The Enhanced Games and the Hidden Doctrine of Anti-Doping
- 5 August 2026
- SLAM
The Enhanced Games and the Hidden Doctrine of Anti-Doping
At my primary school sports day, I entered the egg-and-spoon race confident that weeks of practice balancing the egg on the spoon would pay off. Instead, the girl beside me finished far ahead. Afterwards, I discovered she had glued her egg to the spoon. The following year, everyone did the same. While this appeared to solve the fairness problem, it transformed the nature of the competition. The race was no longer about balance, control, or technical skill; it had become a simple sprint.
A similar question now confronts modern sport. If all athletes are permitted to use performance-enhancing drugs, does that create a level playing field, or does it fundamentally alter the very contest we seek to celebrate?
The Enhanced Games (‘TEG’), founded by Aron D’Souza alongside co-founders Maximilian Martin and Christian Angermayer, is a privately funded sporting event that describes itself as pioneering a “new era of athletic competition”. Operating outside the framework of the World Anti-Doping Agency (‘WADA’) Code, the Enhanced Games permits athletes to use FDA-approved Performance Enhancing Drugs (‘PEDs’) under medical supervision without being subject to conventional anti-doping testing. The inaugural Enhanced Games, held at Resorts World Las Vegas from 21 to 24 May 2026, featured 42 athletes competing across swimming, athletics, and weightlifting for a total prize pool of approximately $25 million. Individual event winners were awarded $250,000, with a further $1 million bonus available to any athlete who broke a recognised world record.
TEG has reignited debate about the purpose of anti-doping regulation. Beyond concerns of fairness, athlete welfare, and competitive integrity lies a deeper question: what, exactly, are anti-doping laws seeking to protect? In this article, Yasin Patel, Rachel Cornford, and Caitlin Haberlin-Chambers explore TEG and the often-overlooked doctrine that sits at the heart of modern anti-doping regulation.
A similar question now confronts modern sport. If all athletes are permitted to use performance-enhancing drugs, does that create a level playing field, or does it fundamentally alter the very contest we seek to celebrate?
The Enhanced Games (‘TEG’), founded by Aron D’Souza alongside co-founders Maximilian Martin and Christian Angermayer, is a privately funded sporting event that describes itself as pioneering a “new era of athletic competition”. Operating outside the framework of the World Anti-Doping Agency (‘WADA’) Code, the Enhanced Games permits athletes to use FDA-approved Performance Enhancing Drugs (‘PEDs’) under medical supervision without being subject to conventional anti-doping testing. The inaugural Enhanced Games, held at Resorts World Las Vegas from 21 to 24 May 2026, featured 42 athletes competing across swimming, athletics, and weightlifting for a total prize pool of approximately $25 million. Individual event winners were awarded $250,000, with a further $1 million bonus available to any athlete who broke a recognised world record.
TEG has reignited debate about the purpose of anti-doping regulation. Beyond concerns of fairness, athlete welfare, and competitive integrity lies a deeper question: what, exactly, are anti-doping laws seeking to protect? In this article, Yasin Patel, Rachel Cornford, and Caitlin Haberlin-Chambers explore TEG and the often-overlooked doctrine that sits at the heart of modern anti-doping regulation.
New era of sport or erosion of “spirit of sport”?
From its inception, TEG confronted international sport with its own version of the “glue stick problem”. Coined the “Olympics on steroids”, the project has attracted widespread condemnation from sporting regulators and governing bodies:
Despite this criticism and financial turbulence, organisers have nonetheless announced the 2027 Enhanced Games, including a tenfold increase in the men’s 100 metres world record bonus to $10 million. This recalibration implicitly acknowledges that the inaugural field could not produce the headline athletic outcome on which the project’s commercial proposition was staked. TEG want an athlete(s) who could break the 100m world record.
- The International Olympic Committee (‘IOC’) described it as a “betrayal” of sporting values and warned that promoting PED “sends a dangerous message”.
- WADA labelled it a “dangerous and irresponsible concept.”
- UKAD called it a “reckless departure” from the principles of fairness and integrity.
- World Aquatics on 3 June 2024 became the first international federation to ban athletes and coaches from its sanctioned competitions if they participate.
- UK Sport warned participants they would lose access to funding, coaching and medical support if participating in TEG.
