The Enhanced Games promise unregulated performance enhancement in sport. But what are the risks, ethics and long-term health consequences?
I don’t think I’m the only one who’s enthralled by watching sports. Grace, power, courage and guile expressed in extraordinary acts of transcendent athletic brilliance. Our transient admiration for these moments of superhuman execution might even allow us to merge with these exceptional athletes, a psychological state that Freud theorised as “our embrace of the superego”. This might, in part, explain our fascination for these seemingly magnificent humans.
In 2026, all our doubts and ambivalence about sporting achievements are about to be put to bed. Enter the Enhanced Games, where athletes will be able to juice themselves up to the gills without sanction and without being required to tell us what they’re taking. The plan is to stage an Olympic-style event in May 2026, fittingly in Las Vegas, where athletes who were once world champions will be able to achieve herculean status, although their achievements and world records, if any are attained, won’t be official.
President of the International Association of Athletics Federations and former British athlete, Lord Sebastian Coe, has called this enterprise “a load of bollocks”. Echoing Coe’s sentiments, other experts have labelled it a “Roman circus”, while the World Anti-Doping Agency has described the Enhanced Games as “dangerous and irresponsible”. While speculations still swirl about the honesty of athletes who claim they are clean, organisers of these games indicate that their participants will be subject to medical surveillance and that performance-enhancing drugs will be used in a safe manner. They even go one step further, asserting that we can learn from what they are doing and use their formulations to live happier, healthier and, perhaps, even longer lives.
When I first entered the anti-ageing arena, the founders of this movement acknowledged Olympians and body builders as the forerunners of the longevity landscape, who were no doubt consuming all forms of preternatural potions way ahead of their time.
Aside from the Enhanced Games as a spectacle, organisers are hoping to enrol athletes in a clinical trial assessing the effect of performance-enhancing drugs on athletic achievement. Together with blood tests and a battery of assessments, including brain, cardiovascular and bone status, they claim that this can provide us with vital information that might even enable us to become healthier, longer-living humans.
As much as we can gauge what they might be taking, her