Competing in the pro-doping Enhanced Games

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, why elite athletes are openly doping for the year's biggest sporting spectacle.

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1:00I was always talented in the water, right? I always had a natural affinity to water and it's a place of peace, right? When you put your head under the water, there's no one's talking to you, it's just you and your thoughts or you just pushing yourself. So there's that part I always thought. But my dream was always like when you're a little kid is to win the Olympic gold medal. As you get older, you start understanding how rare that is. So it kind of shifted towards, you know, just making the Olympic Games. Meet Max McCusker. He's an elite swimmer with the shoulders to prove it. Max trained with military discipline in his childhood.

1:37Six to eight sessions a week, entering every competition going. And it paid off. All right, they're off now for the last final of day two here at the National Championships. Look at that breakout from McCusker. He represented Ireland as a finalist in the European and World Championships. Three strokes to go. McCosker wins it. 23-44. That's pretty slick. I missed the Tokyo 2021 games by a couple of hundredths of a second, maybe. But Max did make it to the Olympics. Paris 2024. He'd have thought this was just the beginning of a glorious career. an Olympian representing his country and being skilled at a level most of us can barely physically imagine.

2:29Pretty much straight after Paris Olympics, I retired due to like mainly financial reasons, but just had no support or funding from the governing body. So just decided that, you know what, I've made my childhood career dream and I had to go work in the corporate world for a bit. At 24, Max thought his swimming career was done. A year later, he got a call. The Enhanced Games. A new era where sport meets spectacle. Where records fall and traditions are rewritten. The world's best athletes, fully unleashed and powered by science.

3:15Yeah, so it was actually an old teammate who reached out to me, Shane Ryan, and was like, there's a spot for a butterfly swimmer. I've told them about you and I've told them that you might be interested. Max was invited to compete in the Enhanced Games, the world's first sporting event where athletes aren't just openly taking drugs. They're being encouraged to do so. I always thought there was more for me. I always thought I was continuously improving. And then, yeah, it kind of went from there, started speaking with the team and the coach. And then before you know it, I was out on a plane to the training camp.

3:58This weekend, the first ever Enhanced Games will take place in Las Vegas. Where else? to show the world what it looks like to turn athletes into superhumans using a radical cocktail of drugs. Peptides, supplements, so-called longevity medicine. All of which you can conveniently buy from their website. From The Guardian, I'm Noshin Iqbal. Today in Focus, selling superhumans. Are the enhanced gains looking to get us all hooked?

4:35Sean Ingle, you're a chief sports reporter at The Guardian, and you recently wrote about not getting your media pass for the Enhanced Games. Can you tell me how come? We all thought it'd be quite interesting to go along. We applied for accreditation and we got a reply back saying, sorry, no. I then got an email from the Enhanced Games people saying it had nothing to do with scrutiny from The Guardian. We don't care about that. It's because The Guardian's not big in America. Right, OK. I point out that actually we are one of the sort of bigger news media websites in America and the world without sort of, you know, picking up the trumpet and blowing it too loudly.

5:10And at the end of last week, they said, OK, you can actually go. So the Enhanced Games, they're absolutely embracing that sports should be aligned with drug use and that it's fair game for everyone to be taking them. Their starting point, I guess, is that they believe that lots of elite athletes take banned drugs already. They're just not caught. So the arts essentially say, look, we're honest here. We're being transparent. We're not hiding in the shadows. This is what the athletes are doing. Whereas more athletes than you think at Olympics and elsewhere are taking these drugs. They're just doing so secretly and illegally.

5:48When I speak to the World Anti-Doping Agency, they would absolutely dismiss this. They would say, of course, there are cheats out there that don't get caught. But it's not the majority. It's more than we'd like, obviously, but it's still better than a free-for-all, which is what Enhanced Games are talking about. So Sean, curiously, the Enhanced Games say that it's not compulsory for athletes to take drugs to compete and that they're also not allowed to use illegal drugs and that it's prescription only. So in terms of the drugs we're talking about, what are the actual risks? I asked the World Anti-Doping Agency this, and their view is all drugs, when taken effective doses, carry risks.

6:26They pointed out steroids, for example, can increase the risk of heart attack, stroke and liver damage. A human growth hormone can trigger diabetes, heart problems and a normal growth in organs and bones. Oh my God. Testosterone can lead to increased risk of hypertension, heart attack and blood clots, as well as infertility and testicular shrinkage. And they say there is plenty of published peer-reviewed literature on this. I did speak to a couple of scientists at Birmingham University and they made another point that sometimes we don't see this stuff. for 10, 20, 30 years afterwards. So you can feel absolutely great and have these benefits.