- Sky Sports said the event produced results that were effectively “null and void” in the eyes of international governing bodies, with some commentators also describing the performances as “disappointing”.
Despite this criticism and financial turbulence, organisers have nonetheless announced the 2027 Enhanced Games, including a tenfold increase in the men’s 100 metres world record bonus to $10 million. This recalibration implicitly acknowledges that the inaugural field could not produce the headline athletic outcome on which the project’s commercial proposition was staked. TEG want an athlete(s) who could break the 100m world record.
Article 4.3 and the Spirit of Sport
Elite sport has always involved performance pushed to its limits, along with evolving forms of enhancement. Altitude training, cryotherapy, biomechanical modelling, AI-assisted analytics, and specialised recovery systems are now constitutive of elite performance rather than external to it. The boundary between permitted and prohibited optimisation is therefore not natural or fixed; it is constructed through regulation.
The doctrinal framework governing enhancement is found principally in Article 4.3 of the 2021 WADA Code. Article 4.3 empowers WADA to place a substance or method on the Prohibited List where it meets any two of three criteria:
- It has potential to enhance sporting performance,
- It presents a health risk, and
- That it violates the “spirit of sport”.
The first two are largely empirical; the third is a value judgment about what sport is meant to represent. The Code defines the “spirit of sport” as the celebration of the human spirit, body, and mind, and the pursuit of excellence through natural talent.
Article 4.3.3 makes WADA’s determinations final, preventing athletes from challenging listings on “spirit of sport” grounds. This leaves a private regulator to define the boundaries of legitimate performance using its own evaluative criteria, with limited scope for review. TEG represents the first serious challenge in decades to this consensus, exposing the uneasy foundation of anti-doping regulation: that the criterion doing much of the doctrinal work is also the least capable of precise legal justification in purely objective terms.
The Therapeutic Use Exemption paradox
If the Code’s reliance on contested values is its first vulnerability, its system of Therapeutic Use Exemptions (‘TUEs’) is its second. A TUE permits an athlete, on documented medical grounds, to use a prohibited substance under strict supervision to treat a medical condition. An example would be the permitted use of medications like salbutamol due to exercise-induced asthma.
This produces a structural paradox: for the duration of a valid exemption, an athlete may lawfully use a prohibited substance and compete against those banned from using it. The compound in the bloodstream is the same; what changes is its legal status, which turns on diagnosis rather than pharmacology.
TEG reproduced almost every feature of the TUE arrangement – medical screening, prescription, supervision and monitoring – while removing one critical element: the medical condition. Stripped of the diagnosis if medically supervised use of PEDs is, in principle, compatible with sporting integrity under the TUE regime, then the Code’s objection may not be to the drugs themselves, but to the lack of a medical justification. Regulators argue that a TUE restores normal function, while enhancement creates an advantage beyond it. Whether that distinction can hold the weight placed on it is one of the key questions TEG now raises.
This produces a structural paradox: for the duration of a valid exemption, an athlete may lawfully use a prohibited substance and compete against those banned from using it. The compound in the bloodstream is the same; what changes is its legal status, which turns on diagnosis rather than pharmacology.
TEG reproduced almost every feature of the TUE arrangement – medical screening, prescription, supervision and monitoring – while removing one critical element: the medical condition. Stripped of the diagnosis if medically supervised use of PEDs is, in principle, compatible with sporting integrity under the TUE regime, then the Code’s objection may not be to the drugs themselves, but to the lack of a medical justification. Regulators argue that a TUE restores normal function, while enhancement creates an advantage beyond it. Whether that distinction can hold the weight placed on it is one of the key questions TEG now raises.
The Super Suit precedent and Las Vegas
Swimming has faced a similar regulatory crisis before. Between 2008 and 2009, polyurethane “super suits”, such as the Speedo LZR Racer and Arena X-Glide, reduced drag and increased buoyancy, improving swimmers’ efficiency in the water. Legal at the time and approved by FINA (now World Aquatics), they were widely used during an 18-month period in which around 300 world records were broken, several of which still stand today. The issue legally was not merely that the suits enhanced performance, but that the enhancement was initially accepted and only later regarded as incompatible with the identity of sport itself.
