On Your Mark, Get Set, DOPE!

A front-row seat to the making of the inaugural Enhanced Games, where select performance-enhancing drugs are permitted, and athletes and organizers alike are making real the hypothetical: What would the Olympics be like if everyone could juice?

- By CHRIS GAYOMALI

1. WELCOME TO THE DOPE SHOW "When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens.

Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking-glass surface and enter a new world...." -ROGER DEAKIN ON SWIMMING

The bodies of male Olympic swimmers tend to differ from those of mere mortals in a few key areas.

One: Large hands, which make it easier to catch the water. Two: Long arms, to pull more water with each stroke. And three: Swimmers are often tall—especially sprinters, for whom six one to six five seems to be a sweet spot—with broad shoulders and long, lithe torsos forming an inverted triangle, what many people consider the platonic swimmer’s build. This triangle then resolves, fractal-like, into an even tinier visual triangle cut, generally, from polyester and spandex: an immodest piece of clothing commonly referred to as a Speedo. Olympic swimmers usually look a little better than the rest of us in a Speedo.

Those differences were strikingly apparent on a sunny afternoon in Las Vegas last October, when a handful of Olympic-level athletes slipped into their little triangles and hopped into the pool at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for a hard day of training. Elsewhere on campus, students speed-walked to class wearing pyjamas, but here, inside UNLV’s natatorium, Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” was ricocheting off the rafters from a Bluetooth speaker. The stench of chlorine gave the air a faintly antiseptic quality, like something was being purged.