The Enhanced Games will pay $10 million to any athlete who breaks Usain Bolt’s 100-meter world record at next year’s competition, chief executive Maximilian Martin announced Wednesday in a Substack letter to shareholders. The new figure is ten times the bonus that was available at the inaugural event in Las Vegas, where no sprinter ran faster than 9.97 seconds.
The announcement landed one day after the parent company’s stock, listed on the NYSE as ENHA, lost 43 percent of its value in a single trading session. Most of Martin’s letter to shareholders read as a defense of the inaugural broadcast. The sprinting section was the closest thing to a concession.
“And to our sprinting fans: we hear you,” Martin wrote. “Our inaugural sprinting events were not to the standard we aspire to and we know why. Top sprinters are among the highest-paid athletes in athletics. The opportunity cost of joining Enhanced has been higher for them than for athletes in other sports. We need to change that equation.”
The reveal came at the end of the paragraph. “The prize for breaking Usain Bolt’s men’s 100m world record at the 2027 Enhanced Games will be increased to $10 million. Our DMs are open.”
The math problem the bonus does not fix
No athlete has come within a tenth of Bolt’s 9.58 since he set the mark in 2009. Noah Lyles, the current Olympic 100-meter champion, has a personal best of 9.79. Fred Kerley, the 2022 world champion and Paris bronze medalist, won the Enhanced Games 100 in 9.97 seconds, a time that would have placed last in the Paris Olympic final two years ago. The next finisher behind him ran 10.05. Kerley said he raced drug-free.
A $10 million bonus for breaking 9.58 only matters if Enhanced can sign an athlete who can run 9.57 or faster. The league’s first attempt at the record produced a field whose legal personal bests sit in the 9.79 to 9.85 range. Even with the chemistry and the bonus, the math leaves Bolt’s mark intact.
Martin acknowledged the baseline problem in the letter. He cited three reasons for the absence of records in Las Vegas. Athletes were on enhancement protocols for nine weeks instead of the designed 20 weeks, which he attributed to regulatory and procurement delays. Two of his strongest world-record contenders, the weightlifters Arley Mendez and Beatriz Piron, were injured in competition after breaking marks in training. And he conceded that “many of the very best athletes in the world have not joined us yet, largely because of fear of repercussions from the traditional sports establishment.”
A move into endurance running
For runners reading the letter, the more interesting forward-looking note came a few paragraphs later. Martin said the company plans to expand “into new sports” and named endurance running as “equally compelling territory” alongside its existing track, swimming and weightlifting events. He did not commit to specific distances, dates or athletes.
The letter also promised smaller events between now and the 2027 Games, and defended Sunday’s commercial performance with the same figures the company released on Tuesday morning: more than $32 million in sponsorship deals against a $31 million sports revenue guidance for the full year, and a North American Roku distribution into more than 100 million homes. Martin said 21 personal bests were set by 13 athletes on the night, including a 13-year-old swimming PB beaten by 35-year-old Megan Romano.
0 Comments