The Enhanced Games: What Happens When Doping Is No Longer Cheating?

For more than half a century, elite sport has operated around a simple principle: athletes may train harder, eat better, recover smarter and use increasingly sophisticated technology—but certain pharmaceutical methods of improving performance are forbidden.

The Enhanced Games are built around the opposite idea.

Instead of attempting to eliminate performance-enhancing drugs, the organization openly permits medically supervised enhancement. Testosterone, human growth hormone, anabolic agents, erythropoietin and certain stimulants can become part of an athlete’s preparation rather than evidence of a rules violation.

On May 24, 2026, that idea moved from theory to reality when the inaugural Enhanced Games were held at Resorts World Las Vegas.

The event was promoted as a glimpse into the future of human performance: elite athletes, advanced sports science, substantial prize money and pharmacological enhancement operating openly rather than secretly.

The result was one of the most controversial experiments modern sport has seen.

But perhaps the most surprising thing about the first Enhanced Games was not how fast the athletes became.

It was how little the world records moved.

A Different Philosophy of Sport

Traditional elite sport treats doping as both a competitive and ethical violation. The World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA, maintains a prohibited list covering substances and methods including anabolic steroids, erythropoietin, growth hormone and many stimulants.

The Enhanced Games challenge that entire framework.

Their argument is essentially this: performance enhancement already exists everywhere in sport.

Athletes use altitude tents, carbon-plated shoes, aerodynamic equipment, advanced nutrition, surgical procedures, sophisticated recovery technology and highly specialized medical teams. If technology can improve the shoe, the bicycle, the swimsuit or the training environment, the Enhanced Games ask, why should pharmaceutical enhancement of the athlete’s biology automatically be considered unacceptable?

Supporters also argue that doping already occurs secretly in conventional sport. From that perspective, prohibition creates an underground system in which athletes may use substances without transparent medical supervision while publicly pretending that pharmacological enhancement does not exist.

The Enhanced Games propose another model: bring enhancement into the open, place doctors around it and allow athletes to make informed decisions about their own bodies.

It is a radically libertarian interpretation of sport.

And it immediately creates an equally radical question:

If everyone is allowed to enhance, is it still cheating?

What Were the Athletes Actually Taking?

Before the inaugural competition, Enhanced disclosed unusually detailed aggregate information about the substances used by athletes participating in its medical study.

The company’s ASCEND001 study is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov as Impact of Medically Supervised Performance-Enhancing Substances on Elite Athletes. The study is designed to examine the safety and performance effects of medically supervised enhancement, with long-term health monitoring planned for several years.

According to Enhanced, 36 of the 42 athletes entered in the Games participated in the clinical trial.

Among athletes in that trial:

• 91% used testosterone or testosterone esters
• 79% used human growth hormone
• 62% used stimulants
• 50% used metabolic modulators
• 41% used erythropoietin, or EPO
• 29% used an anabolic steroid agent

The company’s study protocol lists substances including testosterone preparations, nandrolone, methenolone, human growth hormone, darbepoetin, meldonium, modafinil and mixed amphetamine salts, alongside drugs intended to manage secondary physiological effects.

This makes the Enhanced Games fundamentally different from an ordinary sporting competition.

The drugs are not a hidden scandal surrounding the competition.

They are part of the competition’s design.

“FDA-Approved” Does Not Mean Approved for Athletic Enhancement

One of the most important distinctions in the entire debate concerns the phrase “FDA-approved.”

Enhanced frequently emphasizes that its medical model involves legal medicines and medically supervised substances. But this wording can easily be misunderstood.

A drug may be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating a specific medical condition and then be prescribed by a physician for another purpose—known as off-label use.

The FDA itself makes clear that when a drug is used off-label, the agency has not determined that the drug is safe and effective for that particular unapproved use.

In other words, FDA approval of testosterone for a legitimate medical indication is not equivalent to FDA approval of supraphysiological testosterone use to help an elite athlete become faster or stronger.

