The Enhanced Games promised a revolution. Athletes on supervised drug regimens, unshackled from the anti-doping rules of the Olympics, were going to show us what the human body was truly capable of. The event was transhumanism in practice – a glimpse at humanity’s athletic future.
What it actually delivered was a single world record, broken by a fraction of a second, by the same swimmer who’d already claimed that honour at the pilot event the previous year.
The Enhanced Games introduced potential health risks to athletes by allowing them to take performance-enhancing substances. I previously argued that people are only ok with dangerous sporting events, like boxing, when the entertainment is good enough. It looks like the Enhanced Games may have failed that test.
Founded in 2023 and dubbed the “Steroid Olympics” by critics, the Enhanced Games stripped away anti-doping rules and let athletes use a wide range of performance-enhancing substances – testosterone, growth hormone, peptides, stimulants – under medical supervision.
The company debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2026 with a heavily publicised enterprise valuation of around $1.2 billion.
The pitch was ideological as much as commercial. The event’s founder, Australian entrepreneur Aron D'Souza, framed enhancement as a matter of individual freedom. He said the event would “break world records and fundamentally change the trajectory of not just sport, but humanity as a whole”. His vision was for science and sport to converge to “redefine human limits”.
Crucially, the Enhanced Games were sold on results. D'Souza promised spectators faster, stronger athletes than they’d ever seen before. We were led to believe that a new generation of superhumans would smash the old world records.
A disappointing evening
Despite the organisers’ claim that the event “changed the world tonight”, the Enhanced Games fell far short of their promises.
Out of 22 events, only one world record was broken. Kristian Gkolomeev, wearing a futuristic super suit, completed the men’s 50m swimming freestyle in 20.81 seconds – 0.07 seconds under the standing world record. However, he’d already clocked a comparable time in a demonstration swim the year before.
More damaging for the event’s central thesis: three athletes who said they were clean won events. In athletics, Fred Kerley won the men’s 100m, Tristan Evelyn won the women’s 100m, while Hunter Armstrong won the men’s 50m swimming backstroke. The event did not clearly demonstrate a dramatic performance advantage for enhanced athletes.
The ethical debate around dangerous sports has always rested on a cost-benefit analysis. Every sport carries risk to athletes’ bodies, health and long-term wellbeing. We accept those risks when the sport produces something compelling enough to justify them.
That was the issue hanging over the Enhanced Games. As journalist Jamie Timson put it in The Week: is the juice worth the squeeze? For many viewers, the answer was no.
If doped athletes were routinely smashing records and rewriting our understanding of human performance, there may have been a genuine conversation to be had about whether the spectacle justifies the risks. But that’s not what happened. The performances were, by and large, unremarkable. Enhanced Group’s stock crashed to an all-time low within days of the event, wiping out nearly half of its value. The market reaction suggested doubts about the project’s long-term appeal.
A replacement for the Olympics?
Part of the appeal of the Olympics is that we know the athletes are (in theory) on a level playing field, competing purely on talent and training. We can argue about whether that’s actually true, but the fiction is meaningful. It gives the results stakes.
The Enhanced Games wanted to replace that with something rawer: pure, unfiltered human potential with the ceiling removed. But if the ceiling doesn’t actually move much, you’ve just got a less credible version of the thing you were trying to replace.
Read more: The Enhanced Games: ‘dangerous clown show’ or a wake-up call for traditional sport?
When I was on BBC Radio 5 Live last week, I said the success of the Enhanced Games would hinge entirely on what it produced. If the results were disappointing, it wouldn’t establish itself as a permanent fixture of the sporting landscape. That’s exactly where we’ve landed.
This wasn’t a sporting revolution but rather a one-night event in Las Vegas that didn’t visibly demonstrate a dramatic leap in athletic capability. The ethical question – whether the risks are worth it – has been answered not by philosophers or regulators, but by the market and the score board.
If the juice doesn’t produce results, why would the squeeze be worth it? The Enhanced Games may come back, but on this evidence, there’s no particular reason to think it’ll ever be more than a curiosity.
Byron Hyde is a member of the Health Research Authority London Chelsea Research Ethics Committee and the Open University Human Research Ethics Committee.
