The Enhanced Games Has a Date, a Host City, and a Drug-Fueled World Record

The Enhanced Video games—a type of Olympics for athletes who’re doping—at the moment introduced the date and venue for its first competitors: Might 21-24, 2026, at Resorts World Las Vegas.

Athletes competing within the occasion will likely be allowed to take performance-enhancing medicine like testosterone and anabolic steroids which are often banned from elite competitors, offered they’re authorized, prescribed by a health care provider, and brought at protected ranges.

The inaugural Enhanced Video games may have three predominant sports activities: swimming (50m and 100m freestyle, and 50m and 100m butterfly), monitor (100m dash, 110m/100m hurdles, and 60m sprint), and weightlifting (snatch, clear and jerk). Relatively than splitting women and men into completely different classes, athletes will likely be categorized primarily based on their chromosomes: There will likely be an XX and an XY class for every occasion.

Gkolomeev swam the 50-meter freestyle in 20.89 seconds at a pool in North Carolina, breaking a 16-year-old file.

Courtesy of Paradigm

There will likely be as much as $500,000 in prize cash on supply for every occasion, with $250,000 for the winner, and a bonus of $1,000,000 for anybody who breaks the 100m dash or the 50m freestyle world file. (Different world file breakers will get a bonus of $250,000.) At a glitzy press convention asserting the small print of the primary occasion, organizers additionally revealed that the Video games had helped an “enhanced athlete” break two long-standing 50m freestyle world data in swimming.

Kristian Gkolomeev, a 31-year-old Greek-Bulgarian swimmer who got here fifth within the 50m freestyle on the Olympic Video games in Paris, began his enhancement program in early February. Towards the top of that month, at a pool in Greensboro, North Carolina, he broke César Cielo’s 50-meter freestyle world file of 20.91 seconds, which had stood for 16 years. Gkolomeev swam 0.02 seconds sooner. In April, he broke Caeleb Dressel’s 2019 so-called textile world file—accomplished with out carrying a pace swimsuit—of 21.04 seconds. He swam 0.01 seconds sooner.

Courtesy of Paradigm