{"id":688255,"date":"2026-05-22T22:49:25","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T22:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/688255\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T22:49:25","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T22:49:25","slug":"enhanced-games-athletic-competition-not-the-primary-objective-of-las-vegas-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/688255\/","title":{"rendered":"Enhanced Games: Athletic competition not the primary objective of Las Vegas event"},"content":{"rendered":"

May 22, 2026 \u2014 11:55am<\/p>\n

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Twelve months ago, I proposed that the Enhanced Games constitute a circus freak show masquerading as sport. I was wrong, by some measure.<\/p>\n

Not about the freak show bit; but about the masquerade. Because if you fast-forward to now, with the inaugural Enhanced Games dropping its kids off at a purpose-built pool at Resorts World Las Vegas this Sunday night (US time), the mask has slipped clean off.<\/p>\n

\"KristianKristian Gkolomeev (centre) after lowering the 50m freestyle world record. It was not officially registered because he was taking performance-enhancing drugs.Enhanced Games<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t ever about sport. Rather, whatever competition takes place is a Trojan horse. It\u2019s a prime-time, livestreamed advertisement for a drug business. Swimming, athletics and weightlifting, the bait.<\/p>\n

As it\u2019s so often put: follow the money. In March, two months from their marquee event, the Enhanced Games impresarios did a soft launch of a direct-to-consumer telehealth operation flogging the very substances the Games exist to glamourise.<\/p>\n

From the same website that promotes the sporting contest, you can order prescription testosterone, hormone treatments, and a growth-hormone-releasing peptide called sermorelin, plus a copper-peptide skin cream, all on monthly subscriptions.<\/p>\n

Also in March, the organisers announced that, subject to US regulatory approval, it would soon offer eight additional peptides, including CJC-1295, Ipamorelin, Thymosin Alpha-1, TB-4, GHRP-2\/6, Kisspeptin-10, Semax, and Selank.<\/p>\n

\"JamesJames Magnussen of Australia looks on during a practice session before the Enhanced Games at Resorts World Las Vegas.Getty Images<\/p>\n

It\u2019s space-age stuff.<\/p>\n

But just as an aside, that\u2019s the same CJC-1295 presently under consideration by the Victorian Coroner, as to whether to hold an inquest into the death of a person prescribed it and other growth-stimulating substances.<\/p>\n

These \u201cGames\u201d are merely the shopfront to Willy Wonka land. The peptides are the product, not the sport. The sport is a clinical experiment.<\/p>\n

The organisers barely bother to hide it. The data harvested from the sporting business will tell the company how to sell longevity and performance products to ordinary punters.<\/p>\n

\"EnhancedEnhanced Games co-founders Dr Aron D\u2019Souza and Christian Angermayer.Enhanced Games<\/p>\n

Any clean athletes competing alongside the juiced ones aren\u2019t the sport\u2019s last honest people. They\u2019re the control group.<\/p>\n

With this event, if you strip away the lasers and the residency-show production values, what remains is a four-lane pool, a six-lane track, about 40 athletes, however many guests, and a YouTube product. The competitors, too, tell you what this is.<\/p>\n

The field is drawn overwhelmingly from the retired, the banned and the never-quite-good-enough: athletes whose careers, for one reason or another, are behind them, and for whom an appearance fee represents several years\u2019 earnings.<\/p>\n

No reigning Olympic champion in their right mind is going anywhere near it. If the shiver of absurdity ever needed a spine to shimmy up, it has it.<\/p>\n

\"JamesJames Magnussen at the Enhanced Games pool in Las Vegas.Getty Images<\/p>\n

The marquee names narrate their own grim story. The Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev \u201cbroke\u201d the 50-metre freestyle world record in February 2025, except he did it in a private pool, after a fortnight on drugs he declined to identify and perhaps can\u2019t, while wearing a full-body polyurethane suit that swimming outlawed 15 years ago.<\/p>\n

He was handed US$1 million on the spot and promptly retired from Olympic swimming. His \u201crecord\u201d will never be ratified by World Aquatics or anyone who matters because it isn\u2019t a record. It is a marketing figment with a man dutifully attached.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s James Magnussen. A genuine world champion, who came out of retirement to chase the same million-dollar bonus for breaking that same record.<\/p>\n

Instead, loaded up on testosterone and who knows what else, Magnussen ballooned from his fighting weight of 95 kilograms to be three stone heavier; apparently gaining 10 pounds of muscle in as many days and, by his own admission, getting way too big, way too fast. He missed the time.<\/p>\n

