Can the Enhanced Games prove it's more than just an infomercial for performance-enhancing drugs?

After the bloodwork and the medical screening, a month of hard training naturally, after one last meeting with doctors to review the do’s and don’ts of the regimen he was about to start, Boady Santavy hustled from a conference room to his suite at Earth, a luxury resort in suburban Abu Dhabi, clutching his drugs. Testosterone, human growth hormone, and another anabolic agent.

And after a lifetime of competing without pharmaceutical help, Santavy, a Sarnia, Ont., native who won weightlifting gold at the 2021 Commonwealth Games, plunged a needle into a small bottle of testosterone, pulled back the plunger and filled the syringe. Doctors gave him the option to mix substances, but Santavy, who owns national records in the 89 and 96-kilogram weight classes, opted to keep them separate, a first-time steroid user’s guardrail against mixups.

A year ago, if you had handed Santavy a two-month supply of steroids, he’d have handed them right back. Yes, he competes in weightlifting, a sport once so plagued with doping cases that it was almost dropped from the Summer Olympics. And yes, he finished fourth in the 2020 Tokyo Games, losing the bronze medal by a single kilogram, to a lifter who flunked a drug test later that year. But the disappointment of missing the podium didn’t match the pride Santavy felt knowing his 178kg snatch and 208kg clean-and-jerk were drug-free. 

As a two-time Olympian, and most decorated member of Canada’s first family of weightlifting, Santavy also shoulders the weight of the legacy his forbears established. His great-great uncle, Joe Turcotte, was a record-setting lifter in Manitoba, Michigan and Ontario, while Boady’s grandfather, Bob, competed in the 1976 Olympics. Dalas Santavy, Boady’s dad, has been an