What Would the Olympics Be Like If the Athletes Could Juice?

Magnussen soon began an adventurous enhancement protocol that, he told The Sydney Morning Herald, incorporated various peptides (which, again, athletes participating in the study won’t have on their menus; Magnussen was working with his own physician at the time). He was taking BPC-157 and thymosin (a.k.a. the Wolverine stack) for healing and muscle recovery, and CJC-1295 and ipamorelin for stimulating HGH production. But Magnussen’s favorite enhancement, he said, was probably good old-fashioned testosterone, which makes you bigger and stronger. “It does what it says on the label,” said Magnussen.

Magnussen was self-administering enhancements, so he watched a few YouTube videos in order to figure out the least-painful way to inject himself. Some mornings, he’d have to give himself three shots, some mornings one, other mornings, none. The subcutaneous injections, which can go in a pinch of belly fat or in the thigh, Magnussen described as “dipping your toe”: The needle is thin and about as long as a fingernail. The intramuscular needle commonly used for T? Well, that was a different story.

Typically, this requires two needles: one to draw the testosterone up from the vial, and then another needle to actually slide down into the muscle for the delivery; this two-needle technique is standard practice and helps keep the injection needle nice and sharp.

The intramuscular needle is “quite long,” said Magnussen, typically an inch to an inch and a half, given that it has to go “through the skin, through the fat, and then into the muscle.” To ensure he was going deep enough, Magnussen said he would sit his body weight down onto the poke.

At first it was uncomfortable, but the injections quickly became part of Magnussen’s routine. “Rise and shine and jab yourself in the butt,” he said with a grin. For Magnussen, enhancement had obvious effects on his strength and muscle mass, but its impact on recovery was pronounced too. He felt like he could train harder with minimal rest, squeezing in more reps. Reality folded into itself like a Hyperbolic Time Chamber.

It’s why for seven days a week, seven weeks straight, Magnussen spent up to two hours in the pool in the morning, and then hit the gym for weights in the afternoon. He put on 40 pounds of muscle, peaking at a Hulk-like 250 pounds. He was smashing PRs in the weight room and felt fucking unstoppable. “Brett would say to me, ‘How do you feel today? Do we need to have a lighter day?’ And every day I’d be like, ‘No, let’s go again!’ ”

“I’d wake up the next day with no soreness, no tiredness,” he added. “All my metrics went back to normal. My resting heart rate, my heart rate variability, everything said that I was ready to go.”

February 25, 2025: the time trial, a big day for Enhanced. That day, in Greensboro, North Carolina, with a documentary crew filming, Magnussen would attempt to break the 50-meter freestyle record. He slipped into a polyurethane supersuit—officially banned by swimming’s governing body in 2010 as a tech enhancement—and prepared for his million-dollar sprint across the pool.