When an event bills itself as the next frontier in sport, you’d hope the minimum requirement is that it sparks excitement or, failing that, curiosity. For me The Enhanced Games have managed neither, they’ve just left me very uneasy.
The inaugural event lands in Las Vegas this May and will openly permit performance enhancing drugs administered under medical supervision.
If World Records fall, the message is clear: enhancement works.
The athletes involved will be operating in tightly controlled conditions, with doctors, protocols and close monitoring. Young people watching at home who feel inspired to emulate winners will not. They will be going it alone with whatever looks vaguely helpful and probably with whatever is cheapest and easiest to find.
Supervised doping feels like playing fast and loose with athletes to manufacture spectacle. Surely sport is meant to be about excellence, not voyeurism. Once you cross that line, you are no longer testing honest human potential, you are staging something closer to The Hunger Games.
There is also a competitive absurdity here; do athletes signing up now automatically lose out because they are only just beginning their enhancement programs? Is there an arms race clock already ticking?
Then there is the question that should really unsettle governing bodies…if the Enhanced Games fail to deliver a cascade of shattered records, how effective is anti-doping currently?
British swimming, Ben Proud, reported rationale for taking part is that he is tired of chasing parity with athletes who doped and were never caught. It is a persuasive argument and one which may yet prove prophetic.
Will I turn off in disgust when May arrives? No. I want to see if the genie is in or out of the medicine bottle. If this event proves palatable the commercial implications are vast, not least of all with sponsorships from pharma, healthcare and technology brands. In turn, the broader sporting landscape could shift faster than anyone has properly considered.
Whether it proves to be a circus or a template remains to be seen, I know which I’d prefer.
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