The Steroid Olympics Are Coming

Plus: Brett Favre, Monaco, and an unprecedented media ban.

Good morning and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Don't forget to organize a Fight Club with your friendly neighborhood geopolitical rivals this week.

We're talking about the Olympics today—not the real ones, the new Enhanced Games that allow athletes to use steroids (or not). Then we'll move on to a new Netflix documentary on Brett Favre, followed by Formula 1's Monaco dilemma and a wild story of a journalist getting banned in England.

Locker Room Links

• "Memorial Day is an underutilized sports holiday," Matt Yoder writes at Awful Announcing, and he's right. Seems like a no-brainer that every MLB team should be playing at 1 p.m. local time, perhaps with one big primetime Memorial Day extravaganza, complete with fireworks. Same goes for the Fourth of July and Labor Day.
• Plans for a presidential commission on college sports are paused while Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) works on federal legislation. (Good luck, Ted!)
• "What NASCAR Can Learn From Formula 1," according to NASCAR driver William Byron.
• "The Indy 500 can run just fine without a tax break"
• Anyone else catch all the sports references on HBO's The Last of Us? Catherine O'Hara's character is apparently a Tigers fan, and a certain NFL stadium gets a big reveal too.
• Elsewhere in Reason, also by yours truly: "Should the
Civilization Video Games Be Fun—or Real?"
• The final scoreboard for ESPN's Around the Horn:
  

  After 23 years, today is the final @AroundtheHorn - episode 4,953 (5p ET, ESPN): https://t.co/WoTAQiSa6h@woodypaige tops the leaderboard w/ 688 wins & 2,964 appearances, while @TonyReali has hosted 4,525+ shows.

  *Huge thanks to ATH stats guru/recordkeeper Caroline Willett pic.twitter.com/3WcxmnBvao

  — bill hofheimer (@bhofheimer_espn) May 23, 2025

Olympians, But Enhanced

Some world records might soon fall.*

*But don't expect to see them in the actual record books, not even with an asterisk. The first Enhanced Games are coming in May 2026, an Olympics-style event where athletes who are using performance-enhancing drugs are allowed to compete.

"Enhanced Games athletes will be allowed to take substances that are legal in the United States and prescribed by a licensed doctor," reports ESPN's Dan Murphy. "Examples may include testosterone, growth hormone and some types of anabolic steroids. Illicit drugs—cocaine, for example—will not be allowed." (One wonders where the legally murky status of marijuana comes in.)

Athletes who aren't taking performance-enhancing drugs are also allowed to compete, which could create an interesting contrast. So far there are only plans in place for short-distance swimming, track, and weightlifting events.

I'm sure the public is generally against professional athletes using steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, hence the web of rules and testing in major sports leagues. But, as my Reason colleague Ronald Bailey has written, it's still good for the Enhanced Games to show what athletes are capable of when science boosts them beyond the fullest of their natural abilities. Science is already changing athletic competitions in other ways, from faster running shoes to quicker swimsuits and analytics-inspired tactics.

Let enhanced competitions bloom, and let them compete for the public's attention against nonenhanced events too. Doping is probably more common than we already think anyway. Complicated antidoping rules often punish athletes for accidentally taking a drug they didn't know was banned, or reward athletes who have done better than everyone else at cheating the system.

One world record has already fallen: Greek swimmer and former Olympian Kristian Gkolomeev, who started taking performance-enhancing drugs in January, beat the world record in the 50 meter freestyle by 0.02 seconds in a February time trial.

By the way, don't expect the Trump administration to express "deep concerns" over all of this like the Biden administration did—Donald Trump Jr. is a partner at a venture capital firm that has invested in the Enhanced Games.

Don't Blame Me, Blame Brett

A new Netflix documentary, Untold: The Fall of Favre, looks at the complicated legacy of Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre. It's an engaging watch, although viewers probably won't learn anything important they didn't already know about Favre, his sexually inappropriate text messages, and his welfare-related scandal in Mississippi. For me, the documentary raised two questions that I wish had been explored.