FINA did not sanction swimmers, who were acting within the rules at the time, but instead rewrote the rulebook on swimwear and restricted coverage and mandated textile materials. The Dubai Charter of March 2009, a landmark agreement adopted by FINA, justified this shift with its core principle: swimming is “sport essentially based on the physical performance of the athlete”.[2] This was a value judgment, not a rule, about what swimming is meant to measure. The super suits were lawful until they were judged to conflict with that value, leading to the idea of “technological doping” and a ban driven not by a change in law, but by a shift in how the sport itself was understood.
TEG saw an unofficial record set, with Kristian Gkolomeev clocking 20.81 in the 50m freestyle in a polyurethane bodysuit like those banned in 2010, alongside a programme of PEDs. It is impossible to separate the effect of the suit from the drugs, but even combined, the gap between enhanced and clean elite swimming remained strikingly small.
This was the only world record of the Games. A legally significant fact given that the case against TEG partly rests on the claim that pharmacological enhancement produces performances beyond those permitted under the Code. The empirical picture from Las Vegas complicates that assumption and weakens the suggestion that enhanced performance is necessarily of a different order.
FINA did not sanction swimmers, who were acting within the rules at the time, but instead rewrote the rulebook on swimwear and restricted coverage and mandated textile materials. The Dubai Charter of March 2009, a landmark agreement adopted by FINA, justified this shift with its core principle: swimming is “sport essentially based on the physical performance of the athlete”.[2] This was a value judgment, not a rule, about what swimming is meant to measure. The super suits were lawful until they were judged to conflict with that value, leading to the idea of “technological doping” and a ban driven not by a change in law, but by a shift in how the sport itself was understood.
TEG saw an unofficial record set, with Kristian Gkolomeev clocking 20.81 in the 50m freestyle in a polyurethane bodysuit like those banned in 2010, alongside a programme of PEDs. It is impossible to separate the effect of the suit from the drugs, but even combined, the gap between enhanced and clean elite swimming remained strikingly small.
This was the only world record of the Games. A legally significant fact given that the case against TEG partly rests on the claim that pharmacological enhancement produces performances beyond those permitted under the Code. The empirical picture from Las Vegas complicates that assumption and weakens the suggestion that enhanced performance is necessarily of a different order.
Contrasting Perspectives
The launch of TEG has reignited debate over whether athletes should be permitted to use PEDs under medical supervision. Proponents present it as a safer, transparent alternative to anti-doping rules, while critics argue it undermines the integrity of sport. This article now examines both perspectives and considers whether the Games represent progress or a departure from sport itself.
Health and Safety Through Regulation
One of the strongest arguments advanced by supporters of TEG is that prohibition has failed. Despite decades of anti-doping enforcement by the WADA, the use of PEDs remains a persistent feature of elite sport. Sport philosopher Claudio Tamburrini therefore argues that legalisation would shift enhancement into a medically supervised environment, reducing the risks associated with clandestine doping practices. On this view, athletes would operate under medical oversight, monitoring, and controlled dosing. Proponents contend that this is more realistic than prohibition and that regulation may better protect athlete welfare where PED use is already occurring.
However, the safety claim is contested. Medical supervision may mitigate some risks but cannot remove the known physiological harms of many PEDs, nor address uncertain long-term effects. More significantly, critics argue that TEG may generate new forms of coercion: even if formally voluntary, athletes may feel compelled to enhance in order to remain competitive.
This concern extends beyond those directly participating. Elite sport operates as a developmental pyramid. Young athletes observe the behaviours rewarded at the highest level and often seek to emulate them. WADA has warned that the commercialisation of enhanced performance may encourage greater experimentation with PEDs among aspiring athletes, particularly where substantial financial rewards are available.
The result may be a sporting environment in which enhancement becomes an economic necessity rather than a genuine choice.
However, the safety claim is contested. Medical supervision may mitigate some risks but cannot remove the known physiological harms of many PEDs, nor address uncertain long-term effects. More significantly, critics argue that TEG may generate new forms of coercion: even if formally voluntary, athletes may feel compelled to enhance in order to remain competitive.
This concern extends beyond those directly participating. Elite sport operates as a developmental pyramid. Young athletes observe the behaviours rewarded at the highest level and often seek to emulate them. WADA has warned that the commercialisation of enhanced performance may encourage greater experimentation with PEDs among aspiring athletes, particularly where substantial financial rewards are available.
