Only Dopes Play Enhanced Games
This sporting gimmick will never swim fast enough to escape the giant asterisk.
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Sporting authorities go to a lot of trouble to keep drugs out of competition. The Enhanced Games go the opposite route. The first games, held this past weekend in Las Vegas, encouraged athletes to use the performance-enhancing substances standard athletic contests ban.
The original Olympic Games were part of a religious festival to honor the gods of ancient Greece. Enhanced Games founder Aron D’Souza hoped to cut out the middleman and make humans into gods, to “overcome the weakness of our feeble biological forms and become something more.” Retired Australian Olympic swimmer James Magnussen, the first athlete to sign up, was more blunt: “I’ve put a lot worse in my body.”
Some arguments in favor of the Enhanced Games might seem superficially appealing. Despite strictures against doping in sports, some athletes do it anyway. Sometimes, they even get away with it. Why not do it openly and see what happens? Mr. D’Souza called the Enhanced Games, which permitted doping of FDA-approved substances and promised generous payouts to any athletes who broke records, “a better and more honest model.”
But this is itself dishonest. Imperfect regulation of doping isn’t a case for no regulation. There are reasons other than integrity—which is important—for regulation. It’s, at best, unclear what effects a virtually unrestricted doping regime might have on the human body. At worst, we already know the effects. The Enhanced Games are a “dangerous and irresponsible concept,” the World Anti-Doping Agency said in a statement.
In a journal article critical of the Enhanced Games, Norwegian fitness experts Øyvind Sandbakk and Sigmund Loland draw a parallel to East Germany’s treatment of female Olympic athletes during the Cold War. The relentless doping of those athletes permanently transformed those women, giving them lifelong health issues. “In both cases, athletes are pushed toward pharmacological enhancement because that becomes the condition for being competitive,” Mr. Sandbakk, sports director at the Norwegian School of Elite Sports and professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, said in an email.
Another superficially appealing argument is that these games could exist in their own vacuum as an experiment without affecting the broader athletic community. But any example of performance enhancement, particularly by athletes who once competed in clean (or ostensibly clean) environments, will do more than create incentives in the highest level of competition. It’ll have a “trickle down effect” at lower levels, said coach, fitness expert and author Steve Magness. “It incentivizes people for just going off the deep end and saying, ‘Well, these people are doing it and they got fast, so I’m gonna do this.’ ”
The Enhanced Games have had good marketing. So good, in fact, that the backers may have successfully sublimated the underlying motive.
Enhanced, the company behind the Enhanced Games, is promoting a bevy of supplements and other substances like peptides geared toward the wellness- and longevity-obsessed. Looking at the company’s offered products makes it a bit more obvious what the Enhanced Games might really be for. “The competition itself is marketing for all the products that they’ll come up with to sell to the guy who’s watching on the couch,” said Mr. Magness.
But how about that competition? For all the hype, only one athlete at the Enhanced Games managed to break a world record, though it will rightly go unrecognized (and now there’s a debate over whether it even happened). Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev swam 20.81 seconds in the 50-meter men’s freestyle. Australian swimmer Cameron McEvoy set the real world record in March, only seven-tenths of a second slower. As for Mr. Magnussen, his fellow Australian, the first was last: He brought up the rear in both of his events. Mr. McEvoy’s response to the games was to taunt on Instagram: “Seriously?! That’s all you got!”
Even more embarrassing, several athletes who competed clean won. Upon winning the women’s 100-meter run, Tristan Evelyn said, “This proves that winning takes more than chemistry.”
Max Martin, CEO of Enhanced, claims this year was “just the beginning.” If these games continue, future athletes may have better luck than this year’s crop. But they’ll never beat the giant asterisk hanging over the proceedings.
Mr. Butler is deputy editor of Free Expression.