The narrative at the beginning of the movie is clear: Favre was so popular in Green Bay that local fans and the media treated him like a god. But the media knew Favre, despite his family man image, was gallivanting around. None of the journalists interviewed in the documentary seemed surprised at Favre's behavior in the explicit text messages. Why didn't any of them report on Favre's indiscretions sooner? It would have been unpopular and difficult, but it would have been the right thing to do, morally and journalistically.

One reporter who did the right thing and followed through on unpopular journalism is Anna Wolfe, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for reporting on the Mississippi welfare funds scandal. Mississippi officials used federal welfare funds on a new volleyball building at the University of Southern Mississippi (where Favre's daughter was on the team) and on Prevacus, a concussion-treatment company that Favre invested in. What surprised me is that government officials spend money on stadiums and politically well-connected companies all the time, just not through welfare funds. All Mississippi had to do was claim the money spent was going to create jobs, and hardly anyone would have batted an eye at it coming out of some state "economic development" fund. Why were they so incompetent in their crimes?

Monaco Monotony

The Monaco Grand Prix is famously the crown jewel of the Formula 1 calendar, the most historic race with the most glitz and glamor. Yet the actual racing often sucks. Modern F1 cars got bigger, but Monaco's narrow streets stayed the same, with the race turning into a fast, noisy parade without any passing. This year officials tried to fix the quality of the action by mandating that every driver make two pit stops—a good attempt that ultimately failed to make much difference because the problem with Monaco isn't pit strategy, it's that no one can pass on the track.

F1 regulations are set to change next year, and the new generation of cars will be lighter and smaller with more electric power for temporary speed boosts. Hopefully that solves part of the problem. If not, F1 might have to research any possible adjustments that could be made to the circuit to create longer straights for overtaking (though the Monégasque government may resist anything involving permanent construction). The other option is to just leave it as is and tell critics to get over it: F1 has different kinds of circuits with different kinds of challenges, and Monaco is just going to be what it is.

Fencing Off Forest

Imagine the Philadelphia Eagles denying Tony Romo press credentials and keeping him from commentating on one of their games, just because he was one of many people who called out the Eagles owner for doing something crazy.

That's basically what happened in England this week.

Earlier this month, Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis went onto the field immediately after a match to angrily confront the team's manager. (When something similar happened on Ted Lasso it felt overwrought and unrealistic, but Marinakis showed me wrong.) Pretty much everyone agreed it was a crazy thing to do, and Gary Neville had the gall to join the chorus, calling it "scandalous." This weekend, Neville was supposed to commentate on the final Nottingham Forest match of the season, the most important match of the Premier League's final day. But as Neville detailed on Instagram, calling it an "unprecedented action," Forest "would not give me an accreditation or access to the stadium as a co-commentator."

Marinakis is going to have to grow some thicker skin or no one will be left to commentate on his team's matches. (Forest lost the match, 1–0).

Replay of the Week

The Indianapolis 500 was chaotic, with drivers struggling to adapt to low temperatures (apparently temperatures in the 60s are too cold for them). Marco Andretti crashed out on the very first turn. Multiple cars crashed trying to slow down or stop on pit road. Josef Newgarden's bid for a three-peat ended with a fuel system failure. NASCAR driver Kyle Larson spun himself out, ending his attempt to finish both the 500 and the 600-mile NASCAR race on the same day.

But the most shocking thing was that the chaos actually started before the race even began, when series mainstay Scott McLaughlin crashed during the pace laps.

That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the weekend, Southern Miss against Columbia in the NCAA Baseball Tournament.

Comments

[Eeyore]

Aren't trans athletes in the normal Olympics already allowed to use hormones?

[Don't look at me! (#1 on the “muted” list!)]

Seems like a no-brainer that every MLB team should be playing at 1 p.m. local time, perhaps with one big primetime Memorial Day extravaganza, complete with fireworks.

A perfect way to remember those who died for us.

[Eeyore]

I thought we were supposed to eat a lab grown meat cooked on an electric heat source washed down with a gay lager and some bugs for dessert. To give thanks to those to sacrificed so we could have those things.

