Las Vegas was always going to host this. Where else do you stage a circus built on the premise that cheating, rebranded as innovation, deserves a standing ovation? The city that turned gambling into glamour, excess into aspiration, and consequences into someone else’s problem. The perfect venue for the inaugural Enhanced Games—or, as most of the world has already christened them, the Steroid Olympics.
Forty-two athletes are competing today, chasing world records and prize money while injecting testosterone, anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, and EPO under what the organisers call “medical supervision”.
Among them are US sprinter Fred Kerley, an Olympic silver and bronze medallist, and British swimmer Ben Proud, a Paris 2024 silver medallist. Add to the list Australian swimming legend James Magnussen, Greek sprinter Kristian Gkolomeev, British sprinter Reece Prescod, and, hold your breath—Hafthor Bjornsson, the Icelandic strongman better known as the ‘Mountain’ from Game of Thrones.
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These are not fringe names. These are people who stood on Olympic podiums, heard national anthems, and wore their countries’ flags with pride. Now they are here, in a custom-built arena at Resorts World, injecting compounds banned everywhere else in the world where sport still means something.
Let’s start with the money, because the money always tells you the truth.
The total prize pool is reportedly $25 million, with athletes able to earn up to $1 million for breaking recognised world records. The event has the deep-pocketed backing of a predictable set, including Donald Trump Jr. and billionaire Peter Thiel, plus Middle Eastern financiers. This is not a grassroots rebellion against sporting bureaucracy. This is a curated product, a rich man’s experiment, dressed up in the language of freedom and science, designed to sell supplements and streaming subscriptions to men who spend too much time on fitness forums.
The idea reportedly came from Australian entrepreneur Aron D’Souza after observing steroid use in gyms across the United States. His insight, if you can call it that, was not that the drug use was wrong. It was that the pretence was unnecessary. Why hide what everyone already knows? Why not just put it on a stage, charge for tickets, and call it progress?
The organisers frame this as honesty. They are not being honest. They are being brazen, which in today’s distorted world is bizarrely worn as a badge of honour.
Sports cardiologist Aaron Baggish put it plainly: “It’s akin to me saying I’m going to make smoking safe by supervising you while you’re smoking.”
The International Olympic Committee, WADA, and anti-doping agencies worldwide have condemned the event. Aquatics GB ended Proud’s national funding the moment he signed up, stating the event has no credibility. Proud competed in Paris for Great Britain. He stood for something. Now he stands in Las Vegas for a million dollars and a world record that will mean nothing outside that particular aquatic centre.
Kerley is the most interesting case. His two-year ban by the Athletics Integrity Unit for whereabouts failures began in August 2025 and runs until August 2027. He cannot compete in any legitimate athletics event. So, he is here, saying he wants to become the fastest human who has ever lived. The record he would break belongs to Usain Bolt, a man who, whatever his own complications, did it clean, did it at the Olympics, did it in front of the world. No asterisk required. If Kerley runs 9.50s today in a chemically enhanced bubble in Nevada, bankrolled by men who have made careers from doing exactly this, it will mean precisely nothing to the history of human sport. He knows this. He is doing it anyway.
That is the story of our age, isn’t it?
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We live in a moment when the performance of transgression has become its own reward. When the rules that once governed conduct—in sport, in politics, in public life—are no longer broken reluctantly but flaunted aggressively, as proof of strength, freedom, authenticity. When truth is not a standard but a negotiating position. When the question is no longer “is this right?” but “can I get away with it, and can I make money doing so?”
The Enhanced Games are not an anomaly. They are a symptom.
We have spent a decade watching institutions erode in real time. The norms that held democratic societies together—respect for process, for science, for inconvenient fact—did not collapse overnight. They were chipped away at, one violation at a time, each one slightly more brazen than the last, each one defended with the same set of words that have long lost their meaning—freedom, transparency, disruption. The words change to suit the context. The logic is always the same. The old rules were made by people who wanted to hold you back. We are showing you the future.
Sport was one of the last places where the old moral grammar still operated with some force. The clean athlete against the cheater. The record that stands because it was earned. The podium that means something. Granted, this was always imperfect. Doping scandals have scarred every major sport, and the anti-doping agencies have been playing catch-up for decades. But the framework existed. The aspiration was real. The cheater was still a cheater. Not any more.
The Enhanced Games do not just allow cheating; they celebrate it. The investors are not folks who stumbled accidentally into a sporting controversy. They are ideological actors making an ideological argument—the old world with its rules, its referees, its moral consensus, is finished. The future belongs to those willing to do what others won’t.
They may be right about the future. They are wrong about whether it is worth celebrating.
Forty-two athletes are competing today in Las Vegas. Some of them will break records. The numbers will be impressive. The bodies will be extraordinary. The needles will go in. The starter’s pistol will shatter the silence. $25 million dollars will shout out loud that integrity is just another word for weakness. And somewhere, a generation of young athletes will watch and learn what sport is worth.
Published on May 24, 2026