The Enhanced Games aim to push the limits of sporting achievement via banned methods. Visionary thinking or mere delusion? It’s complicated, says Michael Crawley.
The video of the fastest 50m swim in history has a little over 90,000 views on YouTube. The swim was not even planned as a world record attempt, which was planned for several weeks later.
In the video, Kristian Gkolomeev bounces on the starting block of the Greensboro Aquatic Centre in North Carolina before settling. Then he launches himself, torpedo-like, into the water. It is strange to watch an elite swimmer go all-out on their own, the only other person in shot being Brett Hawke, Gkolomeev’s coach, who jogs along poolside to take splits. It is also strange to hear, with no roaring crowd and no breathless commentary. The Greek is smooth as you like in the water, but with no other noise his huge hands can be heard slapping the water. When he reaches the end of the pool he turns casually to check the screen in the pool. It reads 20.89, two hundredths of a second faster than anyone else in history has ever swum the distance.
Gkolomeev stretches his enormous arms wide before holding his head in his hands. In just over one third of a minute he has just won $1 million, a sum that dwarfs his career earnings from a sport he has dedicated more than half his life to. He has also just single-handedly transformed the fortunes of a sporting event that many had ridiculed, and few believed would actually happen. The Enhanced Games had its first world record, and it was a big one.
Aron D’Souza, CEO of the Games, is unequivocal about its importance, describing it as a “paradigm shift” on a par with the germ theory of disease and space travel. “Millions of people have swum competitively for billions of hours for that one world record,” is how he puts it to me in an interview. “And Kristian did it just like that, you know? That really shows us the power of human enhancement.” Gkolomeev had only been on “the protocol” for a matter of weeks when he broke the record.
In just over one third of a minute he had just won $1 million…
In May I travelled to the launch of the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas, unaware that Gkolomeev had broken the world record three months previously – a secret that the organisation kept closely guarded. For D’Souza, Vegas is the perfect venue for the inaugural competition. “Where better to break records than the city that never watches the clock?” he will ask at the launch event.
In my taxi from the airport, I pass a billboard advertising a law firm with a photograph of a women’s basketball team and the slogan “WE WIN MORE”, and arrive at my hotel at the same time as a Cybertruck representing a company called Liv Wellness. The company provides on-demand IV drips for those seeking a quick recovery from a hangover.
Their slogan is “BE LIMITLESS”. I can’t help but agree with D’Souza that Vegas’s unashamed embrace of sport as business and no-holds-barred vibes make it the obvious location for a competition that has been described as “the Olympics on steroids”.
The first edition of the Enhanced Games will take place over Memorial Day weekend in May 2026, and will feature the most explosive sprint events in swimming and athletics alongside weightlifting, aiming to showcase what can be achieved through the embrace of performance-enhancing drugs and other technologies used under careful medical supervision. The organisers are keen to show that performance-enhancing substances can be safe, and that they can in fact improve the wellbeing of participants. They are also keen to emphasise that normalising the use of performance-enhancing substances has a significance that goes far beyond sport.
Those organising and investing in the Games envision them as a way of ushering in a new “age of enhancement” where everyone could feel younger, healthier and more vital. So what might the consequences of this shift be for sport and society?
I have always thought of the ability to go to sleep under any circumstances as a kind of sporting superpower, and amid the neon lights of the Red Tail bar and the ping and clatter of slot machines from the Resorts World casino floor, Gkolomeev is out for the count when I arrive for our interview.
His second reason is – perhaps surprisingly – to do with fairness. “This will be a level playing field,” he says. “Everyone will have the same access to everything, to the best doctors to work with, and FDA-approved enhancements.” The lingering question of whether or not the people beating him were doing so fairly would be gone, which would be a weight off his shoulders.
“And finally,” he goes on, “I always wanted to see my full potential. I was just curious. What if I did everything right, and added performance-enhancing drugs, and did it openly, and with medical supervision? I was curious. What could I do?”
