Three days after the inaugural Enhanced Games, the heavily- hyped multi-sport competition where steroid use was allowed, encouraged and supervised, the event and its parent company were still running up numbers, even if the stats weren’t as gaudy as the pre-games publicity promised.
There was that one “world record*” in the 50-metre freestyle, set by Kristian Gkolomeev in the night’s final race. We need scare quotes and an asterisk because he, like most swimmers that night, benefited from two levels of enhancement — a PED protocol and a long-banned, super-buoyant swimsuit.
We also had three big wins by drug-free athletes. Hunter Armstrong won the 50m backstroke, while Fred Kerley and Tristan Evelyn, both loudly and proudly non-enhanced, took the 100m sprints.
Then there’s the stock price for the Enhanced Group, the company behind both the sports event and its first cousin, a telehealth platform that sells a variety of steroids, longevity potions and FDA-approved peptides to everyday people. A share would cost you $10 US on May 8, when the Enhanced Group had its IPO, but by Wednesday afternoon that price had dipped below $2.50 before closing at $2.77.
Host of CBC Sports’ Trackside, and professional sprinter gives his thoughts on the upstart event that allows athletes to use performing enhancing drugs.
Around the same time, the Enhanced Games Instagram feed added some new numbers to the discussion.
Any male sprinter who surpasses Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second world record at the 2027 Enhanced Games will earn $10 million, a tenfold increase over this year’s proposed world-record bonus. Kerley hopped into the comments immediately, and signalled he’s willing to trade his natural athlete status for a chance at eight figures.
“Enhance me now,” he wrote.
That hypothetical payout is less an incentive than a reflection of the odds against any sprinter, drugged or natural, running faster than Peak Bolt did in 2009. “Longshot” doesn’t capture it. Organizers could offer $10 million, $100 million, or $1 billion, and it won’t matter. Kerley ran 9.97 on Sunday, a mark that puts him almost five metres behind Bolt. If PEDs can’t close that gap, more prize money won’t either.
In the two-year lead-up to their debut event, Enhanced Games braintrust peddled the idea that safe, supervised use of steroids and other drugs could push human performance to new places. They signed mostly semi-retired swimmers, sprinters and weightlifters, then teased the possibility that those athletes would shatter world records.
Sunday’s soiree provided a reality check, with drug-enhanced athletes making big money for performances that wouldn’t cause a ripple in international competition. PEDs can help you level up, but can’t take an out-of-action sprinter to the brink of a world record in two months. The event doubled as an infomercial for the telehealth portal, but the results also advertised the Enhanced Games as a destination for top-tier, drug-free athletes seeking an easy payday against past-their-prime rivals, who’ll find that PEDs can’t turn the clock all the way back.
Kerley is a case in point. His $250,000 windfall was more than four times what he’d make if he’d won the Diamond League final, even though most of the rest of the field would have struggled against elite high schoolers. He defeated last-place finisher Michael Bryan by .90 seconds, which is an eternity in sprinting. It’s the equivalent of lapping somebody twice in the 10,000m.
WATCH | CBC Sports reacts to Fred Kerley’s Enhanced Games commitment:
Even more perspective: Bryan’s 10.87 would have placed him fourth at the Toronto Catholic school board senior boys final. Granted, those results didn’t include a wind reading, so we’re not sure those teenagers didn’t have a springtime gale behind them. But we know Bryan had a full training camp, with salary paid and expenses covered, along with a personalized PED regimen. Bryan also pocketed $20,000 for that run, while the Catholic school sprinters got high-fives and a chance to compete at Metro regionals.
Point is, when the payouts and performances are this misaligned, something is bound to change.
On the women’s side, Tristan Evelyn brought home $250,000 to win the 100m in 11.25 seconds. If that result were official, it would tie her for number 103 in the world so far this year. The list of sprinters ahead of her includes a Canadian record holder (Audrey Leduc), a pair of high schoolers (Mia and Mariah Maxwell), and a 400m specialist (Talitha Diggs). All significantly faster than anybody at the Enhanced Games, none of them collecting six-figure prizes for a single race.
None of this is a slight to Evelyn, a native of Barbados who holds national records at 60, 100 and 200 metres.
She believed in herself against a field full of PED users. She followed a set of rules that didn’t constrain her competitors and triumphed anyway. And most importantly, when the opportunity to compete arose, she seized it. That $250,000 payout marks a triumph of her footspeed, her focus, and her entrepreneurial spirit.
But if you don’t think a few of the 102 people ahead of Evelyn on the 100m world list are plotting ways to line up at next year’s Enhanced Games, you’re as naive as the people who thought Florence Griffith Joyner’s world record was under threat just because some runners had completed a PED cycle.
But just so we’re clear, because Sunday’s results muddied the message:
Performance-enhancing drugs work.
If the Enhanced Games didn’t leave you with that conclusion, blame their aggressive, truth-stretching marketing. No male sprinter was going to run 9.49 seconds, or set a world lead for 2026, much less approach Bolt’s all-time record. Anywhere near 10-flat for men and 11-flat for women would constitute a breakthrough for whoever did it. Instead, we had a sizzle reel early in the broadcast telling us that Flo-Jo’s record was in play, and an on-air analyst hyping Bolt’s record even as the men settled into the starting blocks.
When you overpromise that thoroughly, you can only under-deliver.
The silver lining for people behind the Enhanced Games is that their potential customers aren’t out to set world records. They don’t know their 100m dash time, or how to perform a clean and jerk.
They just know they haven’t seen their abs in years. Maybe never seen them at all. Telehealth portal PEDs can help with that.
We all saw those viral images of Enhanced Games swimmer James Magnussen, muscles bulging through his wetsuit in pictures taken last year. We saw Canadian weightlifter Boady Santavy trim bodyfat while adding nearly seven pounds of muscle in his first five weeks on PEDs. And even Bryan, the last-place 100m runner, posted photos of his six-pack abs on Instagram.
Performance aside, he looked the part.
That’s all most of us need to do.
Source link