\"LasLas Vegas will host a sporting event like none before it.Getty Images<\/p>\n

Magnussen will swim in Vegas. He has, in the bargain, made himself permanently unwelcome at World Aquatics events. He traded a place in the sport that made him for a bet that didn\u2019t pay. That ain\u2019t a triumph of human potential. It\u2019s a cautionary tale.<\/p>\n

Here is what the brochures won\u2019t tell you.<\/p>\n

The peptides being celebrated, sold and injected \u2013 with space-age acronyms \u2013 aren\u2019t guaranteed to be safe. Several have barely been trialled in humans at all.<\/p>\n

The CJC-1295 I spoke about earlier was around in 2010-11 when it was pushed on rugby league and AFL players, including at Essendon and Cronulla.<\/p>\n

No reigning Olympic champion in their right mind is going anywhere near it.<\/p>\n

One of the umpteen defamation cases commenced in NSW around that time, with unbridled ambition by Stephen Dank, concerned him administering CJC-1295 to rugby league players.<\/p>\n

One of the players, Johnny Mannah, sadly died from cancer.<\/p>\n

It can\u2019t be understated that a Supreme Court jury found, to the civil standard, that CJC-1295 was a dangerous and cancer-causing supplement; that Dank acted with reckless indifference by administering those substances, including CJC-1295, to the player in question; that Dank\u2019s conduct was absolutely indefensible.<\/p>\n

\"AmericanAmerican sprinter Fred Kerley is scheduled to compete in the Enhanced Games.REUTERS<\/p>\n

But here we are, a decade-and-a-half later, talking about the same substances and about how it might be a fantastic idea for people to be injecting them.<\/p>\n

No reputable hospital ethics committee would sign off on what the Enhanced Games are doing, which is why the organisers have gone shopping for jurisdictions and arrangements that don\u2019t require one.<\/p>\n

Supraphysiological testosterone carries documented cardiac risk. Sustained elevation of growth factors is implicated in cancer signalling.<\/p>\n

Another perspective\"Fred<\/a><\/p>\n

The honest answer about the lasting endocrine, cardiovascular and reproductive damage is that nobody knows.<\/p>\n

Nobody knows, but the clinical trial that might reveal the answers is the one being conducted this weekend, for our collective edification.<\/p>\n

The \u201cmedically supervised\u201d reassurance offered by the Enhanced Games organisers deserves particular contempt. Supervised by whom? Not by any sporting authority or practitioners disconnected from this show.<\/p>\n

Las Vegas plays host to this because Nevada\u2019s State Athletic Commission regulates boxing and UFC and even face-slapping, but has no remit whatsoever over swimming or athletics.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no independent arbiter of last resort; no public anti-doping oversight; no state body answerable for the medical fitness of the competitors. There\u2019s only the company\u2019s own privately appointed medical panel. The same company is peddling peptides to Joe Public.<\/p>\n

\"AllAll juiced up: James Magnussen is ready to roll at the Enhanced Games.Getty Images<\/p>\n

Nobody with a brain is fooled, however. World Aquatics has written a rule expressly banning anyone who participates in, supports or endorses the Enhanced Games. World Athletics\u2019 president has called the concept exactly what it is.<\/p>\n

The International Weightlifting Federation, the World Anti-Doping Agency, the United States Anti-Doping Agency and the International Olympic Committee have, in an eerily unified way, condemned what\u2019s about to happen as dangerous, irresponsible and immoral.<\/p>\n

A year ago I asked whether you could countenance your 14-year-old being placed on an \u201cenhancement\u201d regime legitimised by all of this. The question has only sharpened.<\/p>\n

Related Article\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

The Enhanced Games aren\u2019t pushing the boundaries of human performance. They\u2019re pushing products: to athletes desperate enough, or retired enough, to be used as lab rats, and to a paying public sold the fantasy that they too can train like an 18-year-old if you can pirouette on the end of a needle.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s dangerous, it\u2019s dishonest, and this weekend it\u2019ll be streamed everywhere dressed up as a celebration of science.<\/p>\n

Someone, eventually, will be gravely hurt by all of this. When that day comes, do not call it a shock. It was the business model all along.<\/p>\n

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\"DarrenDarren Kane<\/a> is a sports columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X<\/a> or email<\/a>.From our partners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"May 22, 2026 \u2014 11:55am Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":688256,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-688255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=688255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/688256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=688255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=688255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=688255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}