Doping-Friendly Enhanced Games Failed to Deliver on Its Performance Promises, Analysis Finds

When the inaugural Enhanced Games opened in Las Vegas on May 24, 2026, the event promised something no mainstream sporting competition had ever offered: a stage where performance-enhancing drugs were not merely tolerated but openly integrated into athlete preparation, with anti-doping regulation abolished entirely. Organizers framed the venture as a natural evolution of sport, one in which modern medicine and biotechnology would extend human physical capability beyond what natural talent and training alone could achieve. Central to the business model was the expectation that so-called enhanced athletes would shatter world records, generating visibility for pharmacological enhancement and, by extension, profit. A new retrospective analysis published in Physiological Reports has now examined whether those expectations were met, and the answer is a resounding no.

The study, conducted by a Brazilian research team using exclusively public data, evaluated all 42 athletes who competed across three modalities: track sprinting, swimming, and weightlifting. These athletes brought impressive credentials, including Olympic and world championship medals, yet their historical personal bests sat on average about 6 percent below the existing world records at the time of competition. That gap matters because the typical difference between two sequential world records in these sports is usually less than 1 percent. In other words, the field entered the event far from record-breaking territory, and the pharmacological protocols on offer would have needed to produce extraordinary gains to close it.

They did not. Across 60 analyzed performances by enhanced athletes, only a single world record fell, set by a male swimmer in the 50-meter freestyle. Crucially, that swim was aided by a polyurethane suit of the kind banned in World Aquatics competition, a piece of equipment notorious for its buoyancy and hydrodynamic advantages rather than any biological effect. The same 50-meter freestyle record had already been broken under full World Anti-Doping Agency compliance just weeks earlier, in March 2026, without such a suit, which the authors note suggests the promised gains from the drug protocols were not as effective as advertised. In track and field, not a single athlete surpassed a personal best, and performances drifted further from world-record pace after the Games than before them.

The physiological rationale behind the event’s protocols was not baseless. Anabolic-androgenic steroids and growth hormone reliably stimulate muscle protein synthesis, producing chronic gains in lean mass and maximal strength, while recombinant erythropoietin elevates hemoglobin mass and oxygen-carrying capacity, improving maximal aerobic capacity in laboratory settings. Historical precedent appeared to support the enterprise: the state-sponsored doping program of the German Democratic Republic between the 1970s and 1980s yielded roughly 150 Olympic medals, and high-profile scandals from BALCO to the Russian scheme in Sochi reinforced the perception that pharmacology delivers results worth the risk. Yet an umbrella review cited by the researchers found insufficient evidence directly linking these substances to improved on-field competitive performance, a distinction between laboratory adaptation and real-world outcome that proved decisive in Las Vegas.

According to the publicly available clinical trial registration associated with the Games, the protocol involved 25 weeks of various testosterone esters and derivatives, with most participants using testosterone, more than half using stimulants, and a minority using erythropoietin or additional anabolic steroids. The authors caution that actual doses and exact substances were never disclosed, leaving open the possibility that administration fell within clinically recommended ranges insufficient for meaningful performance enhancement. They also note that gains in muscle mass and force do not always transfer to sport-specific outcomes, where hydrodynamics, aerodynamics, technique, and neuromuscular timing impose demands that hypertrophy alone cannot satisfy.

On the individual level, the picture was mixed but underwhelming. Nineteen new personal bests were achieved out of 60 enhanced-athlete performances, all in swimming or weightlifting, representing a genuine if modest accomplishment given that most competitors were past their athletic prime. Athletes who set new personal bests improved by roughly 3 percent on average, while the remaining 41 performances declined by about 5.6 percent relative to prior marks. Weightlifting showed the greatest variability, with three athletes achieving new bests while eight regressed, some by double-digit margins. Swimming was the only modality in which the overall gap to world records remained comparable to the historical pre-Games gap, a result the authors suggest may have been confounded by the permitted use of banned polyurethane suits rather than the drug protocols themselves.

Age emerged as a more plausible explanation for the few successes than pharmacology. Athletes who set new personal bests were, on average, closer in age to the point at which they had previously peaked, roughly five years removed from their best performances compared with seven years for those who regressed. Peak performance in sprinting, swimming, and weightlifting generally occurs in the early to mid-twenties, and the researchers argue that a smaller age gap, combined with the enhancement protocol, likely drove the improved marks rather than any dramatic drug effect. If the protocols had been as powerful as claimed, they contend, performances should have exceeded expectations across the board, which was not the case for the majority of competitors.

The event’s third core promise, that enhancement could offset age-related decline and even support longevity, fared worst of all. Using a linear mixed-effects model with athlete identity as a random intercept, the team examined the relationship between the number of years elapsed since each athlete’s personal best and the percentage change in performance at the Games. The slope was negative, meaning performance tended to worsen as time since peak increased, and while the association did not reach statistical significance at the conventional threshold, the authors note that this direction of effect directly contradicts the claim that drug protocols could counteract aging. Physical capacities such as maximal strength, power, and aerobic function are well documented to decline after the third decade of life, and nothing in the Las Vegas data suggested pharmacology had reversed that trajectory.

Perhaps the most pointed observation concerns the handful of athletes who competed without any enhancement at all. Four athletes self-declared as non-enhanced, and their six performances were on average closer to their personal bests, about 1 percent below, than the enhanced athletes’ aggregate 3 percent deficit. One non-enhanced swimmer achieved two new personal bests, and a non-enhanced sprinter came closest among track competitors to surpassing his own record. The sample is far too small for definitive conclusions, and self-declared status was never independently verified, but the pattern reinforces a conclusion the authors emphasize throughout: elite athletic performance is multifactorial, shaped by training quality, injury history, technique, and psychology, and not determined by pharmacology alone. The study has clear limitations, including the absence of dose information, no age-matched control group, and the inherent constraints of retrospective observational analysis of publicly available data. Even so, the collective evidence indicates that the Enhanced Games failed to deliver on all three of its central promises, generating one suit-assisted world record, a minority of new personal bests concentrated in swimmers and lifters, and no detectable attenuation of age-related decline. The human body, it turns out, may indeed be an incomplete project, but the pharmaceutical toolkit on display in Las Vegas was not the shortcut its promoters promised.

Subject of Research: Performance outcomes of doping-permitted competition at the inaugural Enhanced Games

Article Title: Enhanced but not superior: Performance outcomes from the inaugural enhanced games

Article References: Azevedo, R. A., Coutinho, L. F., Gonçalves, M. C., Oliveira, H. A., Gonçalves, G. J., Campos, M., Roschel, H., & Gualano, B. (2026). Enhanced but not superior: Performance outcomes from the inaugural enhanced games. Physiological Reports, 14(19), Article e71123. https://doi.org/10.14814/phy2.71123

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.14814/phy2.71123

Keywords: Enhanced Games, performance-enhancing drugs, anabolic steroids, erythropoietin, world records, athletic performance, aging, anti-doping, physiology, swimming, weightlifting, track and field