What happens to Enhanced Games if the drugs don’t work as well as they predicted?
Imagine a packed arena. Noise echoes off every surface. A man in his 50s crouches in the blocks. Then… silence. The gun fires. He begins to sprint and 10 seconds later, he crosses the line. Not only is he victorious, but he has just shattered Usain Bolt’s world record.
This is how I opened a feature I wrote two years ago after an interview with Aron D’Souza, Founder of Enhanced Games, the Olympic-style event which allows athletes to take performance-enhancing drugs.
It was very dramatic then, and reading it back now, I can think of a hundred ways I would rewrite it. But I am choosing to open this article with it again.
Why? Well, that intro is the vision D’Souza put in my head after my conversation about what Enhanced Games would be like. However, I can’t help but think I was sold a dream after watching the inaugural edition over the weekend.
Enhanced Games in reality
Let’s rip into my introduction, not grammatically, but by comparing it to what actually happened.
A packed‑out arena might be the closest part of my vision to reality, and that’s a stretch. The event took place in a purpose‑built competition complex inside Resorts World Las Vegas, with attendance reportedly around 2,500. The crowd was hand‑picked and tickets weren’t available to the general public.
It might not sound like much, but there were viewers online, with livestreams hitting around 60,000 on the final day. So maybe instead of noise bouncing off every surface, it was more like comments bouncing around every stream.
The athletes who took part were a mix of Olympians and previously banned competitors, making my “man in his 50s” line sound like an exaggeration. However, in my defence, D’Souza repeatedly mentioned how these drugs would allow athletes to perform at an elite level for much longer careers than usual.
Now we get to the juiciest part… the world record. In my intro, someone shatters Usain Bolt’s 100m time.
Fred Kerley, who didn’t partake in performance enhancement and said he would beat Bolt’s 9.58 world record at the Enhanced Games, ran 9.93 seconds in his 100m heat, ahead of Emmanuel Matadi’s 9.95 and Marvin Bracy’s 10.33.
To put it bluntly, he wasn’t close, despite rumours he’d run around 9.2 in training. This was the trend across the whole event, with only one world record broken across the entire weekend.
But one is better than none, right? Well, here’s the kicker: the world record was set by swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev of Greece, one of the few athletes competing clean, without performance‑enhancing drugs. He set a 50m freestyle record of 20.81, beating Australian Cameron McEvoy’s 20.88, which was set at the Chinese Swimming Open in March.
Impressive, but not exactly “shattering.”
Business model in trouble?
Is it fair to compare what happened against an introduction I wrote for a feature two years ago? Probably not, but that’s what I was sold.
Talking of selling, the weekend puts the Enhanced Games’ business model at risk. For those who don’t know, the event was a way to market supplements and drugs to the general public.
The idea was that athletes use the drugs, become super‑human, smash world records, and people want to buy whatever they’re taking. This would replace the usual revenue from tickets and media rights that traditional sports rely on.
To rub salt in the wounds, Australia’s James Magnussen, whose steroid transformation shocked a lot of people and became the image of the event, finished last in both swimming events he entered.
The Women’s 100m competition was also won by non-enhanced athlete Tristan Evelyn, who took home $250,000 – it’s important to give the Enhanced Games praise for paying its athletes properly.
However, with the only world record being set by a clean athlete, it wasn’t exactly a great advertisement for the product.
If anything, the weekend hinted technology might be the real path to the superhuman performances the Enhanced Games promised. Gkolomeev’s record was helped by a banned polyurethane bodysuit.
Suits, sensors, materials science, recovery tech, and even biomechanical optimisation could deliver the breakthroughs the event hoped drugs would provide. The question is whether anyone at home wants to buy a polyurethane bodysuit, or whether the Enhanced Games can sell a future built on this type of gear.
Who knows, a reason that D’Souza wanted to create this was to make taking enhancements safer because many athletes are allegedly taking these in the shadows. So, maybe this just proves that point and the Olympics aren’t clean… or it could just be like the Verve sang: “The drugs don’t work.”
