What would you be willing to put in your body?

Enhanced Games featured roughly 40 elite athletes using legal performance-enhancing drugs, with media asking what substances athletes were taking. Athletes did not disclose their personalized drug combinations, and the event provided only an aggregated, nonspecific list to reduce copycat use without medical supervision. Reports of the inaugural Games included unenhanced athletes beating enhanced rivals, few records being broken, and concerns that the event functioned as a marketing scheme for supplements, hormone therapies, and legal peptides sold through a direct-to-consumer telehealth platform. The central concern raised was how to decide what is safe to put into bodies, given the intense focus on substances among athletes and wellness influencers.

"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."

"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? 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."

Read at The Verge