A Race to the Bottom
A new shadow has fallen over elite sport with the arrival of the Enhanced Games – a competition that openly permits, even glorifies, the use of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). Its backers claim to be ushering in a new era of scientific athleticism. But to those of us who’ve built our careers on clean competition, this isn’t innovation. It’s an insult.
Last week, the Enhanced Games proudly declared a new “world record” in the 50m freestyle. The time? Faster than any ever officially recorded. The catch? The swimmer has not only been doping since January, but also a wore a full-body polyurethane suit that was banned by swimming’s international federation in 2010 for giving an unfair technological advantage. That alone is revealing. If we’re applauding chemically assisted performances in outdated super-suits, why not let athletes wear flippers?
Sport is meant to be the ultimate test of natural human ability, refined through discipline, talent and sacrifice. The idea that drug-enhanced performances somehow represent the limits of human achievement is farcical. We’re not pushing boundaries here – we’re bulldozing them with artificial tools and pretending it’s progress.
But this isn’t just philosophical. It’s a real-world danger, especially for young athletes. With a $1m world record bounty on offer and headlines for every chemically aided milestone, the Enhanced Games is selling a seductive, toxic message: that shortcuts work, and drugs are a viable path to greatness. For senior athletes who want to gamble their health and reputations, so be it. But this cannot be the new dream we sell to the next generation.
The claim that all this is being done “safely” under medical supervision is disingenuous. Elite sport already pushes athletes to their physical and psychological limits; adding unregulated, experimental drugs raises the health stakes exponentially. Many of the substances being used remain unapproved, untested over the long term, and poorly understood. Reassurances about responsible enhancement are window dressing over an experiment in exploitation. Athletes are being enticed to trade their health for a chance at money and relevance. This isn’t empowerment. It’s commodification.
Some argue the Enhanced Games offers a separate arena where dopers can compete legally, potentially reducing cheating in mainstream sport. But this is naïve at best and cynical at worst. What it actually does is provide a global platform to showcase, in clinical, quantifiable terms, just how effective certain drugs can be. It’s an advert, not an outlet. And it makes the job of every clean sport organisation immeasurably harder.
This feels like a tipping point, where years of hard-fought regulation could give way to chaos. The moment we start to professionalise drug use in sport, we open the door to normalising it. Once chemical shortcuts are legitimised, the foundation of sport and the ideals of fair play begin to collapse.
Clean athletes around the world didn’t sign up for this. We trained, competed, and sacrificed under the shared belief that human performance – unassisted, raw, and real – is something worth striving for. The Enhanced Games promises to “inspire superhumanity”, but in doing so, it dismantles the very idea of what it means to be human. This isn’t progress; it’s a spectacle that undermines the values sport is meant to uphold. If we care about the next generation, the integrity of competition, and the spirit of honest effort, we must call this what it is: a dangerous diversion, not a new direction.
This is absolutely disastrous for the sport we love and sport in general. Where are WADA? How is it being allowed? Just last week my son, a performance swim coach and former National swimmer, gave a talk to the juniors from a local club on the importance of nutrition and touched on drugs and banned substances, emphasising that at their age they didn’t need supplements, just a healthy diet, sufficient calories and hydration and hard work, and that there was greater satisfaction to be gained from their own endeavours rather than shortcuts. We all like a quick fix – how many will latch onto this as a way to achieve their goals? The anti-doping authories are already far too lenient on swimmers caught doping (Sun Yang) – how many will take the risk of not being caught. Swimmers can be tested even at local open meets (although I’ve never heard of it happening) – at what point do we become suspicious of an outstanding performance (and let’s face it, we’ve all seen meets where a swimmer has won a race by a country mile)? This needs to be stopped- and fast.