Games that allow athletes to use drugs that boost performance

MELBOURNE – The inaugural Enhanced Games, held in Las Vegas in May, allowed participating athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs. The Games’ founder, Aron D’Souza, claimed before the start: “We’re going to obliterate the world records… it will be a watershed moment in the history of humanity — a new generation of superheroes.”

The Games failed to live up to D’Souza’s hype. Only one participant broke an official world record: the Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, whose time for the 50-meter freestyle beat the mark by less than one-tenth of a second. Even then, it may not have been performance-enhancing drugs that made the difference, because Gkolomeev wore a high-tech swimsuit banned under World Aquatics rules. Three athletes who said they were not taking any performance-enhancing drugs won their events anyway.

One justification for the Enhanced Games was that we would learn how to surpass the biological limits of human performance. Ironically, the main lesson appears to be that the performance-enhancing drugs currently available make less difference than many people believe for the sports featured at the Enhanced Games — athletics, swimming and weightlifting. The Games produced no superheroes, nor any watershed moment for our species.