The result may be a sporting environment in which enhancement becomes an economic necessity rather than a genuine choice.
Bodily Autonomy
Enhanced Games founder Aron D’Souza frequently frames the issue as one of personal freedom. Athletes, he argues, should have the right to decide what they do with their own bodies. This argument draws upon liberal principles of autonomy, suggesting that informed adults should be free to assume risks in pursuit of sporting excellence, particularly where those risks are medically managed.
Advocates further contend that elite sport already permits numerous forms of enhancement, including advanced nutrition, altitude training, recovery technologies, and sophisticated sports science. From this perspective, pharmacological enhancement is merely another step along a continuum of performance optimisation.
The autonomy argument is also vulnerable to criticism. Participation in TEG is not a matter of unrestricted personal choice. Athletes compete within structured programmes involving specified substances, dosages, and medical protocols.
Furthermore, significant financial incentives raise questions about whether consent is entirely voluntary. When athletes are offered substantial rewards for enhanced performances, the distinction between free choice and economic pressure becomes increasingly blurred.
The rhetoric of “my body, my choice” therefore overlooks the reality that choices are made within systems of incentives and expectations. Where enhancement becomes the route to professional success, autonomy may be more theoretical than real.
Advocates further contend that elite sport already permits numerous forms of enhancement, including advanced nutrition, altitude training, recovery technologies, and sophisticated sports science. From this perspective, pharmacological enhancement is merely another step along a continuum of performance optimisation.
The autonomy argument is also vulnerable to criticism. Participation in TEG is not a matter of unrestricted personal choice. Athletes compete within structured programmes involving specified substances, dosages, and medical protocols.
Furthermore, significant financial incentives raise questions about whether consent is entirely voluntary. When athletes are offered substantial rewards for enhanced performances, the distinction between free choice and economic pressure becomes increasingly blurred.
The rhetoric of “my body, my choice” therefore overlooks the reality that choices are made within systems of incentives and expectations. Where enhancement becomes the route to professional success, autonomy may be more theoretical than real.
The Spirit of Sport
The most fundamental objection concerns the nature of sport itself. While supporters present enhancement as a reform of existing competitions, critics argue that it transforms the activity into something fundamentally different.
Dr Paul Davis has noted that different philosophical models of sport may accommodate enhancement. However, this approach risks overlooking a central issue: every sport is designed to measure particular human capacities within a defined set of rules. Those rules are not arbitrary; they constitute the competition itself.
An egg-and-spoon race illustrates the point. To glue the egg to the spoon does not create a new strategy within the competition; it removes the challenge that the event was designed to test. Likewise, if a sprint becomes partly a test of pharmaceutical intervention, it is no longer measuring the same athletic qualities that the traditional event was created to assess.
The question is therefore not whether enhancement can be incorporated into sport, but whether the resulting activity remains the same sport at all.
Dr Paul Davis has noted that different philosophical models of sport may accommodate enhancement. However, this approach risks overlooking a central issue: every sport is designed to measure particular human capacities within a defined set of rules. Those rules are not arbitrary; they constitute the competition itself.
An egg-and-spoon race illustrates the point. To glue the egg to the spoon does not create a new strategy within the competition; it removes the challenge that the event was designed to test. Likewise, if a sprint becomes partly a test of pharmaceutical intervention, it is no longer measuring the same athletic qualities that the traditional event was created to assess.
The question is therefore not whether enhancement can be incorporated into sport, but whether the resulting activity remains the same sport at all.
Questionable Empirical Foundations
Critics have also challenged the factual basis of several pro-enhancement claims. D’Souza’s frequently cited assertion that approximately 40% of elite athletes are doping derives from contested research and remains far from universally accepted.
Similarly, arguments suggesting widespread abuse of TUEs are difficult to reconcile with evidence indicating that fewer than 1% of Olympic athletes possess valid exemptions and that no clear relationship exists between obtaining a TUE and winning medals.
If the empirical foundations of the pro-enhancement case are overstated, the argument for abandoning the existing anti-doping framework becomes significantly weaker.
Similarly, arguments suggesting widespread abuse of TUEs are difficult to reconcile with evidence indicating that fewer than 1% of Olympic athletes possess valid exemptions and that no clear relationship exists between obtaining a TUE and winning medals.
