The Enhanced Games Has A Date, A Host City and a Drug-Fuelled World Record

The Enhanced Games—a kind of Olympics for athletes who are doping—today announced the date and venue for its first competition: May 21-24, 2026, at Resorts World Las Vegas.

Athletes competing in the event will be allowed to take performance-enhancing drugs like testosterone and anabolic steroids that are usually banned from elite competition, provided they are legal, prescribed by a doctor, and taken at safe levels.

The inaugural Enhanced Games will have three main sports: swimming (50m and 100m freestyle, and 50m and 100m butterfly), track (100m sprint, 110m/100m hurdles, and 60m dash), and weightlifting (snatch, clean and jerk). Rather than splitting men and women into different categories, athletes will be categorized based on their chromosomes: There will be an XX and an XY category for each event.

There will be up to $500,000 in prize money on offer for each event, with $250,000 for the winner, and a bonus of $1,000,000 for anyone who breaks the 100m sprint of the 50m freestyle world record. (Other world record breakers will get a bonus of $250,000.) At a glitzy press conference announcing the details of the first event, organizers also revealed that the Games had helped an “enhanced athlete” break two long-standing 50m freestyle world records in swimming.

Kristian Gkolomeev, a 31-year-old Greek-Bulgarian swimmer who came fifth in the 50m freestyle at the Olympic Games in Paris, started his enhancement program in early February. Toward the end of that month, at a pool in Greensboro, North Carolina, he broke César Cielo’s 50-meter freestyle world record of 20.91 seconds, which had stood for 16 years. Gkolomeev swam 0.02 seconds faster. In April, he broke Caeleb Dressel’s 2019 so-called textile world record—done without wearing a speed suit—of 21.04 seconds. He swam 0.01 seconds faster.

Courtesy of Paradigm