What happens when you take the Olympics, strip out all the drug testing, add Donald Trump Jr. as a backer, and set the whole thing in Las Vegas? Apparently, you get the Enhanced Games - and it's happening this weekend.
According to Fast Company, the event is taking place over Memorial Day weekend in Sin City, which is honestly the most fitting venue imaginable for a competition built entirely around doing things that would get you banned everywhere else. Forty-two athletes will compete across swimming, weightlifting, and running - and performance-enhancing drugs, banned in virtually every serious sporting competition on the planet, are not just tolerated here. They're basically the entire premise.
Wait, actual Olympic medalists are doing this?
Yes. Real, credentialed, podium-having Olympic athletes are apparently on board. Which raises roughly one million questions, the most pressing of which is: what does this mean for the records they set here? Are we supposed to be impressed? Horrified? Both?
Both seems correct.
There's something genuinely fascinating - and a little unhinged - about watching elite sport essentially split into two parallel universes. One universe has the traditional Olympics, with its rigorous testing, its scandals, and its perpetual game of cat-and-mouse between regulators and chemists. The other universe is the Enhanced Games, which has apparently decided to just... skip that whole part.
The case for and against losing your mind over this
On one hand, there's an argument - uncomfortable as it is - that making PEDs overt rather than covert creates a more honest playing field. No more whisper networks, no more suspiciously muscled athletes mysteriously passing every test. Everyone's cards are on the table, or rather, on the table next to a very large syringe.
On the other hand, critics will rightly point out the obvious health concerns of essentially incentivizing drug use at elite levels, and the message it sends to younger athletes who might see this as the blueprint for success.
Either way, the Enhanced Games are the sports story you absolutely did not see coming this Memorial Day weekend - and with Olympic-level talent competing under zero-restriction conditions, the performances alone are going to be genuinely hard to look away from. Whatever records get broken here will mean something and nothing simultaneously, which is very Las Vegas, when you think about it.
The steroid Olympics are real. We live here now.
