Inside the Enhanced Games, Where Athletes Compete on Steroids. And Growth Hormones. And Adderall.

“My whole life I was natural, and I knew I was competing with people who were not following the rules,” a swimmer tells Clara Molot in this disturbing feature on the so-called Enhanced Games. “I wanted to see my full potential.” Molot’s story is rich with revealing comments from the games’ cofounders and participants (not to mention a certain US health secretary), and quietly shaped by its background: ongoing missile-defense efforts in Abu Dhabi, where the games are based. How harrowing, to see what a singular fixation on “potential” leaves out. “Anyone doing a peptide or joining the Enhanced Games is doing an n-of-one experiment,” says Andrew Hessel, a synthetic biologist who has spent his career at the intersection of technology and human biology. “They are the guinea pig. I hugely support people’s right to self-experiment—that’s all our lives are. But many people don’t appreciate the risks. And if they’re doing this for longevity or health, I find the cognitive dissonance just crazy.” The games holds that exact intellectual tension at its core.