[mad.casual]

gay lager

Heineken 0 for the men. Bud Light for the "ladies".

[Eeyore]

I have yet to try a Heiny 0. I think the only non alcohol one I've ever tried is O'doul's.

[mad.casual]

We should host a cross-Pacific baseball championship between the MLB and the Nippon Pro Baseball every year. Games 1 and 2 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9 with the championship game played in Oahu on Dec. 7. It would be a blast!

[Sarah Palin's Buttplug - Jan 6 = 9/11 (same motive)]

Olympics to have flag football.

What a joke the Olympics have become.

[Rick James]

Oh... flag football. I originally read that as 'fag football'.

[SRG2]

Well, the games will be in LA...

I suspect that it will only be for this Games. Look, in times past the Games had tug-of-war and painting, and it still has synchronised swimming..

[JasonT20]

it still has synchronised swimming..

When any idiot can tread water, while doing dance-like moves that include holding your head higher than needed just to breathe, or holding their breath underwater, all for 3 minutes, then I'll look down on it as an athletic sport.

[SRG2]

I do not deny the physical demands of synch swimming any more than I deny the physical demands of ballet dancing. Hell, conducting Gotterdammerung is physically demanding. But these are aesthetic physical activities with subjective scoring or appreciation.

TBH I would be perfectly happy if the Olympics were split so you had an Aesthetic Olympics, with gymnastics, diving, synch swimming, ice dancing, etc.

If the 100m were like gymnastics:
"And now the style scores come in. Usain Bolt loses 1/2 second for too much lateral movement, and the judges also added 1/4 second for his poor lean at the line. Yohan Blake also loses time for lateral movement but his good lean puts him above Bolt, despite covering the actual distance more slowly. And Gatlin has a perfect score! This will cause some controversy, but the judges added no time for his running style nor his lean and, as things stand, despite finishing 3rd on time, he's now top of the leaderboard! The Jamaicans are furious, and have appealed - certainly it looked as though on the head-on replay Gatlin moved from side to side enough to get time added..."

[JasonT20]

That's totally fair to dunk on aesthetic scoring as being a whole different thing than athletic games that are objective. But you singled out synchronized swimming, so I assumed you were dunking on it specifically. (I saw a T-shirt ad today: "Intend your puns, cowards.)

Besides. Since there have been many sports with that kind of scoring going back at least several decades, I think it would be an argument few would sign on to if you wanted move all of them out of the Olympics and into a separate thing.

[VULGAR MADMAN]

“Some world records might soon fall” Especially “women’s” world records, although the hormones are entirely natural.

[Rick James]

*But don't expect to see them in the actual record books, not even with an asterisk. The first Enhanced Games are coming in May 2026, an Olympics-style event where athletes who are using performance-enhancing drugs are allowed to compete.

Unlike bottom-tier men who cosplay as women...

[mad.casual]

"Memorial Day is an underutilized sports holiday," Matt Yoder writes at Awful Announcing, and he's right. Seems like a no-brainer that every MLB team should be playing at 1 p.m. local time, perhaps with one big primetime Memorial Day extravaganza, complete with fireworks. Same goes for the Fourth of July and Labor Day.

Memorial Day is to honor the fallen, moron. 9/11 and 12/7 are really underrated as sports days too.

Veteran's Day, VE Day, 4th of July, etc. are competitive/celebratory days.

[Rick James]

What's 10/7, chopped liver?

[Rev Arthur L kuckland (5-30-24 banana republic day)]

Here's a pamphlet of famous Jewish sports legends

[SRG2]

I'm sure the public is generally against professional athletes using steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, hence the web of rules and testing in major sports leagues

I think that much of the US sporting public wants pro athletes to juice provided they can pretend it's not happening - they want more 100mph fast balls and home runs, etc.

The Enhanced Games will be a joke - because almost no genuinely world-class athlete will compete. Instead, it'll be used by coaches and sports scientists as a field test of the advantages of steroids, because they will be able to compare pre- and post juice performance for a fair number of athletes. You won't see much improvement on the men's side, but there will be some pretty spectacular improvement on the women's side. I don't think anyone will beat the juiced records of Flo-Jo, Marita Koch or Jarmila Kratochvilova but the gap won't be huge.

