The Steroid Olympics: A sales funnel with a starting gun

What happens when a culture forgets that competition was never about the result.

The steroid Olympics are a sales funnel with a starting gun. They’ve told us as much. Their long game is to sell peptides and other drugs to the person watching at home, the one feeling inadequate because their peak athletic moment came decades ago, back when they scored four touchdowns for Polk High. It’s a marketing gimmick. But it represents something far worse: the erosion of the norms that hold a culture together.

The Enhanced Games are what happens when a culture forgets that competition was never merely about the output. They’re the logical endpoint of a tech-bro fever dream, where “optimizing” everything in the name of some metric matters more than the human actually doing the thing. They’re the end result of a “win at all costs” mindset that cares about one thing: profit.

And there’s a reason this is coming out of the same world that got us all addicted to Facebook, TikTok, and whatever social platform came next, while sitting on their own research showing how badly it was hurting the people using it, especially the teenagers.

When the end result is all that matters, you stop seeing people as people. You start justifying the spectacle, as long as the bottom line looks good.

We don’t have to live in that world. And very few of us actually want to live in the tech-bro fever dream that the Enhanced Games represent...

The Erosion of Norms

Just think about it for a moment. Do you really want to live in a society where cheating is the norm? Is that what we want in our schools? Do we just shrug and say, “Well, kids are going to use AI for everything anyway, so let’s forget about teaching them how to write or think. Just let them use it on everything”?

Of course not. It’s the same with sport. Few people want to live in a world where the default is that every athlete has to become a science experiment just to compete. Where competing requires sacrificing your twenties to drugs that often carry long-term health consequences, drugs that frequently require taking other drugs for years, because you’ve jacked up your body’s hormones in the first place.

When you default to “everyone is cheating,” it’s not about transparency. You’re trying to shift the narrative so you can get away with manipulating people for your own benefit.

Do you remember that kid in high school who tried to convince you that everyone cheated? They were trying to normalize cheating. Mostly so they could rationalize their own laziness. After all, if everyone did it, what was the problem?

We see the same thing in sport. Every doper who’s ever been caught, or their doctor, screams that everyone is cheating. They do it for the same reason the high school kid did. They’re trying to rationalize and justify their choices. It’s the self-protective ego telling a story: that they aren’t a bad person, that they didn’t really do anything wrong.

And that’s exactly what the Enhanced Games are doing when they try to convince you they’re being “honest” by telling you everyone cheats. There are several problems sitting underneath that pitch.

First off, contrary to their opinion: no, not everyone is cheating. How do I know? I’ve been in the arenas at the highest level. Hell, I was the whistleblower on one of the biggest anti-doping busts of the last decade. People cheat. But it’s not even close to “everyone.” I’ve coached athletes who finished top 10 in the world, and top 10 at major marathons, clean. I’ve trained and worked with people who were among the best on the planet and did it clean. I have close friends who’ve coached the literal best in the world, athletes I’d bet a lot of money were clean.

You can still be among the best in the world clean.

This isn’t to say people don’t cheat. Of course they do. But 2026 isn’t the 1990s, when Lance Armstrong and Barry Bonds dominated the headlines. Testing has improved massively. It’s not perfect. But what it does is force people to be sophisticated to get around it. And even when athletes do dope, they can’t go full-blown 1980s style about it. It pushes them toward microdosing and similar methods. That at least minimizes the effect a little. More importantly, it keeps athletes from going so far that their health collapses into the kind of catastrophes we saw in the 1970s and 80s, back when doping ran completely unchecked.

Second, the Enhanced Games amplify every incentive that drives people to go all the way. Sure, they’ll tell you their “scientists” are monitoring the drug use. But when you put a million dollars on the line, do you really think an athlete who’s already crossed the line is going to stop the moment some doctor says that’s enough? Especially when there’s no serious anti-doping system holding them accountable? Of course not. They’ve willingly stepped into a world that is win-at-all-costs. The incentives don’t align with restraint.

Third, there’s no real autonomy here. In theory, no one is forced to dope. In practice, once the field is doped to the gills, the clean athlete isn’t making a free choice. They’re choosing between their values and their viability. That’s not a more honest product. It’s not science. It manufactures the appearance of science and “transparency” as a marketing gimmick. It’s no different from Facebook trying to convince you it’s part of the solution to our modern problems because it promotes “connection.” It’s no different from what’s happened in the workplace, where we’ve quietly replaced building trust with building systems to monitor people 24/7. We were sold the idea that it would make companies more efficient. What it actually did was erode autonomy and trust, and burn out the very people who might have been our best performers.

The real question is what kind of competitive world we create when enhancement becomes the default.

What Sport Was Actually For

Somewhere along the way, we forgot the point of competition. That it’s about drive and discipline. That it’s about putting in an enormous amount of work just to come face to face with your limits. That it’s about learning to handle winning and losing. That sometimes you’re not good enough. That sometimes your limits arrive before you’d ever want them to.

It’s about striving together. Yes, we want to win. But anyone who’s actually been in the arena understands that you relish great competitors, because they bring out the best in you. True competitors don’t want easy victories. They want to be challenged.

It’s about being part of something bigger. There’s a reason the bonds you form during high school football or cross-country hold up across decades. Sport forces us to be real. It lets us see our friends break down and cry after a brutal loss, and then helps us stand them back up.

Yes, there’s idealism in this. And yes, sport, like every part of society, will always have its corrupt side. But we don’t have to give up the fight for some semblance of normalcy. We don’t have to hand over one of the last places where reality still wins, where performance doesn’t have to be Instagramified. We don’t have to settle for a tech-bro dystopian steroid Olympics.

We forgot that our kids are watching. They’re learning what mom and dad actually value. Do we want to give them the green light to become the full-blown lunatic youth-sports parent who hands their child HGH so they can “go D1”? Sure, a few insane parents already do that today. But is that the default we want? Is that the norm we’re trying to build?

Do we really want to live in a world where “win at all costs” is the default, where the ends always justify the means?

A meta-analysis of 7,726 young athletes found a strong relationship between the moral climate of sport and young athletes’ behavior. A prosocial moral climate was tied to more prosocial behavior and less antisocial behavior. An antisocial climate was tied to the opposite. Do we really want to give away one of the few places where kids actually learn their moral underpinnings?

In so many other corners of life, we’ve already let the cheating, the surveillance, the misguided “optimization” take hold. And we’re paying for it. Just look at the chaos around us. The anxiety. The rates of mental health disorders. The creeping sense that nothing is quite real anymore.

Sport is one of the last bastions of reality. It’s not perfect. People cheat. But it’s still one of the few places where we get to strive to see what we’re capable of, to find out where our limits actually lie, to compete with some real degree of fairness.

Our kids are watching. They’re learning whether the point is to become the best version of themselves, or the best chemistry experiment money can buy. We get to decide which lesson we hand them.

The Enhanced Games is selling you the AI Instagramified version of sport. One where you can just get a new filter, change your appearance, adopt a new persona. It might get you some cheap likes and follows. But there’s nothing real about it.

Sport is about coming face to face with your own limits. It’s about doing the work, and still sometimes falling short. You have to accept and embrace reality. And the day we forget that is the day we hand away the only part of sport that was ever worth watching. It’s never been about the end result. It’s always been about how you play the game, and who you became along the way. Even at the highest level.

-Steve