Enhanced Games perpetuate a growing problem

Opinion

We appear to be entering a new golden age of steroids.

Years of scandals out of the Olympics, pro baseball, pro wrestling, and other athletic fields should have put to bed the notion that there is any athletic or cultural value in using performance-enhancing drugs, or PEDs, to get an edge. With every suspension, with every prize stripped from a competitor or left tainted by the way it was obtained, the message was clear — it’s cheating, and it’s not worth it.

Some haven’t received the message. The Enhanced Games hopes to hold its first-ever event in Las Vegas, Nev.

The Enhanced Games, as the name suggests, is a multi-sport athletic competition in which athletes are openly using PEDs. The games’ website makes much ado about the close supervision the athletes will be under, overseen by medical professionals to ensure their health and safety.

But it’s not that simple. Supervising an athlete’s PED use in the short term may prevent a tragedy during training, or even in the short term, but long-term use of these substances wreaks havoc on the body, affecting the heart and other organs. In addition to aggravating the global athletic community, the games necessarily subject their athletes to likely future complications.

However, the Enhanced Games are merely a very out-in-the-open manifestation of some sectors’ increasing comfort with the use of PEDs — particularly on social media.

Where show business has a long history of establishing unhealthy body standards, social media has stepped in to normalize and perpetuate them further.

A study by body image experts at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia found that exposure to idealized bodies on social media “was directly linked with negative body image issues and greater propensity to seek out anabolic-androgenic steroids,” according to an account of the study published by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners.

And in the world of social media, where people tend to present idealized versions of themselves, these jacked-and-toned influencers are not always achieving their results the way they describe.

The “Liver King” a.k.a. Brian Johnson, spent years on social media touting his commitment to the “ancestral lifestyle” — a life devoted to hard, rugged work and a diet ahistorically rich in organ meats, often consumed raw. He co-owns a supplement company. An email leak in 2022 revealed that he was a regular user of steroids, spending as much as US$11,000 per month on PEDs. This came as no shock to scrutinizers who wondered how else a man in his 40s could have achieved such a swollen, muscular physique.

And he’s not the only one. Fitness influencers in all corners of the internet make their money selling advice to people setting unreachable goals. Sometimes, the shortcut of steroids has consequences, as in the case of influencer Jaxon Tippet, who spoke of his own past steroid use. He died of a heart attack at 30.

And the Liver King? He continues to post workouts to Instagram, and still touts his hypermasculine ideals. But he also, in December last year, shared on his Instagram a litany of his health problems: a fatty liver; a twisted kidney; a “necrotic fold”; and a mass in his colon.

People are already beset with unhealthy examples of unachievable bodies, with little to no discussion of the terrible toll PED use has over time.

Your muscles will be huge, sure — but so will your heart, and liver.

The Enhanced Games only promise to give more good publicity to a terrible fitness trend.