And sure plenty of current top athletes juice, but the dosages will not be as great as at the Enhanced Games.

[mad.casual]

One wonders where the legally murky status of marijuana comes in.

You. You're the One wondering and you're wondering because you're a retarded pothead. Everybody else broadly recognizes that marijuana, like alcohol and smoking, is between a mixed bag, non-sequitur, or outright detrimental when it comes to performance enhancement.

[SRG2]

It is, however, prohibited by WADA, and Sha'Carri Richardson lost a US title for a positive test. It does impair performance in competition but it does permit more intensive training, owing to the combination of pain-killing and euphoria.

[Don't look at me! (#1 on the “muted” list!)]

What good is more intense training if it impairs performance in competition?

[SRG2]

You don't take it during competition. duh. The training benefits persist long after you stop taking it and impairment effects stop almost immediately.

[mad.casual]

Even if it doesn't specifically impair performance in competition, it can/does cause a learned or trained response that can be unnecessarily unpredictable over time.

Yes, there are people who used to drink to excess and smoke their lungs out and were still phenomenal competitors even by today's standards. They almost certainly would've been better by avoiding the things that were objectively hampering their ability to move oxygen and rest and focus. MJ is little different.

Like with steroids, if MJ were some magic PED, every gym rat would be behind the gym lighting up before their workouts. The biggest, strongest guys you know would also be the most stoned. Marathoners and cyclists would be lighting up at the start line and/or taking drags as they ran. Instead, most don't consume at all and those that do consume don't do so in a matter related to training or even specifically avoid consuming with training/competition.

Anyone saying different is expressing a retarded, almost "Marijuana Derangement Syndrome", sentiment, sperg dunking about some meaningless, insignificant(ly irrelevant) detail, or both.

[SRG2]

FWIW there's a fair amount of steroid usage in masters track and field. This woman, Mandy Mason, was recently suspended for three years for steroids. I think there's about two years' difference in the photos. She's in her mid50s

[JasonT20]

But, as my Reason colleague Ronald Bailey has written, it's still good for the Enhanced Games to show what athletes are capable of when science boosts them beyond the fullest of their natural abilities.

No. And more no. And no again.

There is definitely room to debate the boundaries of what should be considered a "performance enhancing drug" when even experimenting with how, when, and what to eat or drink can affect an athlete's capabilities in events that come down to tiny differences between winning and losing. I'm not posting to talk about those boundaries, edge cases, or the effectiveness and accuracy of testing, I'm posting because there is no 'safe' amount of most of the banned PEDs that an athlete (or anyone else) can take when it isn't to treat a medical condition. That is because it is only when the benefits to ordinary living and functioning outweigh the risks of the drug, do we define it as being "safe".

Sports is a form of entertainment. There is no validity to thinking that anyone should take that kind of risk with their health for our entertainment. I wouldn't ever think that it would be okay for an actor to get drunk or high in order to more accurately portray a character that was drunk or high. I wouldn't want to encourage that kind of risky behavior just for my entertainment, nor would I ever want a child to think that it was a normal part of being an actor to do that.

I definitely don't want any children to think that taking drugs to boost performance was a normal and positive thing for an athlete to do in order to win a medal while we cheer them on. Competing in some sports is already putting stress and wear on an athlete's body that could have long-term negative consequences. Adding in the inherent risks of using drugs other than for their intended and studied medical benefits is just plain stupid.

These "enhanced" games? It is supported by investors that want to make money and don't care how it affects the athletes. (Which makes them just like the owners of NFL teams.)

[I, Woodchipper]

I wouldn't ever think that it would be okay for an actor to get drunk or high in order to more accurately portray a character that was drunk or high

I got news for ya pal

[JasonT20]

Note what I did not say - that it doesn't happen. Just like I am saying that encouraging PEDs is a bad idea, not that athletes never use them.