7:02And I don't think anyone is denying that if you take a bunch of testosterone, you will get stronger, you will probably feel better, but there will be side effects too. And so what do Enhanced Games say about the safety and the side effects and the risk? Well, they will say that for the ones that the athletes are using on Sunday, these are all FDA approved. on the official Enhanced Games website there are other drugs such as peptides these new things that are coming through that aren't currently FDA approved however Enhanced are hoping that will change and there is a currently a battle at the moment to get more of peptides through Congress and there's every possibility that a lot of these peptides will be FDA approved in a year or two but whether they are safe and we know the long-term side effects or to say we don't know about that and so because they haven't actually been adequately studied enough yet with the with the rigor that you would get with approved medicines and sean are you aware of any stories any cases where taking these kind of drugs has had a really negative bearing on an athlete well you only have to go back to before the iron curtain look at the number of east german athletes look at the number of Soviet athletes that broke records, did incredibly on things.

8:19And then years later, they were diagnosed with all sorts of issues. Indeed, I think in 2005 in Germany, a number of East German athletes took a pharmaceutical company to court. What Enhanced would say is those athletes were taking enormous doses, perhaps things were as developed back then. And they would say, look, we are doing sort of smaller, safer doses. But Wider would dispute and say no amount of certain drugs can be safe.

8:51Max, I wonder, was there any reservation on your part to compete in the Enhanced Games? For sure. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't. You know, when you first get the phone call, you have all these thoughts of, all right, well, I haven't done any of this my whole career. All you hear is bad things about, you know, enhancements or steroids. I had these questions. My family's had these questions. I brought these questions to the team and I got all of the questions answered by professional doctors or the relevant team members from the enhanced team. And that was all put my mind at ease within the first week of conversations.

9:25What was the training like in the United Arab Emirates? I know you've been there since January. For me, I've never trained so well, so consistently in my whole life. I went from 13 % body fat to 6 % body fat in probably about two months. I've probably never been under 11 % in my whole life or maybe when I was like a six-year-old kid I was probably around that at the same time I put on about five kg of muscle you're able to do things that I was never able to do when I wasn't enhanced if I had a hard session on Monday when it was time to go fast again on Wednesday I was right where I needed to be do you mind me asking what is it that you're taking to have seen all these changes in your body yeah so I don't really delve into what exactly I'm taking, just for the reason that, let's say, I'm going to give a name here, Jim, sees me at May 24th and sees, oh, his physique looks a lot better.

10:16I'd like to get leaner like him, or he just broke a record or swam a really fast time or won the event. And he goes, oh, I'll go back on an interview and see what he took. And he hasn't got the blood work done. He hasn't been through the testing or got it sourced from maybe the enhanced team, or he's found it somewhere else. I don't want to say what I've been taking so people use it in a similar way when they haven't done the testing for it and made sure it's safe for their physiology. The negative stigma that this organization gets is that, oh, they're just doing loads of steroids. They're just doing drugs.

10:53They're just doing all this. It's like, if that were the case, I wouldn't feel comfortable doing it. And I'm not promoting people going behind the scenes without doctors doing steroids and stuff like this, right? that's not what we do at all. It's everything is extremely tested. Everything is measured to the T. Everything is prescribed based on your biomarkers, blood work, everything, right? It's completely our choice, right? It's completely our choice of, I would like to do part of this, or I'd like to do less of this, or why am I doing this? Then from that, there is extensive check-ins. I just had a check-in this morning, you know?

11:26And to be honest, obviously we're five days from the competition now i can i can say that it's deviated from that at all i feel the best i've ever felt in my life and i felt safe doing it our goal is not to break a world record our goal is actually to break all the world records what kind of incentives are the organizers offering athletes to compete? Every athlete is getting a salary and Hearts Games say that's between three and five times what they would get say if you compete for Team GB. I've seen some athletes talk about six figure salaries in US dollar terms so that's significant amounts of money.

12:12They also get an appearance fee for racing as well as that for every race there is a half a million dollar prize pool with a winner receiving a quarter of a million dollars and then if you break a world record in what they call the glamour events, which is the 50 metre freestyle swimming and 100 metre athletic sprint, you also would receive an extra$1 million. Wow. Max, what was the main appeal for you? For me, it was getting back into swimming, right? Getting back into something that I loved. And you spend the best part of 15 years, maybe more, of honing a skill that's pretty specific, right?

