The Enhanced Games Failed the Sales Pitch It Built Itself On

“Multiple world records.” That was the headline promise from Enhanced Games organizers in the months leading up to Sunday’s inaugural competition on the Las Vegas Strip. By the end of the night, they had one. It came from a Greek sprinter wearing a banned skinsuit. Officially, it will not count. (Full results via the Associated Press.)

The Enhanced Games is not just a sporting event. It is a publicly traded company, backed by Peter Thiel and others, that came to market through a $1.2 billion SPAC merger and plans to sell performance enhancers, supplements and testosterone creams through an online pharmacy under medical supervision. Roughly half its business case rests on the products. The other half rests on convincing people the products work. Sunday was the first big proof point. It went badly.

That problem was visible in the numbers, where a study published days before the competitions shared which substances the 42 competing athletes were taking: 90.5 percent on testosterone esters, 78.6 percent on human growth hormone, 61.9 percent on stimulants and 40.5 percent on EPO. The premise of the night, in marketing terms, was that this combination would deliver results clean training could not.

The track answered the question

The clearest answer came in the men’s 100 meters. Fred Kerley, the 2022 world champion and two-time Olympic medalist, took the marquee race in 9.97 seconds. Kerley says he competed clean. He pocketed $250,000. Behind him, his doped competitors ran 10.05, 10.39, 10.47 and 10.48. The sixth runner did not start.

A 9.97 is not slow, but it is also not fast for an athletics event sold as the future of human performance. Kerley ran 9.81 at the Paris Olympics two years ago. His winning time in Las Vegas would have placed last in that final. Usain Bolt’s world record of 9.58, set in 2009, was never under threat. Bolt’s response to Kerley’s pre-event promise to “destroy” the mark was a single word on social media: “OK.”

The women’s 100 told the same story in worse terms. Tristan Evelyn of Barbados won in 11.25 seconds and reportedly raced clean. Her time was more than three-quarters of a second off Florence Griffith Joyner’s 38-year-old world record. It would not have made the final in Paris. The sixth-place finisher, Shockoria Wallace, ran 13.30, closer to a high-school championship time than a professional one.

Of the four athletes who said they were competing drug-free across the entire event, three of them won.

One record, one banned suit, one asterisk

The one record that fell came at the end. Kristian Gkolomeev swam 50 meters freestyle in 20.81 seconds, 0.07 ahead of Cameron McEvoy’s official 20.88, set in March in a sanctioned event. Enhanced collected its $1 million bonus. Chief executive Maximilian Martin bowed at Gkolomeev’s feet on the pool deck, according to The Guardian’s coverage.

What Martin did not bring up: Gkolomeev was wearing a skinsuit outlawed in elite swimming, and he was doping. The two factors cannot be cleanly pulled apart from the result. McEvoy’s record was set in a textile suit, drug-free, training within the rules of his sport. Whether the same swimmer in the same skinsuit, without the drugs, would have gone faster than 20.88 is the question the night did not answer.

The other swims and lifts did not help the company’s case. Britain’s Ben Proud, an Olympic silver medalist before he signed on, missed the 50-meter butterfly world record by 0.05 seconds and still left with $375,000. Hafthor Bjornsson, the Icelandic strongman, could not move his own deadlift PR of 510 kilograms. Beatriz Pirón of the Dominican Republic missed all three snatch attempts. Boady Santavy of Canada failed his three lifts, was given a surprise fourth attempt by the organizers, and missed that one too.

Enhanced said 14 personal bests were set on the night, all in swimming and weightlifting. None of those PBs were world records.

A marketing claim, not a result

After Gkolomeev’s swim, Martin took the microphone and told the crowd: “We have arrived in mainstream culture. We are here to stay. We have changed the world tonight.” That is a marketing claim, not a description of the event. About 2,500 people watched in the stadium, on invitation only. Around 250,000 watched on YouTube. The audience skewed toward fitness influencers and biotech investors, which is to say, toward the company’s prospective customer base.

Those viewers saw a clean 9.97 win the headline race. They saw a clean 11.25 win the women’s 100. They saw a doped strongman miss three lifts. They saw a Canadian get four attempts at a snatch and miss all four. They saw one swimming time that the company called a world record but that the record books will not.

For a company whose growth depends on selling testosterone and supplements through an online pharmacy, that is an awkward broadcast. A consumer tuning in to see whether banned drugs deliver elite results saw a field of doped sprinters lose to a man on a missed-tests ban who says he is racing drug-free. They saw weightlifters fail at lifts the world record holders make. They saw the actual ceiling of openly doped performance fall below what Bolt did 17 years ago without any of the chemistry on display.

What it means for the next one

Martin has promised the Enhanced Games will return in 2027. “Tonight we did expect a few more world records but this is live sports,” he said. It is hard to picture the second edition working without bigger marks, deeper fields, and a clearer answer to the question every clean coach has been asking since the league was announced: if the drugs are this effective, where are the results? Sport’s existing anti-doping data already suggests the gains from banned substances are smaller and messier than the league’s pitch implies.

For runners, the takeaway from Sunday is straightforward. The fastest times of the night belonged to athletes who said they were not on anything. Bolt’s record is intact. Florence Griffith Joyner’s record is intact. Kerley walked out of Las Vegas $250,000 richer and told reporters his rivals needed to “train a little harder.” He was the one who beat them.

The inaugural Enhanced Games was designed to demonstrate that doping unlocks performance the rest of the world has not seen. The most useful piece of evidence it produced, against its founders’ intentions, was that it does not.