Polymarket Opens Bets on Las Vegas ‘Steroid Olympics’ as Enhanced Games Confirm 91% of Athletes Used Testosterone

Polymarket’s Enhanced Games: Number of Weightlifting World Records Broken? market is the cleanest single window into trader sentiment. Volume is thin — just $61 had traded by Monday morning, almost all of it on the “6 or more” tail, which trades at 6%. Polymarket’s separate aggregate market on whether one or more records of any kind fall across the games sits at 90%, while specific event markets price the men’s 100m freestyle world-record probability at 25% and the men’s 100m sprint at 8%. A head-to-head deadlift market on Icelandic strongman Hafthor Bjornsson clearing 510 kilograms against Canadian rival Mitchell Hooper trades close to a coin flip.

Enhanced Games: Number of Weightlifting World Records Broken? Source: Polymarket

The thin volume on the weightlifting book belies the cultural reach. Polymarket promoted the books on its main social account Monday with the line “Trade the Steroid Olympics live,” racking up more than 643,000 views within hours. Those impressions land against a backdrop of unprecedented regulatory tailwinds for the prediction-market category, including Polymarket’s CFTC-approved return to the U.S. in late 2025 and the $2 billion strategic investment from New York Stock Exchange parent Intercontinental Exchange the same year, which valued the platform at $9 billion.

What the Enhanced Games actually are

Founded in 2023 by Australian entrepreneur and lawyer Aron D’Souza, the Enhanced Games are explicit about what they are: an Olympics-style competition for athletes openly using substances banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency and the International Olympic Committee. The May 21–24 event at Resorts World covers three sports — swimming, track athletics and weightlifting — with $250,000 prizes for event winners and $1 million bonuses for any athlete breaking a recognized world record. Music bookends the program: Alan Walker and Latin artist Farruko at the opening ceremony, with Las Vegas hometown band The Killers closing the event.

Days before the opening ceremony, the company — now publicly listed as Enhanced Group, Inc. (NYSE: ENHA) under chief executive Maximilian Martin, who replaced D’Souza in November — released aggregate substance-use data from a 36-athlete clinical trial. According to reporting in Marathon Handbook, 91% of athletes used testosterone or testosterone esters in the 12 weeks leading up to the games, 79% used human growth hormone, 62% used stimulants such as Adderall and modafinil, and 41% used erythropoietin (EPO) — the blood-booster at the center of cycling’s most notorious doping scandals.

“FDA approval does not equate with safe use when the drug is not used the way the FDA has approved it,” Dr. Aaron Baggish, a sports cardiologist told NPR ahead of the games, calling the testosterone usage rates “very concerning.” Travis Tygart, head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, has described the project as a “dangerous clown show that puts profit over principle.” World Athletics president Lord Sebastian Coe called the concept “moronic” and said competitors face lengthy bans from sanctioned competition.

The Enhanced Games organizers reject those framings. Dr. Guido Pieles, who chairs the company’s Independent Medical Commission, said in a statement carried by SwimSwam that the trial design includes comprehensive cardiology, organ-health, body-composition and neurocognitive assessments alongside long-term follow-up of up to five years per athlete.

The broadcast team — and the longevity industrial complex

The live broadcast, streaming on Roku, Rumble, YouTube, Twitch and Kick, is hosted by former NFL linebacker and Fox Sports anchor Emmanuel Acho, alongside fitness presenter Abby Labar. The most notable booking — and the one with the most direct overlap with the audiences that frequent crypto and biotech Twitter — is Bryan Johnson, the Blueprint and Don’t Die founder who has built a personal brand around extreme longevity protocols and exhaustive biomarker tracking. Johnson serves as the broadcast’s “human enhancement analyst,” providing real-time commentary on the substances athletes have used and how those protocols are expected to affect performance.

The headline athletes include Kristian Gkolomeev, the Greek swimmer who never medaled across four Olympic appearances but whose reported time under enhanced conditions exceeded the 50m freestyle world record that has stood since 2009; Ukrainian record-holder Andriy Govorov in the 50m butterfly; Australian former world champion James Magnussen, who came out of retirement specifically for the games; American sprinter Fred Kerley; and, in weightlifting, Bjornsson against Hooper in a marquee deadlift bout.

The crypto money behind it

The Enhanced Games has been backed since inception by a venture coalition that overlaps significantly with the crypto-aligned wing of Silicon Valley. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Apeiron Investment Group chair Christian Angermayer, former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan, and Donald Trump Jr. have all publicly backed the project. D’Souza, the founder, previously worked with Thiel on the litigation that ultimately bankrupted Gawker Media. The investor stack reads less like a sportswashing operation and more like a coalition of techno-libertarians betting that consumer biohacking — and the regulatory friction around it — is a market unto itself.

That stance makes Polymarket a natural counterpart. The platform, which settles trades in USDC on the Polygon blockchain, hosts roughly 20 active Enhanced Games markets covering individual event winners, single-record probabilities and aggregate record counts. Each is structured as a binary yes/no contract resolving on the official Enhanced Games results, with the platform’s UMA-based oracle as the resolution backstop.

Volume is thin — but the precedent matters

For all the spectacle, Polymarket’s Enhanced Games books are an order of magnitude smaller than the Drake “Iceman” album-release markets that ran earlier in May, which generated cumulative volume above $24 million across 11 active sub-markets. The weightlifting records market, with $61 of total turnover, is closer to a curiosity than a genuine price-discovery venue.

That gap is what makes the experiment interesting. Polymarket has spent the past year courting institutional legitimacy: the $112 million QCEX acquisition that returned it to U.S. soil, the ICE partnership that put founder Shayne Coplan at the NYSE opening bell in November, and the PrizePicks distribution deal that plugged it into fantasy-sports infrastructure. The Enhanced Games coverage is the kind of long-tail, culturally novel category that prediction markets need to demonstrate edge over traditional sportsbooks — events where no other line exists, and where the wisdom-of-crowds mechanism has room to work.

Whether the weightlifting market closes with a flurry of late volume — or settles quietly on the “0 records broken” outcome — will say something about Polymarket’s ability to attract speculative capital to anything beyond elections and major leagues. The market resolves on Tuesday, after the Enhanced Games’ closing card and The Killers’ set.

For Polymarket, every novel category is a test of the same proposition: that real money on real events produces better information than expert opinion. For the Enhanced Games, it is a test of whether chemically-assisted athletes can clear bars that the clean, tested, sanctioned versions of their sports have not, in some cases, moved in two decades.