The Enhanced Games' steroid-fueled spectacle posts a nearly $62 million loss

The Enhanced Games, derided as the “steroid Olympics,” let athletes compete while using performance-enhancing drugs typically banned in professional sports. Held in Las Vegas in May and backed by investors including Peter Thiel, the event was billed by its creators as transformative for organized sports but delivered a thin competitive result: only one world record fell, in swimming, a sport where records are broken often.

That competitive letdown is now confirmed as a commercial one too. Enhanced Group — founded in 2023 and taken public earlier this year at a $1.2 billion valuation — brought in $17.7 million in the quarter, but most of that came from sponsorships tied to the Games rather than the telehealth business the company was built on, which sells FDA-approved treatments including peptides, testosterone injections, and GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. The report casts doubt on earlier claims from Enhanced executives that the Games would become an annual event, since doing so would require either a lot more revenue or a willingness to keep losing tens of millions of dollars a year.

Enhanced may already be signaling a pivot: its earnings report highlighted the recent launch of Enhanced Breakers, an online series the company says “operates at a fraction of the cost of a full Games event” while keeping “athletes competing, audiences engaged, sponsors interested, and performance medicine in front of the world year-round.”

The broader industry around Enhanced is still gaining ground, helped by a recent FDA decision under the Trump administration to reclassify a number of substances long in a legally gray area — though an additional review process still has to happen before sales can fully expand. The FDA’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, is overseen by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose unconventional health views have been routinely characterized as dangerous by health professionals inside and outside government, criticism that hasn’t slowed the industry’s momentum. Silicon Valley remains a hub for peptide-focused startups capitalizing on the tech industry’s appetite for biohacking, with sector growth outpacing the regulatory frameworks meant to govern it.

Why it matters

A splashy, well-funded sports event losing tens of millions of dollars is a reminder that novelty spectacle doesn’t guarantee a business model — even as the underlying peptide and performance-medicine market it was built to promote keeps expanding around it.