The Observer. Hello, I'm Ada and you're listening to the slow newscast from The Observer.

This week, a new age for doping. Jeremy Whittle has spent a career reporting on professional cycling,

a sport that's been torn apart by doping scandals,

and those same scandals have left Jeremy torn as well, about what exactly defines a fair competition.

When the enhanced games were announced, it signalled something of a new era for sports.

The premise was simple. What if doping was allowed? Could it, in a counterintuitive way, level the playing field? If everyone is using performance-enhancing drugs,

then no one is at a disadvantage. The competition has attracted dozens of elite athletes.

Payouts for competitors go as high as $1 million.

Last year, one of the enhanced athletes beat a world record. There's no doubt people will

tune in to watch. But the company hosting the enhanced games has a consumer business too,

selling personalized testosterone, peptides and GLPs, similar drugs to those the athletes

are taking, but they're selling them to ordinary punters too. In many ways, this is the most

natural of evolutions, a meeting of the world of tech bros, pseudoscientific self-optimization,

and ever more lucrative sports sponsorship. Except, as in the spirit of

Red Bull, it's often hard to tell exactly what's the product and what's the advert. While you watch,

the founders want you to remember that you too could maximise yourself, just as these athletes have.

But who is to blame for this state of affairs?

In this episode, my colleagues Jeremy Whittle, Chris Marshall Bell, and Jonathan Lewis

have been investigating in Doped Up.

Over to Jeremy.

I'll set the scene first of just going into actual race day.

We go through this maze of media.

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