Five Layers Down: The Investable Stack Behind the Steroid Olympics
Last week I was walking through Resorts World in Las Vegas after BTC Vegas wrapped up. There’s a structure inside the property that looks like a custom-built sports complex: a four-lane competition pool, a six-lane sprint track, what appears to be a weightlifting platform. I had no idea what it was for. I assumed offseason training camp or a weekend exhibition.
Yesterday morning while at Consensus in Miami, Squawk Box explained it. That structure is the venue for Enhanced Games, which prices its IPO today and stages its inaugural event over Memorial Day weekend.
My mom called this thirty years ago. Watching the steroid era of baseball unfold, she’d say something close to:
“I want to see them swing a bat with their head the size of a watermelon and arms the size of redwoods.” Half-joking, mostly correct.
The Games are interesting on their own. The investment thesis underneath them is more interesting still.
Quick Primer For Newcomers (like me!)
The Enhanced Games is a new sports property launched by Australian entrepreneur Aron D’Souza in 2023.
Three sports across four days at Resorts World Las Vegas: swimming, track and field, weightlifting.
40 athletes
$25 million in total comp
$1 million bounties for breaking world records (100m sprint & 50m freestyle)
The catch is that athletes are encouraged, rather than banned, from using performance-enhancing drugs.
Only FDA-approved substances prescribed by licensed U.S. physicians are allowed. Pre-competition medical screening includes blood panels, EKGs, and cardiac MRIs. WADA, USADA, the IOC, and World Aquatics have all condemned the event, with World Aquatics banning any participant from its competitions going forward.
The cap table reads like a who’s-who of contrarian capital.
Peter Thiel led the seed alongside Christian Angermayer, who runs longevity, biotech, and psilocybin investments through his family office Apeiron, and Balaji Srinivasan.
The Series B was co-led by Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital, with the Winklevoss twins and Saudi prince Khaled bin Alwaleed Al Saud also in the round.
The SPAC merger with A Paradise Acquisition Corp values Enhanced at a $1.2 billion enterprise value with up to $200 million in fresh capital.
That’s the headline story. Here’s what you’ll need to understand for portfolio purposes.
The Olympics format is the marketing engine
Enhanced launched a direct-to-consumer business in early 2026 selling testosterone replacement medicines and other consumer health products. The CEO has been straightforward about the model. The Games “showcase that performance enhancements, under the right clinical and medical supervision, can deliver long term health and longevity benefits.”
The competition is an ad campaign for a consumer health business.
That’s the reframe.
Think Red Bull.
Most people associate the brand with energy drinks. The Formula 1 team, the cliff-diving series, and the wingsuit jumps from the stratosphere are the marketing layer.
The drink is the product. Enhanced is running the same playbook for performance medicine, with one important difference: the consumer health category they’re feeding is enormous and growing fast.
The global testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) market sits around $2 billion today, growing at roughly 4.6% annually. The broader longevity category, which captures peptides, GLP-1 derivatives, hormone optimization, and adjacent biomarkers, is projected to expand from $65 billion in 2023 to $314 billion by 2030 at a 25% CAGR.
Enhanced is positioning into the bigger number, riding demographics and disposable income rather than the slower clinical TRT trajectory.
That’s where the investment stack starts to take shape.
What Enhancement Actually Delivers
Kristian Gkolomeev’s 50m freestyle progression. Source: The Sports Examiner, Enhanced Games announcement event (May 2025).
Worth grounding the conversation in real data. Kristian Gkolomeev’s personal best across his Olympic career was 21.44 seconds in the 50m freestyle. After two weeks of openly disclosed PEDs and using a current-legal swimsuit, he hit 21.03. In a now-banned super suit, 20.89 seconds, technically faster than Cesar Cielo’s 2009 world record of 20.91. That’s a 1.9% improvement over a peak Olympic time, achieved on a compressed prep cycle.
The performance gain looks small, but the economic implications scale far beyond it. A 1.9% performance edge marketed inside a $314 billion consumer health category is worth a lot of public market valuation.
The 5-Layer Stack
Layer 1: The direct play. A Paradise Acquisition Corp is the SPAC vehicle. Enhanced closed a $40 million PIPE that converts into public shares once trading begins. The risk profile is venture-equity-in-a-public-wrapper. Significant upside if the format catches on, total loss potential if the first event flops or a medical incident derails the broadcast. Treat this as speculative exposure rather than core position material.
