Enhanced Games showed you can't turn semi-retired athletes into world-record contenders

Three days after the inaugural Enhanced Games, the heavily- hyped multi-sport competition where steroid use was allowed, encouraged and supervised, the event and its parent company were still running up numbers, even if the stats weren’t as gaudy as the pre-games publicity promised.

There was that one “world record*” in the 50-metre freestyle, set by Kristian Gkolomeev in the night’s final race. We need scare quotes and an asterisk because he, like most swimmers that night, benefited from two levels of enhancement — a PED protocol and a long-banned, super-buoyant swimsuit.

We also had three big wins by drug-free athletes. Hunter Armstrong won the 50m backstroke, while Fred Kerley and Tristan Evelyn, both loudly and proudly non-enhanced, took the 100m sprints.

Then there’s the stock price for the Enhanced Group, the company behind both the sports event and its first cousin, a telehealth platform that sells a variety of steroids, longevity potions and FDA-approved peptides to everyday people. A share would cost you $10 US on May 8, when the Enhanced Group had its IPO, but by Wednesday afternoon that price had dipped below $2.50 before closing at $2.77.

Sprinter Aaron Brown reacts to the Enhanced Games' debut

Around the same time, the Enhanced Games Instagram feed added some new numbers to the discussion.

Any male sprinter who surpasses Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second world record at the 2027 Enhanced Games will earn $10 million, a tenfold increase over this year’s proposed world-record bonus. Kerley hopped into the comments immediately, and signalled he’s willing to trade his natural athlete status for a chance at eight figures.

“Enhance me now,” he wrote.

That hypothetical payout is less an incentive than a reflection of the