That distinction sits at the center of the disagreement between Enhanced and its critics.

The Million-Dollar Experiment

The organizers understood that philosophy alone would not convince elite athletes to risk their reputations and future eligibility.

Money would.

Enhanced offered unusually large financial incentives compared with many Olympic sports.

Event winners could receive $250,000, while world-record performances could trigger additional bonuses. In marquee events such as the men’s 50-meter freestyle and 100-meter sprint, the record bonus reached $1 million.

For athletes from sports where even Olympic-level competitors often struggle to build substantial financial security, those numbers are difficult to ignore.

Former Olympic medalists and internationally recognized athletes became involved, including swimmers Ben Proud and James Magnussen, American sprinter Fred Kerley, Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev and strongman Hafþór Björnsson.

The economic argument therefore became almost as important as the pharmacological one.

The Enhanced Games were not simply asking:

How much faster can drugs make an athlete?

They were also asking:

What happens when athletes are paid enough to reject the traditional sporting system?

Then the Records Refused to Collapse

Before the Games, much of the attention focused on the possibility that enhanced athletes would destroy established world records.

That did not happen.

American sprinter Fred Kerley won the men’s 100 meters in 9.97 seconds.

That is an elite sprint time, but nowhere near Usain Bolt’s legendary world record of 9.58.

In fact, Kerley’s 9.97 would have placed him last in the men’s 100-meter final at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Kerley had himself run 9.81 in Paris.

Even more interestingly, Kerley was presented as competing without the Enhanced medical protocol.

The women’s 100 meters produced another uncomfortable result for the idea that chemistry would automatically dominate competition. Barbados sprinter Tristan Evelyn, also competing as a non-enhanced athlete, won in 11.25 seconds.

Olympic champion swimmer Hunter Armstrong was another athlete described as competing without prohibited enhancement who won an event.

These performances do not prove that PEDs are ineffective.

Decades of scientific research demonstrate that certain anabolic agents and other substances can significantly influence muscle mass, strength, recovery, oxygen-carrying capacity and other physiological characteristics.

What they do show is something more important:

Drugs do not replace elite talent.

They do not automatically create world-class technique.

They cannot instantly reproduce decades of training.

And they cannot eliminate the importance of genetics, biomechanics, psychology, coaching, race execution and competitive experience.

The human performance equation is far more complicated than simply adding testosterone.

The One Performance That Beat a World Record

Eventually, the Enhanced Games got the headline they wanted.

Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev completed the men’s 50-meter freestyle in 20.81 seconds.

The official world record at the time was Australian Cameron McEvoy’s 20.88.

Gkolomeev therefore covered 50 meters faster than the recognized world-record time and earned a $1 million record bonus in addition to his winner’s prize.

But there was a major problem.

It was not an official world record.

World Aquatics would not recognize the performance. The competition existed outside its regulatory structure, conventional anti-doping rules were not followed, and Gkolomeev also competed in a polyurethane full-body “supersuit”—technology that has been prohibited in mainstream elite swimming since 2010.

This created a fascinating scientific problem.

What exactly caused the 20.81?

Was it pharmaceutical enhancement?

The supersuit?

Training?

Natural talent?

A combination of all of them?

The more variables the Enhanced Games remove from conventional sporting rules, the harder direct comparison with conventional records becomes.

Instead of answering the question “How fast can an enhanced human swim?”, the experiment may actually ask something broader:

How fast can a human swim when several traditional restrictions are removed simultaneously?

That is a different question.

The Health Debate Cannot Be Ignored

The strongest criticism of the Enhanced Games does not concern records.

It concerns what may happen to the athletes years after the cameras are turned off.

WADA has called the concept dangerous and irresponsible and argues that medical supervision does not eliminate the risks associated with performance-enhancing substances. The organization has specifically highlighted potential cardiovascular, metabolic, reproductive and psychological consequences associated with substances including anabolic steroids, growth hormone and testosterone.

Scientific literature gives those concerns substantial weight.

