The inaugural Enhanced Games took place to much fanfare in Las Vegas on May 24 2026. An event that has attracted much controversy, the games are designed to showcase the prowess of high-profile athletes who openly take legal performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) to maximise their sporting potential.
Masterminded by sports media and wellness company Enhanced Group Inc., the games offered an unprecedented US$25 million (£18.6 million) in prize money across track, swimming and weightlifting disciplines.
With its reputation for glitz and excess, Las Vegas felt like an apt backdrop for the event which offered an arena for bio-hacking billionaires, venture capitalists and transhumanists (who seek to optimise human performance and lifespan) to fully testrun their disruptor vision of sport.
Like the surrounding casino floors, this was a highly orchestrated and tightly controlled environment, where every aspect was designed and curated with one objective: to grab attention.
Rather than a pure sporting competition, the event could more accurately be described as an elaborate “sportainment” marketing campaign. It seemed designed to generate brand awareness and funnel people towards the Enhanced website to sell its telehealth platform and range of performance and longevity products.
No expense was spared. This invitation-only event was primarily populated with content creators, social media influencers and potential investors. Though we requested permission to attend and paid our own way, many present told us they had been provided with all-expenses-paid trips. Consequently the crowd felt manufactured and at times the atmosphere felt flat compared to other big sporting events.
Complimentary food, drink and branded products were all available in exchange for posts pushing the brand to hundreds of millions of followers across health, wellbeing and lifestyle coaching channels.
Success or failure?
In the run-up to the games, Enhanced Group Inc. CEO Maximilian Martin predicted that “multiple world records would be broken” and that no one would “explode” or have a heart attack. We did witness some extremely impressive performances (by both enhanced and non-enhanced athletes) and saw many set personal bests.
Some performances did not live up to expectations, but the uncertainty of the outcome is what makes sport so exciting. Trying to break world records remains a high-risk, high-reward strategy for Enhanced. The event proved that breaking records is incredibly difficult, even with PEDs and technological enhancements such as swimming supersuits, both banned in traditional sport.
Only one world record was “broken”, by Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, who swam faster than the men’s 50m freestyle world record. But his time will not be recognised officially.
There were a few teething troubles which saw technical glitches on the big screens, the live YouTube stream being lost for more than ten minutes, and some editing issues which all felt a bit amateur and caused frustration.
As a result, the mainstream media generally described the event as a flop. In the immediate aftermath of the games, the Enhanced Group Inc. share price dropped by 70%, its market value tumbling to $550 million in 24 hours.
In his closing ceremony speech, Martin declared that the event had “changed the world”. In his post-games letter to shareholders, he suggested that viewership data had far exceeded internal expectations.
According to data published in the Financial Times, the event generated 4,000 articles, reaching 16.7 billion unique visitors with broadcast news reaching an estimated 932 million people. Crucially, a multi-platform strategy was the primary marketing plan. Enhanced claimed that more than one billion people engaged with content across YouTube, Rumble, Zoop, Twitch, X and Kick in the week preceding the games.
AP / Alamy
Beyond the headlines and hype, it’s easy to forget the human beings at the centre of all this. Some might suggest that Enhanced is pushing these athletes to achieve greatness, despite many being past their sporting prime.
Taking PEDs in moderation might produce performances and health biomarkers that are desirable in the short term, but little is yet known of the long-term effects of “stacking” – mixing a cocktail of drugs.
Despite this, the athletes we spoke to were grateful for the opportunity to extend their careers, felt happier and better supported than ever before, and wanted to remain involved with Enhanced.
The company knows that attention is currency and, therefore, future revenue. Looking ahead to next year, Enhanced is already raising the stakes by offering a $10 million bonus to any male athlete who can beat Usain Bolt’s 100m world record.
Stock value dive aside, we believe Enhanced achieved its primary goal in that people are talking about these games. The question remains, though, where they go from here. What will the Enhanced Games look like if they still exist in 20 years’ time? Could they, for example, push the boundaries of human genome therapy to genetically modify athletes to become superhuman?
And at what point does this spectacle stop being real human endeavour? The ultimate goal for a public company that needs to deliver a return on shareholder investment is to capitalise on this attention and make money. But in this fast-paced world, attention moves on quickly and when the hype is over, Enhanced may find that audiences have done the same.
