When it was first announced three years ago, the Enhanced Games was described by Aron d’Souza, its Australian founder, as a direct rival to the Olympics. ‘The International Olympic Committee has effectively been a one-party state running the world of sport for 100 years’, he declared, ‘and now the opposition party is here. We are ready for a fight.’
For the IOC and the rest of global sport, the promised fight of the Enhanced Games has fizzled out
D’Souza envisaged an annual competition with events in five sports – athletics, swimming, weightlifting, gymnastics and martial arts, with ‘a couple of thousand’ participants. Enhanced athletes would be free from the hassle and bureaucracy of drug testing and compliance to allow them to push the absolute limits of human performance. Sport’s governing bodies took the Enhanced Games sufficiently seriously to issue bans for athletes who signed up. After a long gestation, the Enhanced Games is about to become a reality. But the event that will take place today is a far cry from d’Souza’s vision.
It turns out that creating an event to compete with the Olympics is quite a difficult task, even with financing and support from several of Silicon Valley’s deep-pocketed tech bros. D’Souza and his colleagues approached hundreds of athletes to build a roster that would draw the interest of fans around the world. A total of 42 are due to compete.
The Olympics is a sporting smorgasbord. Ahead of each edition, sports compete fiercely to be allowed in. The IOC has to make difficult decisions to cap the growth of the Olympics to prevent it from overwhelming its hosts. In Paris there were 32 sports and 329 events. The Enhanced Games programme has been cut to three sports and seven events (the 50m and 100m butterfly and freestyle, a 100m sprint, a snatch, clean and jerk, and a deadlift).
Naturally, the Games will take place in Las Vegas, the global home of reckless behaviour. But instead of using the city’s 71,000-seater Allegiant Stadium or the 20,000-capacity T-Mobile Arena, the Games will be held at a smaller hall in Resorts World in front of 2,500 invited guests. Tickets were not made available to the public. Once the afternoon of competition has wound down, there will be an after-party at a local nightclub. If this all sounds rather modest, that is because it is.
Enhanced wants you to know that is trying to break world records. In addition to doping, it has provided its swimmers with racing suits banned by World Aquatics. Unsubstantiated rumours are swirling about the running track for the athletics event, given that the men’s 100m is the most high-profile record of them all.
The thing is, Kristian Gkolomeev, one of the Enhanced Games swimmers, did break a world record last year. He swam the 50m freestyle in 20.39 seconds at an Enhanced test event, shaving 0.02 seconds from Cesar Cielo’s official mark. Enhanced gave him $1m. But nobody cared.
In 2025, d’Souza stepped down from day-to-day operations. The new public face of the project became Maximillian Martin, one of d’Souza’s original partners, whose background is in crypto. Under Martin, the Enhanced Games has shifted from being a self-sustaining sporting event to a marketing stunt for its new focus: selling products to promote performance and longevity. At the time of writing, it was possible to receive a 50 per cent discount on a $420, three-month supply of Enhanced’s Stronger dietary supplement, a fancy creatine powder.
As a target for ridicule, the Enhanced Games is comically easy to hit. But it does have a purpose. The fact that 50 professional athletes have risked their careers and their reputations on an unproven and potentially dangerous endeavour shows that the governing bodies of their respective sports have work to do. The lives of professional track and field athletes, swimmers and lifters require enormous amounts of discipline and sacrifice. Prize money and sponsorships are usually meagre. Sport’s battle with doping is well intentioned but is imperfect at both ends. Dopers still evade detection (or receive political cover), while others are forced to go to considerable lengths to demonstrate their compliance. It should be alarming that a group of talented athletes, however small, are willing to dope in exchange for being put up in a nice hotel and given an outside chance of a big payday.
But for the IOC and the rest of global sport, the promised fight of the Enhanced Games has fizzled out.
Comments