12:49And I can't go into the corporate world and start teaching people how to swim butterfly, you know so it's if someone gives you an opportunity you know what you're going to be supported for once and in every way and see what's the most potential you can get out of yourself in this sport that was the biggest draw to me right off the bat and then just also the interest in this science obviously competing professionally for i guess six years best part of six years clean you know getting drug tested every couple of weeks right and never having a negative test right so it was completely new to me and what is the potential for earning at these games i'm competing in two events so i guess the minimum if i come fourth in both events is a hundred thousand in a couple of hour event or the maximum being five hundred thousand right if i win both events so compare that to my swimming career before where you know maybe over the course of four years i maybe made 10 grand so it's like chalk and cheese for me

13:54Sean this is the inaugural year but the games themselves have had so much press since we were first announced two years ago can you tell me about that and the kind of attention they've had clearly anything that disrupts what we know as traditional sport this idea of fair competition this idea of there are some drugs that you cannot take for either health reasons for safety reasons, also just for reasons of unfairness. Anything that does that is going to raise eyebrows. And the fact some of the people behind it, people from Silicon Valley, throwing millions and millions of pounds at this also creates huge interest.

14:29So, Sean, can you tell me who is behind the Enhanced Games? Where did the idea come from? One of the key guys is an Australian tech investor called Aaron D 'Azouza. He's talked about building a superhumanity through the Enhanced Games. We're building the Apollo mission for the 21st century. You know, what did the Apollo mission do? It showed us that we were so much more capable as a human species, right? We had a new threshold going to the moon, using science and technology to overcome our limits. This is exactly what the Enhanced Games is about. He's an Australian law expert, Oxford University graduate, venture capitalist, tech entrepreneur.

15:07you know he claims that he will reimagine sport in the future even though he admits that he isn't a big sports fan in a recent valentine fair interview he said i get invited to center court one would unbox seat of football games everyone in the sports world wants to meet me and i'm really just not interested in sitting there however i think he sends a money-making opportunity and uh hence here we are at the enhanced games behind all this is this idea that anti-aging as a business is growing hugely everywhere, but particularly in the US. And there'll be thousands, millions of people who perhaps will be watching on Sunday thinking, oh, I'd like a body like that.

15:44And if you go to the Enhanced Games website, there are all sorts of things that you can buy that will make you, they say, go faster, stronger, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of other capital invested in the Enhanced Games, some of it coming from the billionaire Peter Thiel, who we've featured a lot on Today in Focus in the past. He's had his fingers in a lot of pies, eBay, PayPal, Palantir, and now the Enhanced Games. What do you think the interest was for him? Well, I think he is very much into the whole longevity side of things as well. I have to say the Enhanced Games have pushed back on the whole Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr.

16:20who've both been involved. They say they are passive and small investors at the start, and they needed to cede capital. When I was speaking to them, I flagged up the fact that the Times had essentially called them a MAGA experiment. And again, they pushed back on that. And they said, our only social experiment is to show the world how their lives can improve from safe clinical guided use of enhancements. So they'd say they're non-political, they're not MAGA. Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr. are only a sort of a small part of the investment group. But Sean, in your sort of expertise on the sports beat, and you look at who is pushing the biohacking, longevity, advanced science end of things, and then you look at the investors of the enhanced games and who's taking an interest, would you make a link between the games and the connection with MAGA?

17:12Yes and no. I think yes, in the sense, clearly look at some of the people behind it and they are to the right of American politics. But what did Michael Jordan once say, the famous basketball player, he said, Republicans buy sneakers too. And I suspect if you went to the Enhanced Games people, they would say, look, Democrats could be a captive audience for this stuff. their goal certainly is to make the things that you and i and perhaps many of our listeners would feel squeamish about at the moment they hope that in 5 10 15 years time you or i will think well you know i'm in my 50s 60s now i haven't got the energy i once was i'm waking up during the night i will take something it's no different than a sleeping tablet or it's no you know i will inject myself with testosterone suddenly i'm able to lift more than i've done in 20 years that's what they want.

17:59When it comes to customers, they're not picky. This isn't just sport. This isn't just athletes. It's a revolution. And you can be a part of it. Together, we are enhanced. Is it expected to be a commercial success? Because one wonders why so many investors have rushed to back something so controversial and untested. The$100 billion question. There are a bunch of companies in the longevity space at the moment and i think everyone expects this area to grow what enhanced are doing i think are using olympic athletes some of them world champions some of the world record holders to sell a dream the other thing i think it's worth flagging is there are already an awful lot of people particularly in the us taking this stuff A lot of it, though, is coming from China.

18:52A lot of it is unregulated. A lot of it, you're not sure the dose. What Enhanced and other US companies are trying to do is say, look, when you buy this stuff for us, you could be sure if it says X about testosterone in this vial, it will contain it. So they are trying to sort of make this area both legitimate, but also publicly acceptable, if that makes sense. And I think they will succeed. But it sounds like not only are they able to put on a huge spectacle, but they're conducting a live human science experiment while they're at it. Absolutely. They're spending$50 million on this one event. The Killers are going to play at the after show party.

