Serena Williams is back at 44, and sport has no rule for GLP-1s

Serena Williams won her first competitive match in nearly four years last week, closing it with a 116-mile-an-hour serve her opponents could not return. She is 44, her doubles partner 19, and in ads for the telehealth company that pays her she says GLP-1s helped her lose 34 pounds.

Whether that helped her win, nobody can answer yet. The World Anti-Doping Agency says it is watching for abuse and leaves athletes free to take them for now; one adviser to its banned-list group sees almost no athletic advantage, while the head of its health and medical committee wants them banned, mostly over eating disorders. No study has tested them in elite athletes.

Lighter does not mean better. Roughly 25 to 35 percent of the weight lost on these drugs is lean mass, by a meta-analysis published in March, and the same drugs are thought to dampen the dopamine signaling competitive drive runs on. What has been seen on court is uneven anyway: a win at one tournament, a loss at the next, and only in doubles, which asks less of a body than singles.

The harder question is not whether the advantage is fair but what the rules protect. Anti-doping decisions turn partly on the spirit of sport, the ethical pursuit of human excellence, and a comeback at 44 after two kids and four years away fits it.

Read the full story at The Atlantic ↗

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