Enhanced Games sells drugs and true cost won’t be known for many years
The first Enhanced Games takes place in Las Vegas on Sunday. For the unfamiliar, the Enhanced Games, as its website proclaims, “celebrates human potential through safe, transparent enhancement, offering fair play, record pay and unmatched athlete care”. Or, as CNN called it, “a doping free-for-all”.
It’s actually somewhere in the middle, as Enhanced athletes are permitted to use substances approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. These include steroids, testosterone and growth hormone.
How will fit and healthy humans react to being injected with these medicines? On a performance level, we’ll find out this weekend. At a health level, we’ll find out down the line.
That’s because the likes of British swimmer Ben Proud spent the spring in Abu Dhabi on a training camp where the Enhanced medical team individualised their concoction of enhancement drugs to, the likes of Proud hope, project them to untold riches.
Break a world record and you bank $1m. Win a race, $250,000. Plus, there are paid appearances. For athletes in the Enhanced sports of track, swimming and weightlifting, these are life-changing amounts.
But it’s small fry compared to the riches the organisers and investors expect to flood over them. That’s because the Emirati experiment doubled as a clinical trial. “They’ll be using the athletes’ data for case studies,” former swimmer Nick O’Hare told me.
The Amazon of enhancement
O’Hare competed at the 1996 Olympics before forging a 25-year career in the pharmaceuticals industry. “They’ll pump them full of drugs and measure their baseline. Then they’ll assess improvement, which they can publish. They can then say ‘this is Shane Ryan, who recorded the sixth fastest 50m backstroke ever, and he’s improved by X per cent’.
“You’ll then get recreational sportsmen and women who’ll be, ‘Well, if they’re already peak performers and they’ve enjoyed this improvement, how much could I benefit?’ It’ll be a persuasive sell. Because at the end of the day, this is all about selling drugs. Those athletes will soon be cast aside, while the investors will make millions.”
That’s because the Enhanced Games is a shop window for the company’s personalised performance medicine and supplement platform.
Check out the Enhanced site and you’re presented with a medical cabinet’s worth of drugs to support longevity and strength. As a snapshot, you have testosterone injections, starting from $169 per month, and the peptide Sermorelin for $189 per month.
Both are banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) because they’re performance-enhancing and potentially harmful to health. It’s why you won’t see them (explicitly) taken by Olympians or Premier League footballers. But they could be used by the likes of Proud.
Off the back of its aim to, as co-founder Dr Aron d’Souza told me, become “the Amazon of enhancement”, the organisation has already achieved a billion-dollar valuation. It’s why the likes of PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr are on board.
What does this mean for sport? Will we see a day where the Olympic gold medallists receive two bouquets of flowers – one each for the athlete and their physician? Despite the normalisation of enhancement – Botox, TRT… – I can’t see it.
Call me naive, but I feel the appetite to compete clean – even if, as some estimate, 20 per cent of athletes are taking substances on Wada’s prohibited list – remains strong at both competitive and vicarious levels. But that’s not to say Enhanced won’t sit alongside traditional sports. They’ve already mooted running a winter version of the Games and entering triathlon.
Enhanced Games is a high-stakes experiment
I’m more concerned about the messaging. Dr d’Souza didn’t give a convincing answer when I questioned the impact of Enhanced glamourising these drugs on impressionable minds. Youngsters won’t have the finances to tap into Enhanced’s offering so may instead turn to the black market and Telegram.
As Josh Torrance, a drug researcher at the University of Bristol, warned, “You’ll have a problem if you have corporate interest driving image- and performance-enhancing drugs. Inevitably, there isn’t proper regulatory oversight when these things first become established.
“Who loses out? People who shouldn’t be pumping all these drugs into their bodies, who are led to believe they should be by social-media feeds. Honestly, young men really don’t need testosterone. Corporates know their target audience. Many youngsters watching the Enhanced Games will watch it and want to buy those products. This could be trouble.”
From where I’m sitting, the Enhanced Games sits at an uneasy intersection of innovation, ethics and commerce. While it may carve out a niche, its long-term impact will hinge on whether audiences embrace the spectacle or recoil from the risks.
For now, they feel less like the future of competition and more like a high-stakes experiment – one where the true cost won’t be known until well after the records, and the headlines, have faded.
James Witts is the author of Dope, which looks to answer one question: how clean is sport in the modern era?