What records are possible if doping is allowed? The “Enhanced Games”, the self-proclaimed alternative to the Olympic Games, want to pursue this question. An Australian drives the project forward.
He’s faster than Usain Bolt, he’s the fastest man in the world. But nobody knows him. “I can’t show my face. I’m a proud Enhanced Athlete. The Olympics hate me,” says one sprinter in a video on Twitter in which he claims to have broken the Jamaican legend’s 100-meter world record.
If you want to see him, you have to follow the Enhanced Games 2024 – the self-proclaimed “alternative” to the Olympic Games, which wants to do without doping tests completely. “Help me to show myself. Help me to stop hate. I need your help so that the world accepts science,” the sprinter continues.
The Australian businessman Aron D’Souza wants to help him and other dopers. What records are possible in sport if all athletes took performance-enhancing drugs? The President of the Enhanced Games wants to pursue this question with the help of his sports event.
Athletes will compete in five different disciplines: athletics, swimming, weightlifting, gymnastics and martial arts. According to the games website, there should be no doping controls, and the first event is planned for December 2024 in the USA.
But is it realistic that there will be enough athletes for the competitions? “No, I don’t think so. There are definitely some crazy people who let this happen to them. But if you do Olympic sport, you can’t just try it out and then come back,” said judoka Igor Wandtke to SID.
The idea of enhanced games is “reprehensible”
The bronze medalist from Tokyo with the mixed team finds the idea of the games “reprehensible” overall, since the required performance was at the expense of health. Javelin thrower Julian Weber also told Sport1 that the concept had no future: “There must be rules.”
D’Souza won’t care. The businessman wants to show what man can achieve in cooperation with science. It should go higher, faster, further. “People who are adults and have given their free and informed consent should be able to do what they want with their bodies,” D’Souza told the Guardian.
The Enhanced Games see themselves as the opposition to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Olympic Games, while D’Souza described the rings organization around President Thomas Bach as “mafia-like”. The Enhanced Games are “ready for a fight” against the IOC: “I know they will play dirty, I know they will threaten us, but ultimately we know that we are morally correct,” said the Australian.
But is it morally correct to risk long-term health consequences through targeted doping? No, sports physician Wilhelm Bloch told SID, “that’s not justifiable from a medical-ethical point of view.” Because risks and side effects are “practically unpredictable”.
The professor at the German Sport University in Cologne even describes the enhanced games as “gladiator games” and “crazy ideas”: “I can’t approve of that at all, because what are we doing? We open all the gates.”