Enhanced Games is a dangerous and deeply cynical take on modern sport

A planned international sports event, called the Enhanced Games, where athletes will not be subject to drug testing is scheduled to take place in 2025.

Headed by the Australian businessman Aron D’Souza, it will be the first event of its kind to support performance-enhancing drugs and not follow the rules of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada).

Seed funding for the enterprise closed at the end of January with PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel among the investors. The event is intended to be annual and includes track and field, swimming, weightlifting, gymnastics and combat sports. There are no team or ball sports with focus on speed, strength and endurance.

So far, the concept has not had much encouraging traction despite being sold as “The Olympics of the Future” with World Athletics president Sebastien Coe expressing the view of most governing bodies when he called the games “b*****cks” at the recent Indoor World Championships in Glasgow.

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In breathless self-regard for the bringing to life of, let’s say, a tawdry idea, organisers see the vision of “a new model that openly celebrates scientific innovation and honestly represents the use of performance enhancements in sports today”.

If you have a feeling of queasiness, you probably aren’t alone, perhaps not just because of the roll call of cyclists alone who have died from taking bad drugs chasing good performances, including Tommy Simpson in the 1960s and Marco Pantani in 2004.

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Pantani’s death came after the introduction of a synthetic form of the red-blood cell-stimulating hormone erythropoietin (EPO), which became an endurance sport serial killer.

Between 1987 and 1990, 20 young, healthy Belgian and Dutch cyclists died from nocturnal heart attacks, while in their beds recovering from the day’s racing or training. The image of coaches and team doctors shaking cyclists awake in the middle of the night to ride on a stationary bike to prevent a fatal heart attack remains a tragic and sobering image.

The Enhanced Games also challenges the current thinking and medical advice that asserts taking performance-enhancing drugs is bad, harmful or fatal.

“Contemporary drug testing practised in sports today is not necessarily about athlete safety,” says Enhanced. “It often skews the public perception of fairness and health in competitive sports. Enhanced will be adopting a sophisticated safety protocol which puts the athlete’s health first.”

Really? When chilling projects like these arise, the knee-jerk reaction is to consign them to the dustbin of bad ideas. But with Thiel, a wealthy, conservative libertarian, and D’Souza weighing in, the concept carries significant freight.

D’Souza is smart and well connected. He sees the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as corrupt and greedy and wants to eradicate Wada, which he calls an “anti-science police force for the IOC”.

For some, there might be a compelling fascination for a Frankenstein creation running a sub-nine second 100 metres, or some other lab creation trashing Michael Phelps records in the swimming pool

He guarantees that all competing athletes in the Enhanced Games will receive a base salary and compete for prize money larger than in other comparable events. The exact prize pool will be announced in mid-2024 with promises of €920,00 (€1 million) for a world record.

For some, there might be a compelling fascination for a Frankenstein creation running a sub-nine second 100 metres, or some other lab creation trashing Michael Phelps records in the swimming pool.

Weightlifting too would be jaw dropping. The poundage they lift is already comically heavy and while a televised in-competition death might be the epitome of dreadful taste, the Enhanced Games would sell it as a 21st century example of personal choice.

It is a deeply cynical take on modern sport, which has many problems, including moral failings and enduring questions over health with head trauma in sports such as rugby. There is always risk. But to inflate it with a giant experiment in human chemistry seems such a bleak counterpoint to cherishing the athlete. Still, “a full event” is scheduled to take place next year.

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James “I’ll juice to the gills” Magnussen, a three times Australian Olympic medallist, says he could break the 50-metre freestyle world record “within six months” as a gloves-off athlete. That’s the sort of chutzpah organisers are looking for and the type of competitor Dr James O’Connor et al from the School of Business, University of New South Wales, found in a survey.

In 2012, his team asked athletes if legal drugs were available to take for success but death was a consequence of taking them, would they do it. Thirteen from a 212 sample, or around 6 per cent, said they would take the drugs.

That’s not news. Faustian pacts and the driven individuals that make them have usually found themselves at the dysfunctional end of sport, a space now obviously available to exploit.

As Barnum and Baily did over a century ago charging for grotesquerie including a caged human with microcephaly called “the connecting link between man and monkey,” and Joice Heth, an African American woman with a disability who was billed as the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington, so the Pharma Games are due to take their place in the sporting schedule next year.

Roll up, roll up.