19:29There will be, I'm sure, lots of celebs about. It's going to be in Resorts World, Las Vegas. They're throwing big bucks at this. They have got serious athletes here. Decent people like Ben Proudo, I like a lot. Fred Curley, he's Olympic 100 metre silver medalist and bronze medalist. He's the world champion in 2022, 100 metres, one of the fastest men ever. So they've got serious people and they're using those athletes, I think, to raise the stock price and get lots of customers clicking on their website come Sunday night. Coming up, how does Max feel about being an advert for enhancements?

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21:33Max obviously you notice changes in your body and I wonder how you feel about the organizers behind it also using this as something of an advert for the products that are being used right and for mainstream audiences potentially being able to access this stuff I'm not here to pretend that I'm a swimmer again like I know why I've been brought I know I've been brought here to perform on a product so we can sell more product i understand it's a business it's not max mccusker going for an irish record again it's how can we allow max mccusker to do what he's best at to help sell a product i understand that that's what it is and in terms of the product you know it's it's what we've been doing everything's above board and done properly people don't have to buy the product no one's being forced to use the product but if you like what you see come may 24th then yeah it's a free country you should be able to benefit from things that you want to want to undergo and have you faced criticism from your peers and if so how have you handled that i haven't to be honest i get the old keyboard warrior every so often who give me some criticism from from my point of view and i've said it since day one i wanted to make sure that i wanted to do it i wanted to make sure that my family my four family members were comfortable with me doing it and a couple of friends.

22:50If everyone was on board and I could reassure them, then I was happy doing it. I've had teammates, people from sports organizations come to me secretly and be like, I actually really rate that. And how do you think the two things will be seen now in the future in the world of sport, having athletes taking enhancements, competing in these enhanced games? What's the sort of prestige compared to the Olympics or, you know, European championships? I'd be sad if there's not always a place for the Olympics and European championships and world championships, right? That's how I got here. I think they're separate.

23:24I think there's a place for that and there's a place for us. Do I think we're going to get more views? Yeah, I do think we're going to get more views. I think it's something new. People are more interested. There's a lot more talk about the enhanced games in the past year than any other swim meet that's happened in the past 10 years. So I think that tells you a lot, right? People want to see different things now. You know, like we just saw Jake Paul fight Anthony Joshua like a couple of months ago. You know, people are interested. Did you enjoy that though? I watched it, you know, I watched it.

23:52But what we're trying to do is even different from that. We're trying to do things that unenhanced people haven't done. It's a different sort of thing. It's not swimming. It's a different aspect now. Do you worry that it might make it difficult to ever return to mainstream tournaments? And is that even a goal? For me, no. I don't see myself going to mainstream tournaments again. To be honest with you, I'm not 100 % sure if that's possible. I'm not someone who believes that clean sport or unenhanced sport should be dirty. I think it should be clean. I was always clean my whole career. I never failed a drug test.

24:29I never would even dabble in it. And when I was doing it, I did everything by the book as I should have done it. How did you feel when you'd hear about doping allegations? And did you ever compete against someone who later failed a drug test? It's a great question. If athletes told you they don't think about it, they'd be lying because it's something that is in your head, right? There was a documentary that came out years ago called Icarus. It's a cycling doping scandal from, I believe it was Russia, right? And I couldn't bring myself to watch it because as an athlete, when you do know you're playing by the rules and you're checking your supplements and you're checking to make sure strictly that you're not doing anything, and then there's structural doping through other nations or individuals find ways to get through tests, it's a wind up, you know, it's a complete slap in the face to people that are trying to do it by the book.

25:20Max, how do you feel about your chances in the competition? Do you feel as excited about success in the enhanced games as you might have done for the Olympics or what have you? For me, training has been going the best it's ever been, right? I'm more confident that I'll I'll do PBs in both races that I'm competing in than I've ever been before. In terms of my chances, right, in the 50 fly, I'm going against the ex-world champion, Ben Proud, the current world record holder, Andrei Govorov. Is my competition tough? Yeah, it's just as tough here as it would be on an Olympic stage. Am I an underdog and willing to go in and race these boys?

25:53Yeah, for sure. I've got a lane, so I've got a chance. Max, thank you so much for your time. Wish you the best and good luck. Thank you. I appreciate you guys having me on. That was Olympic swimmer Max McCusker and The Guardian's chief sports reporter Sean Ingle. You can read all of Sean's coverage of the games at theguardian.com. And that's it for today. This episode was presented by me, Nosheen Iqbal. It was produced by May Robson, Tom Glasser and Ivor Manley. Sound design was by Ross Burns. The executive producer was Elizabeth Kassin. We'll be back this afternoon with the latest.

26:36This is The Guardian.