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If you witnessed the sleek, over-produced presentation last May in Las Vegas introducing the Enhanced Games to a global audience, you would have expected world records in track and field, swimming and weightlifting to fall like leaves in autumn at the inaugural Games held over Memorial Day weekend.
Instead, the only world record set at the Enhanced Games — in which the use of performance enhancing drugs are not only accepted but also encouraged — happened in the final event in front of a reportedly invite-only crowd at Resorts World Las Vegas.
Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev broke the non-enhanced world record time of 20.88 seconds in the 50-meter freestyle with a time of 20.81 — earning him a $250,000 prize for first place, plus a $1 million bonus for setting a new world record.
But the record will not be considered legitimate, as Yahoo!Sports reported: “In addition to having competed on PEDs, the swimmers also wore high-tech suits that have been banned.”
“I thought we were going to break a few more world records,” Maximilian Martin, co-founder of the Enhanced Games, admitted to Vanity Fair a few days later. “But at the end of the day, it’s live sports.”
Critics were more … critical. Google the Games, and you’ll find YouTube videos with titles like “The Enhanced Games Were An ABSOLUTE DISASTER” and “The Failure of The Enhanced Games.”
As Vanity Fair noted:
The Enhanced Games — part peptide vendor and part sporting extravaganza, backed by Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr., and Saudi royalty — shipped runners, swimmers and strongmen to Abu Dhabi to complete a clinical trial on the impacts of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) on the human body. After nine and a half weeks of training on individual concoctions of drugs, the athletes came to Las Vegas for the ultimate test — an Olympics-style competition on steroids where breaking a world record could result in a million-dollar prize. …
To athletes, investors and a rubbernecking public, the results were underwhelming.
The company’s [Enhanced’s] stock price — after going public just weeks before the event — told a similar story, dropping 50% a couple of days after the competition. “Flop,” read headlines and social media posts, with one central question emerging: Does this prove PEDs don’t work — or that elite athletes were already secretly using them all along?
According to Martin, athletes need more financial incentive in order to break all those world records. “The prize for breaking Usain Bolt’s men’s 100-meter world record at the 2027 Enhanced Games will be increased to $10 million. Our DMs are open,” read a statement from Martin and his Enhanced Games co-founder Christian Angermayer obtained by Vanity Fair.
So it looks like the Enhanced Games are not going away.
“Though they are slick marketers, the group pushing the so-called ‘Steroid Olympics’ are not a bunch of flaky losers using enhanced sports as a tool to sell PED-based personal fitness schemes,” wrote Steve Kettmann for The San Francisco Standard. “If you hoped they would flop in Vegas and quickly go away, you might be disappointed. In reality, juiced athletes are going to keep gaining a larger niche in sports culture."
The article continued, "We may need to get over the awkward feeling of knowing an elite athlete has taken the needle. And science has a big job in catching up to the reality of widespread use of synthetic testosterone — now surpassing 11 million prescriptions a year in the U.S. If it’s legal to be prescribed by a doctor, PED proponents argue, then maybe it shouldn’t be banned by professional sports leagues.”
Kettmann added that “[the] Enhanced organizers would be smart to dial back the hype around PEDs and focus instead on hard work, discipline and craft — the largest drivers of athletic success.”
The Enhanced Games have been controversial since the beginning.
“While those behind the Enhanced Games might be looking to make a quick buck, that profit would come at the expense of kids across the world thinking they need to dope to chase their dreams,” Travis Tygart, CEO of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, said last year. “We desperately wish this investment was being made in the athletes who are currently training and competing the real and safe way. They are the role models this world so desperately needs and they are the ones who deserve our support — not some dangerous clown show that puts profit over principle.”
Meanwhile, Enhanced (which also makes sports performance products) recently announced that the inaugural Enhanced Games “secured more than $32 million in aggregate sponsorship deal value across its commercial partner ecosystem. Sponsorship deal value was secured ahead of the inaugural Games. The company has more than seven months remaining in the year to pursue additional sponsorships, renew and expand existing relationships, and build toward the second Enhanced Games.”
Streamed free on the Roku Sports Channel to more than 100 million homes across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, the Enhanced Games also were distributed through digital partnership channels that included ZOOP, Rumble, YouTube and X, according to the announcement.
“We reset what this category is capable of,” Martin said. “The market has spoken and what our sponsors recognized is that the Enhanced Games is not a niche experiment. Rather a new accessible category of live sport with genuine reach, an engaged audience and a brand identity unlike anything else in the market. The $32 million we secured with our first event is not a ceiling. It is a starting point.”
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