A 2026 review published in Sports Medicine – Open specifically examined the cardiovascular implications of the Enhanced Games and relevant performance-enhancing substances.

The researchers concluded that the performance benefits of different PEDs are inconsistent, while cardiovascular harm can be significant, cumulative and potentially irreversible. Anabolic-androgenic steroids and erythropoiesis-stimulating agents show some of the strongest performance effects, but they are also associated with problems including cardiac remodeling, arrhythmias and thrombotic events.

Chronic anabolic steroid exposure has been associated with changes including increased ventricular mass, impaired cardiac function and coronary abnormalities. Growth hormone presents a different profile: evidence suggests it may increase lean body mass, yet improvements in actual strength or exercise performance are much less convincing, while excessive exposure can contribute to fluid retention, metabolic disturbance and potentially harmful cardiac changes.

The difficult scientific reality is that “medically supervised” does not mean “risk-free.”

It may mean risk-managed.

Those are very different things.

Enhanced Is More Than a Sports League

To understand why the Enhanced Games matter, it is necessary to look beyond sport.

The company behind the Games is also building a broader consumer health and performance business.

Its SEC filings describe the Enhanced Games as a global sports and media platform designed not only to generate entertainment and sponsorship revenue but also to act as a brand and audience engine for its Live Enhanced consumer platform.

That platform is intended to provide physician-guided performance protocols, telehealth services and performance-related products. The company’s filings explicitly connect the sporting event with the wider commercialization of human enhancement.

Enhanced Group is now publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ENHA, and its investors have included prominent technology and investment figures such as Peter Thiel and Christian Angermayer.

This changes the meaning of the project.

The Games are not merely an experiment designed to discover how fast humans can run or swim.

They are also a demonstration platform for a potential new industry:

performance medicine for the mass market.

Elite athletes become both competitors and living advertisements for the concept of biological optimization.

That may ultimately be the most consequential part of the Enhanced Games.

The Real Question Is Bigger Than Doping

For decades, discussions about PEDs have usually been framed around cheating.

The Enhanced Games deliberately remove that framework.

If every competitor is allowed access to enhancement, the traditional fairness argument becomes less straightforward.

But new problems immediately appear.

If enhanced performance becomes normalized, could athletes eventually feel pressured to use drugs simply to remain competitive?

Can genuine consent exist when refusing enhancement could mean sacrificing hundreds of thousands—or millions—of dollars?

Would young athletes begin using substances earlier because the enhanced pathway offers a professional career?

How should records from enhanced and conventional competitions be compared?

Where does medical treatment end and optimization begin?

And perhaps most importantly:

What exactly are we trying to measure when we watch sport?

Is sport supposed to reveal the natural limits of the human body?

Or has elite sport always been about using every available form of knowledge and technology to push those limits further?

A Strange First Verdict

The first Enhanced Games did not prove that pharmacology can instantly create superhuman athletes.

If anything, the results demonstrated the extraordinary difficulty of elite performance.

Despite extensive enhancement among the athletes enrolled in the medical program, the event produced only one performance faster than an existing official world record—and even that result involved equipment that would be illegal in conventional competition.

Several athletes competing outside the enhancement protocol won events.

The promised avalanche of impossible performances never arrived.

But dismissing the Enhanced Games as a failure may be premature.

Its real impact might not be measured in seconds, kilograms or world records.

It may be cultural.

The Games have taken a practice that elite sport spent decades pushing underground and put it under bright lights in Las Vegas.

They have transformed doping from a secret violation into a public product.

And once that happens, the conversation changes.

The future battle may no longer simply be between clean athletes and dopers.

It could become a battle between two completely different definitions of sport:

one in which human biological limits are part of the challenge,

and another in which those limits are simply another engineering problem waiting to be solved.

The first Enhanced Games therefore left us with a more interesting question than whether steroids can break records.

If science eventually allows us to redesign the athlete, at what point does enhanced human performance stop being sport—and become something entirely new?