It takes a particular kind of audacity to build a pharmaceutical marketing funnel, stick a scoreboard on it, and call it the future of human achievement. Respect. Almost.
So. The Enhanced Games are done. Las Vegas has been returned to its natural state — a place where money is extracted from optimistic people under flashing lights — and we're left to pick through the wreckage of whatever it is we just watched. A sports event? A drug fair? A very expensive Instagram campaign with lanes? All three, probably, but mostly the last one.
Start with the headline, which the Enhanced Games have been flogging like a medieval town crier who also owns the apothecary. Kristian Gkolomeev, they announced, swam the 50m freestyle faster than the official world record. A million dollars changed hands. Champagne happened. One detail, possibly large depending on your view: clips circulating online suggest he hadn't quite reached the wall when the clock stopped, and others point out timing systems and footage don't always sync perfectly — true of Olympic races too. No technical rebuttal has been offered. Watch the clip, decide for yourself. What isn't in dispute is that World Aquatics doesn't recognise the record, and never was going to. But the story ran. The brand trended. Whether or not the swim was everything it was billed as, the Enhanced Games had already got what they came for.
Which is, you'll notice, the entire business model.
The Enhanced Games weren't built to advance sport. They were built to sell peptides. The founders have financial interests in the performance-enhancing compounds they spent months press-releasing at anyone who'd listen. The whole thing was an infomercial with a starting pistol — a shop front with a scoreboard bolted to it.
And here's the thing about cynical genius: it works. Whatever you think of the ethics, this has been some of the finest snake-oil salesmanship since a gentleman in a waistcoat convinced the American frontier his bottled tonic cured lumbago, dropsy and mild disappointment. The Enhanced Games understood something traditional sport has spectacularly failed to grasp — that controversy isn't the enemy of visibility. It is visibility.
Now, the part where the entire premise collapses in on itself like a dramatic soufflé.
Most events at the Enhanced Games — the competition specifically built to celebrate and normalise performance-enhancing drugs — were reportedly won by athletes who'd chosen not to take any. The "non-enhanced" competitors, racing under a rulebook built on the philosophy of definitely take drugs, mostly beat the ones who did.
Let that breathe for a moment.
If it sounds familiar, that's because we've run something close to this experiment before, and the results are a matter of public record. Between the 1970s and the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany ran a state doping program — internally known as State Plan 14.25 — that systematically administered anabolic steroids and other substances to thousands of elite athletes, including children. It produced medals. It also produced, once the regime fell and the files were opened, a long and well-documented list of liver and cardiovascular damage, early deaths, and — for many of the women given male-range doses without their knowledge — permanent masculinisation, infertility and psychological trauma that victims are still speaking about decades later. It's now treated as one of the lowest points in the history of sports medicine, and it's the reason the modern anti-doping system exists at all.
The pharmacology hasn't changed much since. The medical literature on these drugs, even taken under careful supervision, is not ambiguous: anabolic steroids carry real risk of liver toxicity, up to and including tumours; cardiovascular strain that raises the odds of arrhythmia, heart attack and sudden cardiac death; and disruption to the endocrine system that can leave men infertile. In women, the doses required to be competitive against doped rivals run at roughly twenty times normal female testosterone levels — enough to permanently deepen the voice, trigger irreversible body and facial hair growth, cause male-pattern baldness, and disrupt or end fertility. None of that reverses when the competition season ends. On top of the physical cost, steroid use is linked to genuine psychiatric harm — aggression, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation — that can outlast the drug use itself.
None of which makes the athletes who competed villains. Most are underpaid, under-recognised professionals who've given decades to their sport while the bodies governing it sign broadcast deals worth hundreds of millions. If the Enhanced Games put real money in the pockets of people who'd earned it, that's not nothing, and we should all be a little careful with the stone-throwing.
The problem isn't the swimmers in the pool. It's the people who built the pool, and what they whispered to everyone watching from the stands — a great many of them not yet thirty, still working out what sport and achievement and the body are even for. The message, dressed up as liberation, was simple: chemistry is the edge between good and great, and the establishment just doesn't want you to know it. That's not a philosophy. It's a sales pitch, landing at exactly the moment youth sport is already losing ground to shortcuts and algorithm-fed promises of a faster route to the top.
There's also a quieter mechanism at work here, one researchers have modelled for decades: once athletes believe a substance gives a real edge, and believe their rivals might already be using it, the rational move for everyone is to use it too — regardless of what they'd actually prefer. Most surveyed athletes say, given the choice, they'd rather compete clean. Left unmanaged, the system still drifts toward universal doping anyway, because nobody wants to be the one who stayed honest and lost. That's not a hypothetical. It's the well-documented mechanics of exactly the situation the Enhanced Games are trying to manufacture at scale.
There was a genuine opportunity here to do something useful with the real problems in elite sport — financial exploitation of athletes, governing-body dysfunction, the grotesque economics of amateurism. Instead, they built a drug shop with a stadium attached and called it progress.
Sport, at its best, runs on the most useful lie we tell ourselves: that effort gets rewarded, that the best person wins, that the race is fair. Not always true. The aspiration matters anyway. The Enhanced Games took that aspiration, valued it at roughly nothing, and sold the naming rights.
One last thing — a small philosophical hand grenade. The Enhanced Games have no publicly documented eligibility policy for their female category. None. Which leaves an obvious question their founders haven't answered: what happens when a biological male registers as a woman and dives in?
This isn't a hypothetical aimed at being unkind to transgender athletes — it's a stress test of the Enhanced Games' own stated ideology. The whole enterprise was built on two pillars: bodily autonomy and self-determination. Your body, your call, no institution gets a vote. Fine. But the moment they write a policy excluding a biological male from the female category on the grounds of biology, they've performed an act of institutional gatekeeping that would make World Aquatics blush — invoking the very biological reasoning they spent two years mocking. Allow it, and watch their own prize money go to a biological male while the female athletes they recruited by promising fair compensation look on, furious and with reason. Either path makes the same point: the stuffy establishment, it turns out, had one.
I spent the better part of two decades in compression and recovery wear, telling athletes the real edge was in the work — the sessions nobody filmed, not a vial. The Enhanced Games spent two years telling them the opposite, then proved me right with their own scoreboard. Remarkable, in its way. Comprehensively, wrong.