This is a question most athletes ask, even at much lower levels of the sport. It is a question that remains tantalisingly unanswered for the vast majority, for so many reasons, and I found myself really relating to Gkolomeev and the other swimmers who have signed up so far on a very human – not superhuman – level. Australian James Magnussen (the first athlete to sign a contract with the Games) in particular, is extremely open about the vulnerabilities of the elite athlete and the difficulty of letting go of that identity.
It is clear that the swimmers I meet share some of the frustrations the founders of the Enhanced Games express about the Olympic movement and conventional sport. There is a degree of resentment at the lack of financial support they have received to swim at the highest level, aimed both at national federations and the International Olympic Committee itself. There is also a sense that there is inadequate acknowledgement of the harm that high-performance sport can do. As Ukrainian swimmer Andriy Govorov puts it, “Traditional sport is by definition unhealthy. We all know the signs of this with injuries, mental health problems and ruined tendons. Ninety per cent of athletes struggle to maintain their health over time. Why? Because there is little scientific support for recovery.” This is something he feels the Enhanced Games can provide.
I can see the attraction of remaining fit and healthy into old age.
What seems clear from my conversations with both Gkolomeev and Magnussen is that it takes some time to get used to inhabiting an enhanced body. “It changes a lot of things in your body,” is how Gkolomeev puts it, not least of these being that it makes you heavier, which can be a challenge for a swimmer.
Magnussen was constantly surprised by how good he felt every day in training after taking testosterone and a cocktail of peptides and other substances. “Basically, I went four months without any soreness,” he told me. “And it was actually to the detriment of my performance, because I would wake up every day saying, ‘I feel great, let’s push harder, let’s go further, let’s lift heavier.’ I trained twice a day, every day, for 49 days straight, which for a 34-year-old athlete is unheard of.”
All the metrics he was used to monitoring daily to assess his readiness to train looked amazing – his resting heart rate was 28, and his HRV (heart-rate variability – often used as a marker of wellbeing) was “off-the charts”. What he didn’t realise was that while his cardiac and muscular systems seemed primed, his nervous system couldn’t keep up, and his speed was dropping. He couldn’t rely on the data or on how he was feeling to tell him when to back off.
This raises all kinds of questions for me. Being able to ‘listen to your body’ and know when to take it easy has always been an important skill for an elite athlete. What will happen if this is no longer possible? As a society we celebrate characteristics like grit, determination and the ability to overcome pain and discomfort in relation to sport, so what would it mean if these qualities are no longer required? What would it mean for the athletes’ sense of self for their performances begin to be attributed primarily to the specific ‘protocol’ they were on, rather than their ability to work hard and overcome pain and suffering?
Both D’Souza and his co-founder, billionaire biotech investor Christian Angermayer, are prone to high-level philosophising about the future of humanity. For D’Souza, we face a choice between entering an age dominated by AI, where humans become a “subservient, secondary species”, and embracing enhancements, where “technology is a modality for improving the human condition”. He envisions trillions of dollars of investment in human enhancement bringing about profound changes to the structure of society.
“I think the greatest gift that I wish to give to humanity would be a 65-year-old who can run as fast as Usain Bolt,” he tells me, “because that would show that 65 shouldn’t be the age of retirement.” For Angermayer, the same drugs that allow an athlete in their prime to break a world record will allow 80-year-olds to carry their bags home from the supermarket.
Krisitan Gkolomeev has already offered a glimpse of what might be achieved at the Enhanced Games
Clearly, there are potential benefits to the normalisation of some of the performance enhancements on display at the Games, and I can see the attraction of remaining fit and healthy into old age. The high-flown rhetoric does tend to give way to commercial reality, though, and in Las Vegas I found the transition from the celebration of “superhumanity” to the launch of the Enhanced Games’ product range somewhat jarring. The Games will be a billboard for a certain kind of future, and, whatever happens, it will be a fascinating watch.
The inaugural Enhanced Games will take place in Resorts World Las Vegas on 24 May 2026.
Michael Crawley is an award-winning author and social anthropologist based at Durham University. His latest book, To the Limit: The Meaning of Endurance from Mexico to the Himalayas (Bloomsbury, 2024), was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Sports Book Awards.
