes little difference.

It’s the calling card of the longevity space we find ourselves in. A study of nearly 120,000 Americans tracked for more than three decades found that five basic habits—never smoking, a healthy weight, 30 minutes of daily activity, moderate alcohol, a decent diet—added 12 to 14 years of life expectancy at age 50. Other research shows that cardiorespiratory fitness, social connection, and decent sleep each independently move the needle. The boring fundamentals dwarf the biohacker stack by such a margin that any honest read of the literature has to start there.

This isn’t an anti-science rant to eschew progress and technology. It’s that we need to ditch the sciencyness, the things that have the appearance of rigour and making a difference, but when you pull back the layer they’re just a bunch of marketing with no real substance underneath.

The steroid Olympics were a sales funnel with a starting gun. They hoped to sell drugs to middle-aged men who felt inadequate. That if they could just take this supplement stack, then they too could recapture their glory days when they scored four touchdowns in a single game for Polk High.

The Enhanced Games is just the latest version of an old pitch. Soylent told us we could hack human nutrition down to a beige paste. Until people got sick, and the company that promised to replace food now sells protein shakes at petrol stations. Theranos promised to hack blood testing the way Silicon Valley hacks software, until it turned out you can’t iterate your way through a misdiagnosis. Facebook promised to bring the world closer together, to help bring “connection” and “presence.” While their internal research showed it created the opposite: mental health problems and addiction to screens. It’s the same pattern every time. There are some things we can’t hack.

The Enhanced Games are the logical endpoint of a tech-bro fever dream, where ‘optimising’ everything in the name of some metric matters more than the human actually doing the thing. But what it proved is that the human mattered. When it comes to performance, you can’t skip steps. You need the boring work for a long time. And the same is true for most of life.