The first edition of the highly divisive Enhanced Games, an event that openly permits competitors to use performance-enhancing drugs banned by every major international sports governing body, wrapped up in Las Vegas on Sunday with just one unofficial world record broken, falling far short of organizers’ bold predictions of multiple record-breaking performances.
Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev delivered the sole standout result of the night, clocking 20.81 seconds in the men’s 50-meter freestyle to beat the existing official world mark of 20.88 seconds set by Australia’s Cameron McEvoy earlier this year. Competing in a synthetic full-body supersuit banned from Olympic and other mainstream sporting events for decades, Gkolomeev’s achievement will never be formally recognized by global athletics regulators, but it earned him a $1 million bonus from event organizers. “It was a great race… I got it,” Gkolomeev said after the win. “I’m going to continue. Maybe next year I’ll break it again.”
Organizers had built hype around the event by promising that the open use of sophisticated doping regimens would lead to dozens of new records across swimming, sprinting, and weightlifting. Gkolomeev’s last-minute win spared the event from a total record drought, though most athletes came within fractions of a second or kilograms of existing marks without surpassing them. Earlier in the competition, Gkolomeev had also come close to breaking Pan Zhanle’s 100m freestyle world record of 46.40 seconds, finishing with a time of 46.60 and saying he was frustrated to fall just short.
Other high-profile competitors also narrowly missed record targets. Britain’s Ben Proud, a 2024 Paris Olympics silver medallist who admitted to using multiple performance-enhancing substances, won the men’s 50m butterfly in 22.32 seconds — just 0.05 seconds off the world record. “We all know what we came for. And that’s world records. And so to be that agonizingly close, it’s frustrating,” Proud said.
In a surprising turn of events that defied the event’s core premise, several clean, unenhanced athletes claimed event titles against doped competitors. American swimmer Hunter Armstrong took gold in the opening swimming event, the men’s 50m backstroke, with a time of 24.21 seconds to beat two rivals who used performance-enhancing drugs. Former 100m world champion Fred Kerley, currently serving a suspension for missed drug tests, also won the men’s 100m sprint clean with a time of 9.97 seconds, joking of his doped rivals: “Man, they got to do better than that. They need to train a little harder. Get on that shit a little bit more.” Barbados sprinter Tristan Evelyn also won the women’s 100m sprint clean, finishing in 11.25 seconds. US Olympic medallist Cody Miller, another clean competitor, rolled back the years to win the men’s 50m breaststroke, cutting seven-tenths of a second off his own personal best at age 34, though he did not come close to challenging Adam Peaty’s world record.
The pattern of near-misses extended to the weightlifting platform, where multiple athletes failed to hit the record lifts they had achieved in training. Dominican Republic weightlifter Beatriz Piron, who reportedly hit a world record lift in training, narrowly failed to complete a 100kg snatch to open the competition. Canadian Boady Santavy and American Wesley Kitts also fell short of their target record snatch lifts of 183kg and 197kg respectively, even after organizers bent competition rules to grant each an extra fourth attempt. “I hit a lot of PRs in training. Not 197 yet… Man, if I had about four more weeks (in training) I’d say I’d have had a good shot at it,” Kitts said. Even Hafthor Bjornsson, the former World’s Strongest Man best known for playing The Mountain on *Game of Thrones*, failed to break his own existing 510kg deadlift world record.
Backed by high-profile investors including billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel and former U.S. President Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., the Enhanced Games was held at a custom-built temporary arena on the parking lot of a Las Vegas casino, with large cash prizes — up to $1 million for a world record and $250,000 for an event win — luring a field that included multiple current and former Olympic medallists.
The event has faced widespread condemnation from global sports governing bodies, who refuse to recognize any records set at the competition and have called it a dangerous experiment that normalizes harmful doping. Public health experts have also raised urgent alarms, warning that the open use of banned substances such as testosterone and anabolic steroids carries major long-term risks, including life-shortening heart, liver, and kidney damage, with little research available on the full health impacts of the regimens athletes are using. Enhanced Games officials have pushed back against these criticisms, noting that all substances used by athletes are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the event’s parent company already sells many of these substances directly to the general public.