I traveled to Las Vegas in May to watch the Enhanced Games — a one-of-a-kind sports competition that lets athletes compete while using the kind of performance-enhancing drugs typically banned in professional sports. The games, derided as the “steroid Olympics,” were put on by a telehealth company backed by the likes of Peter Thiel and staffed by veterans of the crypto, AI, and biotech industries.
The event ended up being more than a little anticlimactic. Hailed by its creators as an event that would fundamentally transform the world of organized sports, the games resulted in few exciting feats. Only one world record fell, and it came in swimming, a sport where records are broken often.
Now it can be said that, in addition to the games being a competitive flop, they were a commercial failure, too. Earlier this week, the Enhanced Group, the company that put on the games, posted its second-quarter earnings report, revealing that the company had suffered a net loss of nearly $62 million. Much of that loss came from hosting the games.
Enhanced Group, founded only several years ago in 2023, enjoyed an IPO earlier this year at a $1.2 billion valuation, and sells personalized health treatments via a a digital telehealth platform. The treatments it sells are all FDA-approved, including peptides, testosterone injections, GLP-1s for weight loss, and other similar products.
The company’s Q2 earnings report says it brought in $17.7 million in the last quarter, but most of that money came from sponsorships tied to the games, not the telehealth business on which the company was built. Scant information is available about how that core business is doing. The report casts doubt on claims previously made by Enhanced executives that the games will be an annual event (the company will either have to start making a whole lot more money or be comfortable losing tens of millions of dollars a year).
Enhanced may already be signaling a pivot. The company’s report also highlights the recent launch of a new online series, Enhanced Breakers, which it says “operates at a fraction of the cost of a full Games event” while still keeping “athletes competing, audiences engaged, sponsors interested, and performance medicine in front of the world year-round.”
Enhanced’s own woes aside, the industry around it is gaining ground. The peptide business is booming, helped along by a recent decision from the Trump administration’s Food and Drug Administration to reclassify a number of substances that have long resided in a legally gray area. The government’s support doesn’t open the floodgates for the sale of those substances quite yet — an additional review process still needs to take place — but it highlights the government’s interest in deregulating the industry.
The FDA’s parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is notably overseen by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long been known for his unconventional views on health. Kennedy’s ideas have been castigated by health professionals both inside and outside of the government who have routinely characterized his thinking as dangerous — criticism that hasn’t slowed the industry’s momentum.
Silicon Valley remains one of the hotbeds for peptide startups, where companies like Superpower and Noho Labs are capitalizing on the tech industry’s penchant for biohacking and trendy health supplements. And the sector’s growth is outpacing the rules meant to govern it, with state governments struggling to keep up with regulatory schemes.
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