The Enhanced Games are dangerous. They’re not a celebration of science

Twelve months ago, I proposed that the Enhanced Games constitute a circus freak show masquerading as sport. I was wrong, by some measure.

Not about the freak show bit; but about the masquerade. Because if you fast-forward to now, with the inaugural Enhanced Games dropping its kids off at a purpose-built pool at Resorts World Las Vegas this Sunday night (US time), the mask has slipped clean off.

It wasn’t ever about sport. Rather, whatever competition takes place is a Trojan horse. It’s a prime-time, livestreamed advertisement for a drug business. Swimming, athletics and weightlifting, the bait.

As it’s so often put: follow the money. In March, two months from their marquee event, the Enhanced Games impresarios did a soft launch of a direct-to-consumer telehealth operation flogging the very substances the Games exist to glamourise.

From the same website that promotes the sporting contest, you can order prescription testosterone, hormone treatments, and a growth-hormone-releasing peptide called sermorelin, plus a copper-peptide skin cream, all on monthly subscriptions.

Also in March, the organisers announced that, subject to US regulatory approval, it would soon offer
eight additional peptides, including CJC-1295, Ipamorelin, Thymosin Alpha-1, TB-4, GHRP-2/6, Kisspeptin-10, Semax, and Selank.

It’s space-age stuff.

But just as an aside, that’s the same CJC-1295 presently under consideration by the Victorian Coroner, as to whether to hold an inquest into the death of a person prescribed it and other growth-stimulating substances.

These “Games” are merely the shopfront to Willy Wonka land. The peptides are the product, not the sport. The sport is a clinical experiment.

The organisers barely bother to hide it. The data harvested from the sporting business will tell the company how to sell longevity and performance products to ordinary punters.

Any clean athletes competing alongside the juiced ones aren’t the sport’s last honest people. They’re the control group.

With this event, if you strip away the lasers and the residency-show production values, what remains is a four-lane pool, a six-lane track, about 40 athletes, however many guests, and a YouTube product. The competitors, too, tell you what this is.

The field is drawn overwhelmingly from the retired, the banned and the never-quite-good-enough: athletes whose careers, for one reason or another, are behind them, and for whom an appearance fee represents several years’ earnings.

No reigning Olympic champion in their right mind is going anywhere near it. If the shiver of absurdity ever needed a spine to shimmy up, it has it.

The marquee names narrate their own grim story. The Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev “broke” the 50-metre freestyle world record in February 2025, except he did it in a private pool, after a fortnight on drugs he declined to identify and perhaps can’t, while wearing a full-body polyurethane suit that swimming outlawed 15 years ago.

He was handed US$1 million on the spot and promptly retired from Olympic swimming. His “record”
will never be ratified by World Aquatics or anyone who matters because it isn’t a record. It is a marketing figment with a man dutifully attached.

And then there’s James Magnussen. A genuine world champion, who came out of retirement to chase the same million-dollar bonus for breaking that same record.

Instead, loaded up on testosterone and who knows what else, Magnussen ballooned from his fighting weight of 95 kilograms to be three stone heavier; apparently gaining 10 pounds of muscle in as many days and, by his own admission, getting way too big, way too fast. He missed the time.

Magnussen will swim in Vegas. He has, in the bargain, made himself permanently unwelcome at World Aquatics events. He traded a place in the sport that made him for a bet that didn’t pay. That ain’t a triumph of human potential. It’s a cautionary tale.

Here is what the brochures won’t tell you.

The peptides being celebrated, sold and injected – with space-age acronyms – aren’t guaranteed to be safe. Several have barely been trialled in humans at all.

The CJC-1295 I spoke about earlier was around in 2010-11 when it was pushed on rugby league and AFL players, including at Essendon and Cronulla.

No reigning Olympic champion in their right mind is going anywhere near it.

One of the umpteen defamation cases commenced in NSW around that time, with unbridled ambition by Stephen Dank, concerned him administering CJC-1295 to rugby league players.

One of the players, Johnny Mannah, sadly died from cancer.

It can’t be understated that a Supreme Court jury found, to the civil standard, that CJC-1295 was a dangerous and cancer-causing supplement; that Dank acted with reckless indifference by administering those substances, including CJC-1295, to the player in question; and Dank’s
conduct was absolutely indefensible, and the CJC-1295 may have accelerated Mannah’s death from cancer.

It can’t be understated that a Supreme Court jury found, to the civil standard, that CJC-1295 was a dangerous and cancer-causing supplement; that Dank acted with reckless indifference by administering those substances, including CJC-1295, to the player in question; and Dank’s
conduct was absolutely indefensible.

But here we are, a decade-and-a-half later, talking about the same substances and about how it might be a fantastic idea for people to be injecting them.

No reputable hospital ethics committee would sign off on what the Enhanced Games are doing, which is why the organisers have gone shopping for jurisdictions and arrangements that don’t require one.

Supraphysiological testosterone carries documented cardiac risk. Sustained elevation of growth factors is implicated in cancer signalling.

The honest answer about the lasting endocrine, cardiovascular and reproductive damage is that nobody knows.

Nobody knows, but the clinical trial that might reveal the answers is the one being conducted this weekend, for our collective edification.

The “medically supervised” reassurance offered by the Enhanced Games organisers deserves particular contempt. Supervised by whom? Not by any sporting authority or practitioners disconnected from this show.

Las Vegas plays host to this because Nevada’s State Athletic Commission regulates boxing and UFC and even face-slapping, but has no remit whatsoever over swimming or athletics.

There’s no independent arbiter of last resort; no public anti-doping oversight; no state body answerable for the medical fitness of the competitors. There’s only the company’s own privately
appointed medical panel. The same company is peddling peptides to Joe Public.

Nobody with a brain is fooled, however. World Aquatics has written a rule expressly banning anyone who participates in, supports or endorses the Enhanced Games. World Athletics’ president has called the concept exactly what it is.

The International Weightlifting Federation, the World Anti-Doping Agency, the United States Anti-
Doping Agency and the International Olympic Committee have, in an eerily unified way, condemned
what’s about to happen as dangerous, irresponsible and immoral.

A year ago I asked whether you could countenance your 14-year-old being placed on an “enhancement” regime legitimised by all of this. The question has only sharpened.

The Enhanced Games aren’t pushing the boundaries of human performance. They’re pushing products: to athletes desperate enough, or retired enough, to be used as lab rats, and to a paying public sold the fantasy that they too can train like an 18-year-old if you can pirouette on the end of a needle.

It’s dangerous, it’s dishonest, and this weekend it’ll be streamed everywhere dressed up as a celebration of science.

Someone, eventually, will be gravely hurt by all of this. When that day comes, do not call it a shock. It was the business model all along.