Enhanced Games isn’t sport but a product placement exercise
The Killers are an odd choice of band to wrap this weekend’s Enhanced Games. I’ve no idea about lead singer Brandon Flowers’ attitude to the permissibility of performance enhancing drugs in sport, but the name of his beat combo jars with an enterprise testing scientific and medical boundaries. It won’t be spinach that the 50 Popeyes competing in Vegas have been training on.
Fifty is a small number for an event covering three sports plus a strongman contest. The numbers that matter, however, will be the finishing times for the 100m sprints on the six-lane track and across the seven disciplines in the four-lane pool.
Without a world record, the Enhanced Games will have failed – however much organisers trumpet its red carpet for celebrities and global media attendance.
Enhanced is dangling a $1m bonus for a “world record” on the track or in the 50m freestyle in the pool. Looking at the roster of sprinters signed up to the cause, it is nigh-on impossible to envisage Usain Bolt’s 9.58 second record being tested, or Flo-Jo’s 10.49 (from, cough, a “different” era back in 1988). The swimming is another matter entirely given the availability of full-body swim suits now banned in conventional competition.
Australia’s Cam McEvoy, current world record holder in the 50m freestyle, had his say last week: “It’s in the same ballpark as throwing on a set of fins and doing some crazy time. That double whammy [doping/super suit] is going to basically make any time not really accessible to any recognition outside of the Enhanced camp. They should be in jammers, what we race in traditionally.”
Of the 25 swimming world records broken at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, 23 were by swimmers sporting the LZR Racer suits subsequently banned by Fina (now World Aquatics).
Three days out from these inaugural permissive Games, it is timely to ask just what they are really all about. Enhanced’s founder, Aron D’Souza, left the enterprise last year. He had previously described its vision as: “To inspire humanity with the belief that we can all overcome our limits and become super-human, safely, with the right medical supervision.”
If athletes provide inspiration, then one way to view this Sunday’s events is as a product placement exercise. The Enhanced website is a gateway to testosterone supplies, one of a range of “personalized treatments and guided pathways built around your unique biology”. These are grouped into fat loss, longevity, sleep quality and female hormone balance.
We live in a world obsessed by image. Social media parades the effects of cosmetic enhancement and physical augmentation, often steroid-boosted. Think of those 50 competitors in Vegas as potential TikTok and Instagram adverts for the dream Enhanced is selling of ripped bodies, long lives and untroubled sleeps.
When the likes of British silver medalist swimmer Ben Proud signed up for the Enhanced Games, the life-changing rewards available to him featured heavily in media commentary. More pertinent, surely, to ask what his feats could do for Enhanced’s sales than what the enterprise might do for him.
Meantime, DJ Ruckus will be performing at the official Enhanced Games afterparty. Now that’s an aptly named signing.
Bolt from the O2 blue
Ben Proud isn’t the only athlete fretting about his future financial security. It goes with the Olympic territory.
Tickets went on sale on 8 May for Usain Bolt: Fastest Man Ever at London’s O2 Arena. The venue has since announced that the evening slated for July “has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control”. It has not been rescheduled.
My first reaction when I saw the original announcement was sadness rather than an urge to buy a ticket. Perhaps I wasn’t alone.
True north
One event you can be sure isn’t on the UK government’s event hosting wish list is the Enhanced Games. Pretty much everything else is though.
Last weekend – perhaps prompted by a strategic leak to a Sunday paper – it announced a feasibility study into a north of England Olympic bid. Curious timing given the ruling Labour Party is currently tearing itself apart with Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester – or “King of the North”, if you like that sort of thing – at the heart of the plots and counter-plots.
Cue a spokesman for London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, later that day saying that excluding London from any bid would be a “missed opportunity.”
Leaving aside for now the financial wisdom of holding another Olympics in the UK, as well as the curious timing of Sunday’s announcement given the prevailing political turmoil, it is worth stating one truth: athletics stadia are expensive to build and produce negligible returns post-Games. That’s why planners look at repurposing and downsizing them.
Britain only needs one permanent athletics venue of Olympic scale. So any future Games should utilise the London Stadium or a temporary venue (as per the Manchester Commonwealth Games of 2002 – now home to Manchester City).
Of course, there is the option of abandoning athletics’ use of the London Stadium altogether. Crystal Palace is closer to being given the green light for refurbishment than at any time since the London 2012 bid was first conceived, well over two decades ago.
Be clear though that any permanent venue outside the capital should be scaled down post-Games, as experience shows it’s a struggle to sell thousands of seats for athletics anywhere else – let alone tens of thousands.
In any logical, apolitical world, North v London squabbling should resolve itself into a UK-wide Olympic bid. Spread the sport, the love and the urban regeneration across the whole nation. Convince IOC members that our trains are quick and run on time and our motorways never clog.
I’d say a broad geography is more likely to capture imaginations and IOC votes than either a London reboot or a regional bid. Would make much more financial sense too.
Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com