Layer 2: The TRT and peptide supply chain. This is where the patient capital lives. Hims & Hers (HIMS) is already pivoting hard into this exact category, investing in a California peptide manufacturing facility and planning a 2026 longevity specialty covering peptides, coenzymes, and GLP/GIP treatments. The company is launching testosterone replacement therapy this year through an exclusive partnership with Marius Pharma for oral testosterone. Its 2.5 million subscriber base is the moat Enhanced has to compete against rather than the one Enhanced builds. Eli Lilly (LLY) sits one rung up the supply chain with GLP-1 dominance and the LillyDirect distribution layer that now routes Zepbound prescriptions through Hims. AbbVie (ABBV) carries the legacy AndroGel franchise, which is generic-pressured but still cash flow generative.
Layer 3: Diagnostics and monitoring. Medical supervision is the regulatory choke point that makes the whole model work. Every athlete gets blood panels, EKGs, cardiac MRIs. Every consumer customer ordering testosterone or peptides through a telehealth platform needs the same baseline. Tempus AI (TEM) sits at the genomic testing layer and was already on the radar from my AI value chain piece in March. Quest Diagnostics (DGX) and LabCorp (LH) handle the volume blood work. The wearable layer, including Apple, Garmin, plus private names like Oura and WHOOP, provides continuous biomarker data that turns a one-time prescription into a longitudinal subscription.
Layer 4: The Vegas experience economy. Resorts World is owned by Genting Berhad, a Malaysian conglomerate that doesn’t trade on U.S. exchanges. The cleaner U.S. expressions of Vegas-as-spectacle are MGM Resorts (MGM), Caesars (CZR), and Wynn (WYNN). Live Nation (LYV) deserves a mention because the Enhanced closing event includes a Killers concert and an afterparty at Zouk. This thread connects to the Tropicana piece I wrote earlier this year about Vegas pivoting from gambling-first to spectacle-first hospitality. Enhanced is the latest data point.
Layer 5: Downstream betting infrastructure. If enhanced records become a persistent product category, regulated betting markets pick up a new vertical. DraftKings (DKNG) and Flutter (FLUT) are the obvious U.S. names. Prediction markets like Kalshi are the more interesting expression because they don’t need state-by-state sports betting licensure to operate, and recent regulatory tailwinds have widened their lane meaningfully.
The Risk Worth Flagging
The first event could go badly. Like…really bad.
A medical incident on the broadcast would change the regulatory conversation overnight, which is exactly why the FDA-approved-only and pre-competition screening framing exists. Insurance is doing real work in this business model. World Aquatics has already banned participants from its future competitions, which limits the talent pool to retired or near-retirement athletes. The format hasn’t been proven yet.
The TRT and peptide thesis stands on its own without Enhanced Games. Hims is launching this category whether or not the swim meet draws an audience. Lilly is building distribution rails regardless. The longevity market is forecast to compound at 25% per year through 2030 because of demographics and disposable income, not because of a Memorial Day weekend exhibition. Enhanced is the loudest signal yet that the category is real, but the category was already real.
How I’m Allocating. What I’m Watching
Do I buy this stock on Friday? Absolutely not. Friday’s pricing is the immediate event. Worth tracking opening-day flows but not chasing.
Am I interested in the space? Hell yes!
Honestly, I’m so very curious to see how this narrative gets priced. If we are able to collect valuable data on the use of PEDs, it could continue to enhance the way we engage with the complex idea known as “longevity”.
I also own - as we’ve discussed before - Tempus AI so I already have some tangential exposure which makes me feel like I have some proverbial skin in the Enhanced Games.
The more meaningful signal will come on May 24th, the morning after the inaugural games. If world records fall and the event runs cleanly, expect the consumer health side of the cap table to re-rate within weeks. If something goes wrong, the conversation flips to regulation overnight.
Either way, the five-layer stack is where the durable thesis lives. The Games are the ad campaign, but the portfolio sits one or two layers below.
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Matthew Snider is the founder of Block3 Strategy Group, author of “Warren Buffett in a Web3 World,” and publisher of the BitFinance newsletter. He holds a Series 65 and MBA, and has been an active participant in digital asset markets since 2015. This article is for educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making investment decisions.