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≡ ENHANCED GAMES ≡
A carefully-scripted and attractively-produced 32-minute show at Resorts World Las Vegas on Wednesday introduced the Enhanced Games, to be staged a year from now, at that site.
Founder Aron D’Souza (AUS) called his project “disruption by design” and introduced the project:
“When my colleagues and I started out, no one – not one institution, not one organization – had committed to normalizing and celebrating performance medicine. So I made it my cause. …
“In just over a year, we helped change the global conversation, not just about sport, but about health, and science and what it means to be human. Because this isn’t just a sporting event. We’re not just organizing competition. We are in the business of unlocking human potential.
“The idea for the Enhanced Games came to life in 2022, during a moment of reflection where I found myself asking why athletes are still bounded by outdated rules that ignored everything that we know about science. I imagined a new kind of competition, one where science and sport and society could evolve together, where we stop apologizing for progress and started to embrace it.
“We built the Enhanced Games, a platform that celebrates human innovation, rewards excellence and explored enhancements openly, responsibly and ethnically.”
Saying that in a half-century, “biology was never the ceiling, it was only just the starting line,” D’Souza enthused that the project will be “the vanguard of super-humanity.”
He talked about a “performance enhancement protocol,” a framework “to make sure all athletes are enhanced ethnically, safely and above all, with great safety and effectiveness,” via oversight from separate medical and scientific commissions. The medical commission will monitor athlete status and clearing those who will be allowed to compete. The scientific commission was described as making sure “that everything we do is grounded in evidence that meets the highest standards of scientific integrity.” D’Souza added:
“Not only are they working behind the scenes, they are leading a global conversation about what enhancement can be, both in sport and in life.”
And he noted that there is an already-defined commercial element to the project:
“We’re not exclusively in the business of delivering sport. We’re also in the business of science, and developing and marketing new drug compounds. I want to take a moment to also announce the launch of the Enhanced Performance Products brand. This summer, we’re bringing Enhanced to the American public with our new consumer products.
“This will be the embodiment of Enhanced’s core mission: to inspire humanity with the belief that we can all overcome our limits and become super-human, safely, with the right medical supervision.”
The event details from the presentation:
● The Enhanced Games will be held at Resorts World in Las Vegas, beginning on 21 May – a year from the announcement – and continuing over the Memorial Day Weekend.
● Three sports will be featured: track & field, swimming and weightlifting, with about 100 athletes total, in small venues, such as a four-lane pool and six-lane track.
● Participants, who do not need to take performance-enhancing drugs to compete, will be paid appearance fees, prize money and record bonuses, if achieved.
● The list of events was not provided, but will include the 50 m Freestyle in the pool and 100 m dash on the track. Each will have a $500,000 prize purse, with $250,000 for the winner; world-record bonuses will pay $250,000 except for the 50 m Free swim and 100 m dash, which will have $1 million payouts for records. There was no indication if events will be staged for men and women.
The second half of the show concentrated on snippets from a video which showed four-time Greek Olympic swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, now 31, the 2019 Worlds men’s 50 m Freestyle silver medalist, in 50 m Freestyle time trials. He was shown swimming the 50 Free in a now-outlawed “super suit” in 20.89, slightly faster than the world record of 20.91 by Brazil’s Cesar Cielo from 2009, and then in another time trial with currently-allowed suits, in 21.03, a hundredth faster than American Caeleb Dressel’s 21.04 from 2019, the fastest in a currently-legal suit. Gkolomeev’s best during his international career was 21.44 from the 2018 European Championships, currently no. 22 on the all-time list, so his “enhancements” produced a 1.9% improvement in a current-use suit.
An All-American at Alabama from 2014-16, Gkolomeev was shown being coached by former Austrian star Brett Hawke (AUS), a two-time Worlds relay silver medalist and later the coach at Auburn from 2009-18.
Gkolomeev came on stage to explain that the first race (20.89) was held after three months of training (so likely in March this year), but with only two weeks of “enhancements.” The 21.03 came after putting on an additional 10 pounds – from 203 to 213 lbs. – from a “full, two-month cycle” of enhancements.
Gkolomeev is the second athlete to publicly affiliate with the Enhanced Games. Retired Australian star James Magnussen, the two-time men’s 100 m Free World Champion in 2011 and 2013, has said he will come back to swim – aided by doping – to try and win $1 million for a world record. He last swam competitively in 2018.
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Observed: While D’Souza trumpeted the enormity of the event, the Enhanced Games is starting small, with 100 athletes in three sports, each with easily-identified world records and deep statistical data available.
With a full year to go, there is also time for what will be relentless criticism of this project from the World Anti-Doping Agency, the International Olympic Committee, all three of the International Federations whose sports will be included, national anti-doping agencies and medical and scientific groups who will voice their own doubts about the engineering of “super humans.”
The event itself, its athletic veracity and the ethics of human engineering will come under a microscope, but D’Souza and his team have planted their flag in Las Vegas and now will be expected to deliver an event in which anything short of a world record in every event will be a disappointment.
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