Why The Enhanced Games Won’t Matter

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• Background
• Who is behind the Enhanced Games
• Why sports matters to people
• Fewer regulations lessens the challenge
• Athlete health concerns
• Startup culture’s history of exploitation

In May 2026 a new multi-sport event dubbed “The Enhanced Games” is set to take place in Las Vegas. It is planned to be a festival of sports not unlike the Olympic games but, as the name suggests, with the crucial difference of there being a lack of any form of meaningful doping control. Organisers tout it as being free of the shackles of the corrupt IOC and the anti-science WADA, and that it will be the future of sport and redefine Super Humanity (their words). I think it will be a massive failure.

There are plenty of reasons that the EG will fail, and the most obvious is that the people in charge of it are tech bros, which is a nice way of saying that they are some of the Worst People™, and the organisational structure will resemble a tech startup rather than a sporting organisation or event management company. Investors include venture capital funds of questionable repute, and a Saudi prince. People love to talk about the success of tech startups, but most people forget that 9/10 of them fail and even the ones that do “succeed” do so because they are bought-out by tech giants either to incorporate their intellectual property or inhale their user data (through a rolled-up $100 bill, I imagine).

There are plenty of reasons that the Enhanced Games will fail, and the most obvious is that the people in charge of it are the Worst People™

Why do we care about sports?

No; the Enhanced Games won’t be a good idea that fails because of poor execution, or incompetent staff. The real reason the EG will fail is because nobody will care about it. The organisers think that people will care because all the athletes will be doped and therefore faster, higher, and stronger meaning that they’ll break world records, and everyone loves to see world records get broken, right? I mean, look at all the fanfare around Mondo Duplantis every time he takes another centimeter off the pole vault world record (14 times and counting), or whenever Usain Bolt broke the 100m world record. It’s true – we do seem to love watching world records get broken, but have we ever stopped to think about why that is the case?

Here’s the kicker – we don’t care about world records because they’re the fastest, highest, strongest that a human has ever gone. We care about them because of how they make us feel – special. We feel special because we believe that we witnessed something extraordinary, historic, something nobody has ever seen before. If it was really only about the number, then replays of sport would have the same draw as watching an event live, and they clearly don’t. We enjoy watching people triumph over adversity, whether that adversity is the theoretical limit of human performance as defined by a world record, or a very closely-matched adversary. Think about it – some of the most memorable sporting moments aren’t the ones where the favourite took an early lead, dominated the race/match, then won comfortably without much effort – they were matches where you weren’t sure who was going to win, possibly until the very last moment – in fact some of the most memorable sporting moments came from situations where everyone was fairly certain that the eventual winner wasn’t going to win. The greater the adversity, the greater the victory.

We care about world records because of how they make US feel – special

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised that a bunch of tech bros didn’t consider the wider societal and philosophical implications of their actions, but by reducing a sports spectacle down to simply the act of sports performance, they have largely missed the point. People say they want to see world records because they’re fast, or whatever but without other competitors or a stopwatch, I would challenge anyone (even the athlete who holds the world record) to distinguish a world record performance from one that places them in the midfield. The performance itself is almost irrelevant without the wider context in which it happens, and that is the essential component that the Enhanced Games misses.

Context matters

The only reason being Olympic champion means anything is because a belief exists that that particular performance is the best in the world, as opposed to simply the best. The world is the perceived population of people who theoretically compete to be Olympic champion – not just at the Olympics themselves, but at all the competitions leading up to it. When I see Usain Bolt run 9.58 seconds in the 100m, I think about all the times I ran 100m at school, and although I wasn’t bad at it, there were plenty of people who were faster, and then at regional and state competitions, there were people who were even faster than them, then at national and international competitions, there were people who were even faster than those people. The peak of the mountain is only high if it has a large base, and that is why the 100m is such a big draw – almost everyone in the world has tried to run it at some point. In a very broad sense, the 100m world record holder is the fastest person to ever do a thing in a competition where almost everyone in the world is a participant. As a counterexample, the athletes in Major League Baseball are probably the best baseballers in the world, yet we still scoff that it’s called the World Series, when the league is limited to franchises based only in North America – context matters.

The peak of the mountain is only high if it has a large base

Moving goalposts

So why won’t people care about the enhanced games? Apart from the fact that most people in the world wouldn’t bother with the risks and expense of doping thus removing themselves from the participant base, it’s also because there aren’t enough restrictions. As I mentioned before – the greater the adversity, the greater the victory. As someone who has been involved in high-level sport as an athlete, administrator, and coach, I’d be the first to tell you that the boundaries that are set between what is a supplement and what is considered doping can sometimes be rather arbitrary, but the important point is that a definitive line is drawn, not unlike the line at the end of a 100m race. If we started running races where some lanes ran 100m, while others ran 98, or 104, we would probably stop caring about the result. Indeed, some races exist where this exact thing happens such as the Stawell Gift. While these handicap races are certainly a lot of fun, nobody seriously considers the results of these races to be meaningful indicators of who is the fastest runner.

But what about the athletes?

Let us not forget that the primary economic driver for high-level sport is that it is entertainment. Even if it isn’t terribly meaningful, done correctly a freak show disguised as sports can still be very entertaining – just look at wrestling and Jake Paul boxing matches. I do, however, fear for their health. A lesser-known fact of life is that, while sports are generally very good for your health, doing sport at the elite level is often not. Yes, there are benefits of good cardiac health, strong muscles, good balance, and a high VO2 max, but these are outweighed by the vastly increased wear and tear on connective tissue, joints, and even the heart muscle itself. Sports that involve frequent contact and impacts obviously have more well-known deleterious side-effects. Giving athletes carte blanche to partake in performance enhancing drugs is a recipe for disaster.

This is where I must concede that founder of the EG, Aron D’Souza has a point – these people are adults, and they are free to make whatever decisions they wish (within the laws of wherever they happen to be). This is not unlike the less-unhealthy choice that Olympic athletes made in the not-too-distant past where they would turn professional, surrender their Olympic eligibility, and participate in “professional” competitions for what one would hope is a lot of money. Perhaps the EG will be successful enough to create a critical mass of athletes who sacrifice their health in the pursuit of untested world records. However, if not enough people care about what these people do, then the economic case for holding the competition will be such that the reward for the athletes will be insufficient to entice them to switch.

The greatest success that I believe that EG can hope for is to follow the trajectory of many a failed tech start-up where the initial novelty and buzz mean that the early iterations, while flawed, might attract enough attention for it to be worth it (for certain definitions of worth), but eventually the entire business model proves to be unsustainable. I just hope that it is successful enough that the athletes who become caught up in it are paid enough to set them up for their lives after sports, because I would honestly be surprised if this lasts past the first event. Given the track record of tech startups, I wouldn’t be surprised if the athletes are eventually exploited in the same way that participants in freak show circuses were in the past.

Who cares?

At the end of the day, aside from a little intellectual curiosity, I don’t particularly care how fast a doped athlete can be. Occasionally doped athletes in very technical sports teach us new things about technical possibilities because they are able to spend more time at higher speeds and intensities than clean athletes, and that can inform us about optimal technical solutions for certain situations. To me, they’re nothing more than a science experiment. For a result to be significant in a sporting context depends on participants operating within agreed-upon confines of the sport’s regulatory structures, flawed as they may be. The organisers of the Enhanced Games are free to organise whatever they want, and call it whatever they want, but what they can’t do is expect anyone to care.