Opinion | September 18, 2025
Yesterday, Fred Kerley became the face of the Enhanced Games overnight as the first high-profile track athlete to announce his participation in the event. I’ve written about Kerley in the past, and it seems like every time I do, it’s about something negative.
I’m critical of other decisions he’s made, but not particularly critical of his decision to join the games after already being provisionally suspended from World Athletics events.
This article isn’t really about Kerley. It’s about the Enhanced Games and the organizers who seem to have no qualms releasing a poison into society to fill their pockets and to champion themselves as heroes.
If you’re not familiar with the Enhanced Games, its inaugural event will take place next May in Las Vegas, consisting of swimming, athletics, and weightlifting under the premise that athletes can use performance enhancing drugs without being subjected to drug tests.
The president of World Athletics, Sebastian Coe, has criticized the Enhanced Game, calling it “bullocks” in one Guardian article.
As the president of a major sporting organization, Coe has to be somewhat subdued in his response to the games. But I’m under no such restriction and can freely say that the games, founded by Aron D’Souza, is a moronic event put on by a group of scumbags with a near-erotic fixation on turning a profit at the expense of the fundamental spirit of sport.
Any idea that they’re “advancing human potential” is a thinly guised way of saying “we like money more than we like being a net good to society.”
Not surprisingly, they’ve recently released a pharmaceutical line to push their testosterone replacement therapy to consumers.
A quick look at some of the early investors only adds more evidence that the event only serves to make a handful of rich tycoons who have never taken an interest in sport before even richer.
Nobody Will Sniff the World Record
I’m sure the Enhanced Games will be a flop, nothing more than the get-out-of-town carnival model of a group of investors capitalizing on a line of pharmaceuticals and disappearing into the night before having the face the first of angry consumers.
In the athletics portion of the Enhanced Games, the official website lists the 100-meter and 100/110-meter hurdles as the events. As of now, Kerley is the only confirmed track athlete who has competed at a high level, previously winning the Olympic silver medal and World Championship gold medal in the 100-meter.
The main audience the event seems to be trying to appeal to is one uneducated in terms of the nuances of a sport like athletics—effectively the same audience as those investing in it.
If you believe the hype behind the event, you might expect somebody to smash Usain Bolt’s 100-meter record. But this is so laughable that it doesn’t really require any explanation of why it won’t happen.
If you follow athletics at all, I’m sure you already understand why.
Not “All” Elite Athletes are Doping
One comment from the popular Jumpers World account on Instagram read, “If [Kerley] doesn’t break the world record with this, to the naked eye, he is going to put a huge asterisk on every 100m sprinter ever.”
I’ll use this as a proxy to attach my counterargument to because it’s an argument that I’ve consistently seen online without much basis.
The idea that “all” top athletes are on PEDs is a pervasive one, but not one that we can state with any degree of confidence.
Anecdotally, I know athletes personally who have gone on to compete at the Olympic or World Champion level. Although I don’t follow them around 24 hours a day, I would be willing to bet my life savings that, for at least some of these athletes, their urine is cleaner than a hypochondriac’s kitchen counters.
It’s very difficult to figure out the true prevalence of doping, but the highest quality studies we have available suggest that the actual prevalence may be closer to 10% among elite athletes, with the caveat that most studies rely on anonymous self-reporting.
Small Talent Pool
To equate “no world record at the Enhanced Games” with “all elite athletes are on PEDs” would require making several serious jumps in logic.
For starters, we would require an equal talent pool among athletes competing in the Enhanced Games and World Athletics events to make a fair comparison, and we would need years for the full effect of ergonomic drugs to become apparent in performance.
Kerley is coming off a season where he ran 9.98 seconds (9.87 seconds windy) in a year where he received a provisional suspension. At least as it stands now, it seems unlikely that he’ll have much competition.
With the president of World Athletics threatening large suspensions for athletes who compete in the league, it’s most likely the the talent pool will mostly consist of athletes who were never going to reach the top level anyway, aging athletes who want to make some money before retiring, and athletes like Kerley who are already serving a suspension.
What’s The Motivation
The lack of a deep talent pool leads to another issue: a lack of motivation. According to the event website, all athletes will get paid. And as it stands now, whatever top talent they recruit won’t be seriously challenged.
Let’s use Kerley as an example. Let’s hypothetically say he runs 9.90 seconds, and the nearest competitor is running 10.10 seconds. Is he really going to pump himself full of experimental drugs to break Bolt’s world record (and all but certainly still fall short)?
Maybe financially incentivizing athletes to break the world record would be enough to overcome this issue, but do I really need to point out the ethical problem with incentivizing these types of “gladiator battles?”
A Net Negative for Society
If the Enhanced Games were food, they would have the nutrition of marshmallow Peeps. If they were a book, they would have the literary merit of “Fifty Shades of Grey.” If they were a film, they would be as likely to be nominated for an Oscar as “The Human Centipede.”
The overall reaction to the Enhanced Games among the athletic community has been overwhelmingly negative, for good reason. The event has little appeal to anybody who cares about the spirit of sport and threatens to become a gladiator-type spectacle.
I’ll leave off with a quote that I quite liked by the CEO of Sports Medicine Australia, Jamie Crain, that was published in ABC News, “No gladiatorial bout ever ended up being good for the two people in the ring.”
As an athletics fan, I would strongly discourage you from tuning into the event or engaging with it directly in any way (such as watching the YouTube stream). To do so would only encourage more of these moronic events.