If the empirical foundations of the pro-enhancement case are overstated, the argument for abandoning the existing anti-doping framework becomes significantly weaker.
Conclusion
TEG undoubtedly exposes weaknesses in modern anti-doping systems. Prohibited enhancement persists despite extensive regulation, and concerns about athlete autonomy and enforcement deserve serious consideration.
However, the strongest criticism of the Games is not that they are dangerous, but that they redefine the object of sporting competition itself. A medically supervised athlete using PEDs may be safer than one using them illegally, but that does not answer whether the resulting performance remains an achievement of athletic excellence or becomes one of pharmaceutical optimisation.
Following TEG, the performances, including a headline swimming record, will not be recognised within international sport, and participating athletes are likely to face significant barriers to any future Olympic involvement. Despite organisers promoting substantial financial incentives, including a proposed $10 million reward for breaking Usain Bolt’s 100m world record, the event’s long-term viability remains dependent on commercial demand and audience engagement that the inaugural competition has yet to demonstrate.
More importantly, TEG exposes something often left implicit in anti-doping regulation: clean sport is not merely a scientific exercise in detecting cheating, but a regulatory choice about which forms of enhancement preserve the nature of competition and which change what sport is meant to measure. Beneath testing regimes and the Prohibited List lies a value judgment about the purpose of sport itself.
This article has acknowledged weaknesses in the anti-doping framework, including the circularity of the “spirit of sport” criterion and tensions within TUEs. However, these imperfections do not justify abandoning the principle that sport measures human performance within defined physiological limits. TEG offers a different model, where performance is partly pharmacologically produced. It may be a legitimate competition, but it is not the same one.
The central question is therefore not whether enhancement can be made safer, but whether sport should remain a test of athletic ability rather than pharmaceutical optimisation. In that respect, TEG does not reform sport; it redefines it.
In our view, TEG are best understood not as a reform of sport but as a new category of competition altogether. They may have commercial appeal and may even prove safer than some forms of illicit doping. However, if sport is intended to test human physical and mental capacities within a common framework of rules, then enhancement of the kind promoted by TEG alters the nature of that test. The competition may be legitimate, but it is not measuring the same thing. For that reason, TEG should be regarded as an alternative to sport as traditionally understood, rather than its future.
However, the strongest criticism of the Games is not that they are dangerous, but that they redefine the object of sporting competition itself. A medically supervised athlete using PEDs may be safer than one using them illegally, but that does not answer whether the resulting performance remains an achievement of athletic excellence or becomes one of pharmaceutical optimisation.
Following TEG, the performances, including a headline swimming record, will not be recognised within international sport, and participating athletes are likely to face significant barriers to any future Olympic involvement. Despite organisers promoting substantial financial incentives, including a proposed $10 million reward for breaking Usain Bolt’s 100m world record, the event’s long-term viability remains dependent on commercial demand and audience engagement that the inaugural competition has yet to demonstrate.
More importantly, TEG exposes something often left implicit in anti-doping regulation: clean sport is not merely a scientific exercise in detecting cheating, but a regulatory choice about which forms of enhancement preserve the nature of competition and which change what sport is meant to measure. Beneath testing regimes and the Prohibited List lies a value judgment about the purpose of sport itself.
This article has acknowledged weaknesses in the anti-doping framework, including the circularity of the “spirit of sport” criterion and tensions within TUEs. However, these imperfections do not justify abandoning the principle that sport measures human performance within defined physiological limits. TEG offers a different model, where performance is partly pharmacologically produced. It may be a legitimate competition, but it is not the same one.
The central question is therefore not whether enhancement can be made safer, but whether sport should remain a test of athletic ability rather than pharmaceutical optimisation. In that respect, TEG does not reform sport; it redefines it.
In our view, TEG are best understood not as a reform of sport but as a new category of competition altogether. They may have commercial appeal and may even prove safer than some forms of illicit doping. However, if sport is intended to test human physical and mental capacities within a common framework of rules, then enhancement of the kind promoted by TEG alters the nature of that test. The competition may be legitimate, but it is not measuring the same thing. For that reason, TEG should be regarded as an alternative to sport as traditionally understood, rather than its future.