But his third start was perfect. He slid into the water, and three powerful dolphin kicks set him on his way. He felt good—strong, relaxed, in flow. Magnussen could see a slice of the pool through the open door of the massage room, and when he saw him go past he knew he was going quicker than before. Hawke was jogging alongside the pool with a stopwatch to track the split times, and at the 35-meter mark he realized what was about to happen. Gkolomeev touched the wall and turned to check his time on the big screen in disbelief—20.89 seconds, a new world record. Mouth agape, hands raised to his black swimming cap in genuine shock. At the other end of the pool, Martin jumped into the water in celebration. “I felt like a Labrador who just couldn’t help himself,” he says. Hawke sat with his head in his hands, as if he couldn’t quite believe what they had just done. “It was a beautiful day,” Martin says. “Brett was crying. One of the officials was crying.”
Gkolomeev phoned his wife to tell her they were millionaires. The giant check presentation had to wait, though—the organizers had arranged one, but it had been made out to James Magnussen, so they returned the next day to stage some footage for the documentary and some slow-motion shots of them spraying champagne over each other. There was always one eye on the optics—and news of the record was kept a closely guarded secret, for now.
Seven weeks later, Gkolomeev returned to North Carolina to break another world record—for the fastest time in “jammers,” the skintight shorts that elite swimmers have worn since the supersuits were banned in 2010. But he found this one a lot harder. He had been on the enhancement regime for longer, and although he hadn’t put on as much weight as Magnussen, he had to adjust his technique to compensate. In the end, it took Gkolomeev five attempts to go one-hundredth of a second under Caeleb Dressel’s 2019 time of 21.04.
The fact that Gkolomeev seemed to get slower the longer he spent on the protocol made me wonder if he could have broken the record anyway, without the enhancements. “I would like to think yes,” says Hawke, his coach. Gkolomeev agrees—but says it would have taken longer, maybe six months of training. Magnussen, perhaps unsurprisingly, gives credit to the drugs. “If you watch his 50-meter freestyle race in Paris, at the 15-meter mark he was eighth,” he says. “He was last because he didn’t quite have that explosive strength and power that you get on the performance enhancement protocol. I think that gave him that last 1 percent—that last cherry on top to break the world record.”
In May, Enhanced held what it was referring to internally as an “Apple-style launch event” at Resorts World, a sprawling hotel and casino complex in Las Vegas, where it would announce the date and venue of the first Enhanced Games. It was a day many of the doubters had thought would never come. If you’d asked me six months ago I would have agreed. But the changing political climate and Gkolomeev’s record-breaking feats had changed what seemed possible.
In keeping with D’Souza’s digital-first approach, the presentation was being streamed on YouTube, but there were about a hundred people gathered inside Zouk nightclub, where the VIPs seemed to outnumber the regular guests by about 4 to 1. There were burly men in suits that somehow managed to show off their arm muscles, several of whom turned out to be longevity doctors. I met Zoltan Istvan, a transhumanist who is running for governor of California. Enhanced staff—almost exclusively fit, young, and possibly enhanced men—buzzed around in branded black T-shirts. Peter Thiel’s husband, Matt Danzeisen, was there with a delegation from Thiel Capital and a security detail so discreet that I didn’t even notice they were there until someone told me afterward.
After a heavy-handed introduction—Greek statues crumbling, a solemn voice-over saying things like “we dream beyond what we were allowed to dream”—D’Souza took to the stage. He looked unusually nervous. The first Enhanced Games, he announced, would take place at Resorts World in Las Vegas on Memorial Day weekend in May 2026. If that was a bit anticlimactic—we were already sitting there, after all—what came next shocked the crowd. Angermayer got the honor of doing the Steve Jobs line—“one more thing”—as he introduced a clip of Gkolomeev breaking the 50-meter freestyle world record. There was a stunned silence in the room, followed by a round of applause. A guy near the front with a wrestler’s physique and visible forehead veins rose to his feet in a standing ovation.
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