September 24, 1988. Seoul’s Olympic Stadium. Ben Johnson tears through the finish line in 9.79 seconds, his index finger jabbing skyward before he even crosses it. The Canadian has just obliterated his own world record and humiliated Carl Lewis, America’s golden boy. Back in Toronto, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney rings to offer congratulations on live television. Newspapers scramble to coin superlatives. ‘Benfastic!’ screams the Toronto Star.
Fifty-five hours later, Johnson is on a plane home in disgrace. The Olympic Doping Control Center has found stanozolol, an anabolic steroid, swimming through his urine. Gold medal gone. World records erased. Mulroney’s phone call replayed endlessly as evidence of a nation, a world, duped.
That should have settled matters. Nearly four decades on, however, a consortium of Silicon Valley libertarians has concluded that Johnson’s real error was the hiding, not the doping. Their solution? Make sure nobody has to hide at all.
The Enhanced Games, coming to Las Vegas in May 2026, will allow—indeed celebrate—performance-enhancing drugs. Peter Thiel has invested. So have Christian Angermayer and Donald Trump Jr. Prize money runs to 500,000 US dollars per event; break a world record and you pocket an extra million. Aron D’Souza, the Australian tech entrepreneur behind the venture, dismisses the World Anti-Doping Agency as an “anti-science police force”. He is not joking. This is not the reinvention of sport. It is its degradation dressed up in libertarian cosplay.
A sordid history
The Enhanced Games’ backers argue they are merely dragging an open secret into the light. They have a point about prevalence, if nothing else. A 2017 survey commissioned by WADA found that nearly half of elite athletes admitted anonymously to using banned substances, while only one-two per cent are ever caught. The history of doping is littered with household names. Marion Jones, America’s golden girl of the Sydney 2000 Olympics, returned five medals and spent six months in prison after admitting she had lied to federal investigators about her steroid use. Lance Armstrong’s seven Tour de France titles were stripped in 2012 after revelations of an elaborate doping scheme involving blood transfusions, EPO, and testosterone. He had been tested more than 200 times and never officially failed.
The most chilling precedent, though, comes from East Germany, where a state-sponsored programme turned the Communist country into an athletic superpower. Many athletes were unwitting participants, doped as teenagers without their knowledge. The long-term consequences—liver damage, infertility, hormonal disorders—haunt survivors to this day. Records set during that era remain on the books, an uncomfortable reminder that “clean” sport has always been a somewhat aspirational concept.
But here is where the Enhanced Games’ logic collapses into itself. The argument that doping is widespread is not, in fact, an argument for legalising it. It is an argument for better enforcement. That cheating exists does not make it virtuous; it makes it common.
The body as collateral damage
The medical literature on performance-enhancing drugs makes for grim reading. Anabolic steroids do not merely build muscle; they also damage the heart, liver, and endocrine system. Users report depression, aggression, and in some cases suicidal thoughts. EPO—the blood-boosting drug of choice for endurance cheats—thickens blood to the consistency of motor oil, dramatically raising the odds of stroke or cardiac arrest. Between 1990 and 2012, the National Institute on Drug Abuse identified 19 deaths in published case reports linked to steroid use, though the true figure is almost certainly higher given chronic underreporting. Blood doping has killed cyclists in their sleep.
D’Souza’s answer to all this is medical supervision. Competitors will use only FDA-approved substances, he says, and their health will be tracked for five years after competition. This sounds reassuring until you consider that the doses athletes use to gain competitive advantage frequently exceed anything ethically tested in clinical trials. The Endocrine Society has warned that the true adverse effects of many performance-enhancing drugs remain poorly understood precisely because researchers cannot ethically administer the quantities that athletes actually consume.
The moral hazard extends well beyond the competitors themselves. The Enhanced Games insist their event is ‘not for young athletes’—a disclaimer that manages to be both self-aware and utterly naïve. Young athletes who fall just short of elite level already face enormous pressure to find any edge they can. A competition that explicitly rewards pharmaceutical enhancement, broadcast to millions, sends an unmistakable message: natural ability and hard work are not enough. The International Federation of Sports Medicine has expressed concern that the Enhanced Games will exploit young people. They are right to worry.
The shoes don’t fit
One of the favourite arguments put forward by advocates of doping in sport involves running shoes. If Nike’s Vaporfly trainers—with their carbon-fibre plates and energy-returning foam—are permitted, they ask, why not testosterone? It is a clever piece of rhetoric that collapses under the slightest scrutiny.
Sport has always drawn lines around technology—it just tends to draw them after the fact. Speedo’s LZR Racer swimsuit helped athletes smash 23 of the 25 world records broken at the 2008 Beijing Olympics; swimming’s governors duly banned it. Nike’s Alphafly prototypes carried Eliud Kipchoge under the two-hour marathon barrier; World Athletics responded with rules capping sole thickness and the number of carbon plates. The pattern is consistent: kit that warps the competition gets debated, limited, or thrown out entirely.
More importantly, equipment and drugs are categorically different. A shoe does not rewire your endocrine system. A carbon-fibre pole does not cause liver failure. A swimsuit does not trigger depression or aggression. The false equivalence between external technology and internal chemistry is either intellectually lazy or deliberately misleading—and either way, it is fatuous.
Reinvention worth having
If you wanted to actually reinvent sport—to tackle the problems D’Souza claims to care about—you would not start by pumping athletes full of testosterone. You might begin with money. Most swimmers, even world-class ones, earn shockingly little; Britain’s Elite Athletes Association has warned that two-thirds of Paris 2024 Olympians cannot afford to keep training until Los Angeles 2028 without more funding. Revenue-sharing models could help. So could transparent governance that does not require a federal investigation to expose corruption. Anti-doping programmes that actually catch more than just a few cheats would restore some credibility. Technology can play a role too, where it makes sport safer or more watchable. None of this requires turning competitors into lab rats.
The Enhanced Games offer none of this. What they offer instead is a spectacle funded by venture capital and built on the proposition that human beings are merely hardware to be optimised.
The head of the US Anti-Doping Agency, Travis Tygart, has called the Enhanced Games a “clown show“. World Aquatics described it as “a circus, built on shortcuts”. Both are right, but perhaps too generous. Circuses at least acknowledge they are entertainment. The Enhanced Games want something more: to redefine sport itself in their own image, to declare that the old rules about fairness and health were always arbitrary, and that the only authentic competition is one where chemical enhancement is just another input to be optimised.
Ben Johnson, now in his sixties, still insists he deserves his place among the greats. Perhaps the Enhanced Games will give him closure. But they will not reinvent sport. They will simply remind us why we banned doping in the first place.
Photo: Dreamstime.
