Never considering myself much of a writer in my youth, I entered the Young Queensland Writers’ Award in Australia with a throwaway short story I’d whipped up on a whim one weekend in my early twenties.
In just a few thousand words, it described a world nostalgic for athletic records, in which an Olympics-style event was established for competitors willing to be pharmaceutically enhanced. It centered on one hopeful entrant and his dream of gold.
At the cost of their long-term health, people could juice up on the latest drugs and literally run their little hearts out in the name of riches and glory. Of course, the true competitors in the story were Big Pharma, vying with one another to develop compounds that could push the human body to absurd limits.
The story fell short of first place, but it earned me a consolation prize and a conversation with the judges over the wild fantasy of an enhanced Olympics.
Two decades later, I wrote a book on the definition of health, called Unwell. In writing it, I interviewed scientists about their views on disability and technology in sport. I was reminded again of my short story – only in light of my research, I was feeling far less whimsical about my fiction.
Forced to consider the blurred lines between biology and technology in physical competition, especially in the Paralympics, I found that the philosophy of sport itself is far more malleable than I’d ever considered. Gone are the days when a finish line determines which naked Greek has the fastest, strongest physique. Now it’s about nutrition as much as metabolism. Shoes as much as grit. The trainer as much as the mindset. The finance as much as the experience.
So, why not the dope as much as the drive?
It’s 2026. Artificial intelligence, driverless cars, and drone warfare make it hard to deny that we are now living in a version of the future that a 22-year-old me would have pictured.
And at last, after several years of controversial debate, we have it. The inaugural “Enhanced Games” in Las Vegas. Olympics on steroids.
You know there’s more, the official website tells us.
Announced in 2023 and founded by Australian businessman Aron D’Souza, CEO of an AI tech firm backed by the likes of Peter Thiel, the games were sold as a way to change how we do sports. Performance-enhancing drug tests are out. FDA-approved pharmaceuticals are in. Doping is, after all, inevitable, and harder to weed out. So, why not lower the barriers?
“People love to watch events like the Olympic Games to see humans test the limits of their abilities, and this takes that idea one step further,” says Matthew Dunn, a researcher in performance and image-enhancing drugs at the Institute for Health Transformation at Deakin University in Australia.
“People have been using substances to enhance their athletic abilities for millennia, and this is no different.”
Whether it’s “one step” or a 10-story pole vault is a question now being debated. At its core, it is a matter of ethics that goes beyond sports and into society’s obligation to protect individuals from choices that put their health at risk. In an age where we’re putting protocols in place to protect college footballers from traumatic brain injuries, should we permit experimenting with drugs that risk long-term damage in the name of sport?
“The Enhanced Games are a unique opportunity to see how illegal methods and substances can impact sports performance,” argues sport scientist Kagan Ducker, the Head of Program for Exercise Science at Curtin University in Australia.
The right to be a guinea-pig aside, the question of what we’re truly cheering over is a question laid bare by the games.
Ducker goes on to say, “While most sports viewers are used to seeing fairly equal athletes competing against each other, what they will see at the Enhanced Games is a quite diverse set of athletes with diverse preparations, because these aren’t a nice equal group of world finalists in their sports, there are some medal-quality athletes competing against elite but much lower-ranked athletes, and that alone will likely create diversity in results and a poor viewing experience.”
Perhaps bizarrely, competitors were all classified by their “chromosomal sex”. You know, to avoid controversy. After all, you can pop whatever FDA-approved pills or wear augmented shoes and suits, but hey, we can’t have trans folk bringing unfair advantages to this unfair competition.
In many ways, we’re continuing to struggle with the philosophical foundations of sport. Just what defines competing? Muscle against muscle? Testosterone against testosterone? Pharma against pharma? Should it matter?
It’s with perhaps a touch of irony that despite promises of shattering the biological ceiling holding back world records, only a single record was actually broken, by Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev (aided by a synthetic supersuit and months of performance-enhancing drugs). Even then, he shaved just 0.07 seconds off the record in a 50-meter freestyle event.
Perhaps it’s early days for this new chapter in sporting history. If it continues, The Enhanced Games may one day take the world’s best athletes while young, foster their dreams, marry them with the best enhancements sponsorship money can buy, and send them forth to crack the three-minute mile, the 90-minute marathon, or the 9-second 100-meter dash.
At the end of my consolation prize-winning story all those years ago, my protagonist was overtaken at the last second in a blur of fur and spots, as a man with cheetah genes tore past. All of those body-destroying drugs for nothing, as the age of genetic enhancements had arrived.
Which is ludicrous, of course. The Enhanced Games would never allow such a thing.
We all have our limits when it comes to what we’d do for gold and glory, after all…
