LAS VEGAS, NEVADA — The inaugural Enhanced Games, a highly divisive event that allows competitors full access to performance-enhancing substances, concluded its opening day of competition Sunday with just one world record broken, falling far short of organizers’ bold pre-event predictions. Greek sprint swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev emerged as the sole athlete to surpass an existing global mark, clocking 20.81 seconds in the men’s 50-meter freestyle to edge out Cameron McEvoy’s 2018 world record of 20.88 seconds. The result, while unofficial by international swimming governing body standards, spared event organizers from a total washout after they had forecast multiple records would fall thanks to the event’s permissive doping rules. Gkolomeev also used a synthetic full-body “supersuit” banned from Olympic and other mainstream international competitions, and walked away with a $1 million bonus for his record-breaking swim. Speaking to reporters after his win, the Greek swimmer called the race a success, hinting he could target an even faster time at future iterations of the event: “Maybe next year I’ll break it again.”
Conceived as an alternative to traditional anti-doping governed sport, the Enhanced Games has drawn fierce condemnation from global athletic governing bodies and anti-doping watchdogs, who warn the open use of banned substances poses severe, irreversible health risks to all participants. Despite the widespread criticism, the event drew a high-profile field of competitors, lured by generous prize purses that included $250,000 for individual event titles. Past Olympic medalists including James Magnussen, Cody Miller, and Ben Proud were among those competing over the weekend.
Going into Sunday’s finals, Enhanced Games co-founder Max Martin told reporters he expected “quite a few” world records to be broken. But the night was marked by a string of near-misses, with multiple athletes falling fractions of a second or kilograms short of global marks. Britain’s Ben Proud, silver medalist at the 2024 Paris Olympics, won the men’s 50-meter butterfly in 22.32 seconds, just 0.05 seconds off the existing world record. Speaking after his close call, Proud expressed clear frustration: “We all know what we came for. And that’s world records. And so, to be that agonizingly close, it’s frustrating.” Gkolomeev also came up short earlier in the night in the 100-meter freestyle, finishing 0.2 seconds off the world record with a time of 46.60 seconds.
Martin framed the lack of multiple records as an expected variable of live competition, noting several athletes were forced to withdraw from the event due to pre-competition injuries. “I think tonight, yes, we did expect a few more world records to happen. But at the end of the day, this is live sports, and this is always something that you can never plan for,” Martin told Agence France-Presse after the event.
Even with the lack of record-breaking success, the event saw more than a dozen personal best performances from competitors, including several athletes who came out of retirement to compete. U.S. swimmer Cody Miller, 34, won the men’s 50-meter breaststroke and told the crowd he was thrilled to cut seven-tenths of a second off his previous personal best. In a surprising turn of results, the small group of athletes who opted to compete without performance-enhancing drugs also claimed multiple event wins. Clean swimmer Hunter Armstrong took gold in the men’s 50-meter backstroke, defeating two competitors who had chosen to use banned substances. U.S. sprinter Fred Kerley, a former 100-meter world champion currently suspended for missed drug tests, and Barbados sprinter Tristan Evelyn won the men’s and women’s 100-meter dashes respectively as unenhanced competitors, clocking 9.97 seconds and 11.25 seconds. Kerley joked after his win over enhanced rivals: “Man, they got to do better than that. They need to train a little harder. Get on that shit a little bit more.”
In the weightlifting competition, three athletes — Beatriz Piron, Boady Santavy, and Wesley Kitts — all attempted to set unprecedented snatch lift records in their weight classes, but all fell short of their targets, even after organizers changed event rules to grant Santavy and Kitts an extra fourth attempt. Kitts said after his attempt that more training time would have given him a far better chance at the record. Even Hafthor Bjornsson, the actor best known for playing “The Mountain” in Game of Thrones and a former world record holding strongman, failed to break his own personal best 510kg deadlift.
The Las Vegas event, held at a purpose-built arena constructed on the parking lot of a Resorts World casino, counts high-profile backers including former U.S. President Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Health experts have issued stark warnings about the open use of banned performance-enhancing substances at the event, noting that many common doping products carry high risks of life-shortening organ damage to the heart, liver, and kidneys, with limited long-term research on their full health impacts. Enhanced Games officials have pushed back on these warnings, noting all substances used by competitors are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The event’s parent company, Enhanced, also sells many of the performance-enhancing products used by competitors directly to the general public.