The Enhanced Games Doesn't Need to Win. It Just Needs to Exist.

Seoul, September 24, 1988. It’s the 100m final. The crowning event of the Olympic Games. Ben Johnson crosses the finish line in a blistering 9.79 seconds, breaking the world record. His victory is short-lived, though, because three days later, it's announced that he's failed a drug test.

What took longer to emerge was the fuller picture: six of the eight finalists in that race were eventually linked to anti-doping violations at some point in their careers. The two that weren’t finished 4th and 8th.

"The dirtiest race in history" was not a story of individual moral failure. It was a collective incentive problem. A problem I believe is about to play out on a much larger scale.

A Different Kind of Competition

On 21 May 2026, Las Vegas will host the first Enhanced Games. It is designed to rival the Olympics and Diamond League in spectacle and prize money, with one significant difference: performance-enhancing substances are not prohibited. In fact, breaking a world record will earn you a $1 million bonus.

Most of the public debate has focused on the obvious questions: Should it be allowed? - Who's to stop it? Is it ethical? - All participants are consenting adults. Does it undermine conventional sport? - Possibly. Probably.

These are all reasonable questions, based around the morality of supervised doping, but what intrigues me is grounded more in the mathematics of game theory, and that is:

What happens to sports when everybody is enhanced?

To appreciate my concern, it helps to make a brief detour to understand the concept of game theory.

The Athlete's Dilemma

Game theory is the study of strategic decision-making, where the outcome for one person depends on the choices made by others.

Two suspects are held in separate cells. Each is offered the same deal: betray your partner before they betray you, and you get to walk free. If you stay silent but get betrayed, you get 10 years. Betray each other, and you both serve 5 years. But if you cooperate and both stay silent, you serve 2 years each.

The rational individual choice is to betray your partner for freedom. But the problem is that if both of you reason the same, you both end up worse off (5-years) than if you had simply trusted each other and kept quiet (2-years). In other words, acting in your own self-interest can result in harming the whole group.

Game theorists call this endpoint the Nash Equilibrium: the point at which no individual player can improve their outcome by changing their choice, alone. The film A Beautiful Mind illustrated it memorably.

Sport under anti-doping rules operates a version of this game. If everyone competes without enhancement, competition is fair, and records reflect genuine human capability. If one athlete enhances and others do not, they gain an advantage while carrying the risk of sanction. But if everyone enhances, records inflate, health costs accumulate, and the integrity of competition erodes. This is the Nash Equilibrium in action.

For decades, what has prevented that erosion has been the deterrent of sanctions: a lengthy ban, damaged reputation, and professional ostracism. The punishment was severe enough that competing clean remained, on balance, the rational individual choice. Not because every athlete was virtuous, but because the numbers favoured it.

So what happens when the deterrent, the proverbial stick, is diminished and a massive carrot is offered in its stead?

The Effect on Athletes

Imagine a 19-year-old regional sprinter. They follow the Enhanced Games on social media and see the prize pot. They know that anti-doping testing at the local level is severely under-resourced and therefore infrequent.

They also know that posting an implausible time at a club meet generates content, social reach, and the kind of visibility that might attract attention from people connected to the enhanced circuit. In this scenario, the rational decision, uncomfortable as it may seem, is to go enhanced. The worst that can happen is a ban from the sport, which they may not reach the pinnacle of anyway.

And what if they get banned? The Enhanced Games awaits, with appearance fees, a generous prize structure, and a stage that celebrates rather than penalises enhancement. The worst-case scenario is no longer career annihilation. It is transfer to a better-paid competition. Game theorists call this an "outside option".

Now, put yourself in the lane next to them. You are competing without enhancement. You've also noticed that you're no longer as competitive as you once were, and you start to wonder: "Am I the only one still playing by the old rules?"

That question, asked enough times, across enough sports, at enough levels, is the mechanism by which the Enhanced Games can erode traditional competition from within. It does not need to recruit athletes directly. Its mere existence and prize structure does this passively, at every level of sport. By removing the deterrent, we could end up with a situation where "the dirtiest race in history" gets re-enacted every weekend at local track meets.

The Effect on Spectators

The influence of the Enhanced Games on athletes is just one part of the story. We should also consider how this may affect our, the spectators', relationship with sports.

One of sports' greatest currencies is rarity. Sebastian Sawe's sub-2 hour marathon. Usain Bolt's 9.58 seconds. These outlier performances land with such force precisely because they happen infrequently, and because we believe they are real.

But, using the concept of the athlete's dilemma, if the race to the bottom means that more competitors use PEDs, then these rare moments in sports will become commonplace. Yesterday's "Wow!" becomes today's "meh". Syndrome, the villain in my favourite Pixar movie, The Incredibles, said it best:

And when everyone's Super, no one will be.

To see how this could play out, we only have to look at the steroid era of Major League Baseball during the 1990s. Home run totals exploded season after season. Fans initially loved it. Until they didn't.

Once it became apparent that the ability to hit a home run could be replicated with the right pharmacological aid, it lost its lustre. The audience felt betrayed and tuned out. Ratings fell. MLB spent years rebuilding trust it had not realised it was spending.

A more insidious effect is the shadow cast over athletes who compete without enhancement. The Enhanced Games does not need to be mentioned when an elite athlete delivers a barely believable performance for there to be doubt. It's already there in the background, so the additional onus, and cost, to prove that the feat was achieved naturally falls on the athlete.

Before breaking the marathon world record, Sawe underwent multiple drug tests over a twelve-month period, not because he was obliged to, but because authenticity now requires pre-emptive defence.

The Response

The governing bodies have noticed, and some are trying to reassert the weight of defection.

World Aquatics introduced By-Law 10, banning athletes, trainers, or support staff from all World Aquatics competitions for any involvement in the games, including making any public endorsement. Not surprisingly, the Enhanced Games sued, alleging antitrust violations. A New York federal judge dismissed the case in November 2025. The by-law stands.

Although World Athletics has not followed suit with written legislation, its influence is being felt: the Enhanced Games have reported difficulty recruiting track athletes, specifically citing the federation fears.

The governing bodies are betting that an Olympic career is worth more than a one-off prize purse, and so far the evidence would suggest that they're right. According to the official games website as of May 2026, the Games had 41 confirmed participants for the May 2026 event.

But the conversation in 2027 may look very different, depending on how commercially successful Las Vegas proves to be.

The Real Risk

The Enhanced Games isn't looking to abolish traditional sport. It is proposing a split approach featuring one competition with established rules and consequences for rule-breaking, and the other defined by performance without restriction. But to suggest that one will not have an effect on the other would be naive.

As a sports medicine doctor, the athletes I am most concerned about are not the ones who will be competing in Las Vegas next month, under clinical supervision. They're the ones already self-medicating in gyms across the country: using unregulated compounds, chasing relevance, with no one monitoring their hearts, their livers, or their hormones.

This community existed long before the Enhanced Games. But if the movement grows commercially, it does not just validate enhancement it normalises the unmonitored version of it, for people nobody is watching, with compounds nobody has approved, and consequences nobody has agreed to be responsible for. Who bears that responsibility when one of those athletes ends up seriously unwell is not a hypothetical question. It is a question of medical foreseeability and it is one that nobody, including the Enhanced Games, has yet answered.