Your bag is empty.
As Fred Kerley shot off from the starting line in the Men’s 100-meter final race at Sunday’s Enhanced Games in Las Vegas, a small grey box in the lower-left corner of the screen seemed to loom over him more than any pressure. The box reminded the viewer of the current world record — 9.58 seconds — set by Jamaican Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt in 2009 at the World Athletics Championships in Germany.
The number, more than the finish line 100 meters from where Kerley started, seemed to symbolize the end goal of the race: to beat a record and prove that performance-enhancing drugs, which were allowed as part of the Enhanced Games, could push human physical achievement further than ever before.
Kerley, who — despite performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) being sanctioned at the games — said he is not on PEDs, won the race after running for 9.97 seconds, a number that made him the fastest runner of the evening but also would have placed him last in the same event at the 2024 Paris Olympics just two years ago when he, ironically, placed bronze with a time of 9.81. Though Kerley won $250,000, Bolt’s record remained intact, even though Kerley had previously boasted that the Jamaican runner’s achievement would be “destroyed.”
The headlines that followed were cheeky and derogatory toward the event itself, with a HuffPost headline attached to an Associated Press dispatch announcing the Enhanced Games as off to a “bumpy start.” The lead even included a tongue-in-cheek dig at Kerley, calling his 9.97 second-run “pedestrian.”
Aron D’Souza, an Australian tech entrepreneur, announced the games in 2025 as a challenge to the “hypocrisy” of the World Anti-Doping Agency, the organization that defines what drugs are and aren’t allowed in sporting. Instead, D’Souza says he wants athletes to make decisions about what goes into their bodies. It’s part of D’Souza’s mission to build a “superhumanity” (and to that end, the Enhanced Games website sells a variety of supplements and peptides).
But the results of the games didn’t exactly read as super. As many outlets reported, only one athlete at the controversial games, Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, beat a world record, swimming the 50-meter free in 20.81 seconds and taking home a $1 million bonus for the achievement. However, because the race sanctions and encourages the use of performance-enhancing drugs, which are banned in mainstream sports, Gkolomeev’s record will not be written down in any official history book.
That very few records were broken isn’t surprising to Greg Novacheck, a hormone performance specialist and former body builder. He said it’s important to put these athletes’ achievement at Sunday’s games in perspective, including the fact that, for money, their professional peaks — which often include the Olympic Games — are firmly in the rearview.
“The athletes that we saw were retired Olympians,” Novacheck said, which means they likely aren’t training at the level that would result in world records. “There is zero disrespect because these people are literally at the top 0.01% of the world in performance, but it is not humans at their prime.”
He pointed specifically to Gkolomeev, who retired from competitive swimming in 2025 after representing Greece at the 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024 Summer Olympics. He never placed as a medalist.
“He’s done with the Olympics,” Novacheck said. “That’s the best of the best. He’s still better than anybody else you and I will ever come across. But it’s not necessarily the best that the human race can put out.”
Novacheck said that when he first heard about the Enhanced Games a year ago, he was “super excited” and that he thought it would actually make the games more fair for players. “Essentially you are leveling the playing fields, because the conversations that are happening behind closed doors are now able to actually happen in the doctor’s office,” he said. Despite measures, such as the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), to combat the proliferation of PEDs at the Olympics, experts contend that doping is still an issue at the international sporting event. As of 2020, there have been 442 positive drug tests since the protocol was implemented in 1968, resulting in the loss of 173 medals.
Novacheck’s sentiment is close to one from Ivan Rojas, an Enhanced Games weightlifting coach, who told NBC, “I call this the Transparency Games, because let’s face it, I have been involved in weightlifting for 45 years, and enhancement has always been a part of the game. And now we’re doing it openly and honestly and in a controlled environment.”
The Enhanced Games billed itself as such. Its own rhetoric likened athletes who use PEDs to a marginalized group that needed to be liberated. “Each Olympiad, another cohort of brave athletes sets new world records, only to have their medals revoked, their careers suspended, and their names dragged through the mud. It is time to end this oppressive cycle,” its website read at one time, per the Guardian. The website then said that it “hereby reinstates” the wins of those whose medals were absconded due to doping, including Lance Armstrong.
The Games were also backed by a venture capital fund that included Donald Trump, Jr. and Peter Thiel among its investors, per the BBC. Culturally, the games seem to be a reflection of our current moment of health and wellness-maxxing, a movement that includes optimizing your health and even, as with billionaire Bryan Johnson, beating back death and maximizing longevity.
But, to Novacheck — who has been on testosterone replacement therapy for six years following surgeries that lowered his testosterone — that is a complete misunderstanding of how PEDs work. They are not, for instance, the main ingredient in athletic performance.
“PEDs are the smallest part of the equation,” he says, instead listing the many things — often out of athlete’s hands — that can determine athletic acumen, including genetics, training, nutrition, skill level, hours of sleep, whether you drink alcohol and more.”
Such a genetically deterministic message seems at odds with the message of the Enhanced Games, which is that PEDs can optimize human accomplishment. But Novacheck does believe in some of what the Enhanced Games is selling.
“As sports fans, as performance enthusiasts, health nuts, we want to see what is possible by humans,” he said. Novacheck pointed to the fact that in bodybuilding, there are divisions that test for PEDs and those that do not, and athletes can self-select into whatever category they want. It would allow for athletes to have a choice and for the use of PEDs to be monitored and controlled.
“If we made it an option for people in sports, I think we would end up having a lot more people on the enhanced side,” he said. “The guardrails are off, let’s see what the pinnacle of human performance really is with it.”
British track sprinter Reece Prescod, who came out of retirement to play in the Enhanced Games, told NBC that, if given the option, he estimated that “maybe half” of his peers would take PEDs if they could do it without getting caught.
For now, the games, which have been widely condemned by mainstream sports organizations, exist only as entertainment. WADA’s science director likened them to a “Roman circus.”
“You sacrifice the lives of people purely for entertainment,” Olivier Rabin said, per Reuters. “What’s the value of this?”
Of course, for some, entertainment enough can be a draw.
“If the home-run fence is 400 feet, people don’t want to see a 401-foot home run,” Novacheck said. “They want to see that thing get smashed 550 feet out of the park.”
