# Enhanced Games and Tech Equity in Sports

**Podcast:** FT Tech Tonic
**Published:** 2026-07-15

## Transcript

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Live from Resort World Las Vegas in a unique purpose-built competition complex, tonight, strength will be measured, speed will be tested, and human potential will be redefined.
The camera sweeps across an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
It's time to meet our athletes for the men's 50-meter freestyle.
But these swimmers aren't normal athletes.
And this isn't a normal swimming race.
This is the Enhanced Games, or as some prefer to call it, the Steroid Olympics.
From Greece, a world championship silver medalist and European champion, Christian Kolomeov.
The athletes are here to smash world records using the latest anabolic steroids and human growth hormones.
And they're dressed in tight-fitting super suits.
that are banned from mainstream sports.
Greek swimmer Christian Colomiv breaks the world record by 0.09 seconds.
What a race and notice all the swimmers lining the pool, cheering on what we just saw.
Elite sport is all about pushing the limits of performance.
But when does technological innovation tip over into cheating?
This is Tectonic from the Financial Times.
I'm FT Sports Editor Josh Noble.
In this season...
I've been looking at how tech is fundamentally changing every aspect of athletic competition, from training to competing to watching.
With the World Cup underway, are these advances in technology leaving the world of sport better off?
In this, the final episode, I'm asking when new technology crosses the line into cheating, does the push for more innovation in sport risk making international competition unfair?
We'll hear about the enhanced games.
Super Shoes developed by Adidas and the blurred line between human ability and technological advantage.
Episode 3.
High Tech Cheating.
We heard audio from the Enhanced Games at the top of the show.
Our producer, Josh Gabbard-Doyon, was there, but now he's here in the studio with me.
Two Joshes.
Hi, Josh.
Hi, how's it going?
You went to the inaugural Enhanced Games in Las Vegas.
What was the setup like?
So back in May, I flew to Las Vegas for the first Enhanced Games, which took place over Sunday evening.
There's a lot of media fanfare around it.
It was very hot in Las Vegas, and the games took place outside in the parking lot, essentially, of a big casino.
They gave us a tour of the stadium before the games got underway.
We got to walk around.
Okay, I'm in the...
temporary enhanced games venue they've set up.
There's a weightlifting platform.
There's an Olympic pool.
It's four lanes only, so not as wide an Olympic pool, but it's Olympic pool length.
There's a track, a running track right next to it, which is for the 100 metres they're doing, and suites for VIPs.
So it's a pretty big operation.
There's Trump Tower in gold, and there's the mountains you can see.
around Las Vegas and, of course, right next to us is the big casino and resort where this is taking place.
So what are the Enhanced Games and why are they happening at all?
The idea for the Enhanced Games came from a kind of tech world fascination with pushing forward the limits of human performance and the human body.
Part of the claim is that other sports, you know, international sports in general, already have widespread doping.
We're just going to be open about it.
Obviously, that's a highly contested claim.
It's gotten a lot of backlash from international sporting bodies.
Naturally, the enhanced games also want to sell their enhancements, their supplements and drugs and what have you.
As part of the competition, they have a telehealth business.
Major investors for the games are Peter Thiel.
He's one of the big names who's attached, famously one of the founders of Palantir.
There's also the likes of the Winklevoss twins, early Facebook investors, and Donald Trump Jr.'s 1789 fund.
So they're really trying to make a name for themselves in sports.
But what is it they're actually trying to prove with all this?
I think there's a couple things they're trying to prove.
They're trying to break world records.
That's really what they...
have set out to do in the first place.
They're saying that they can break world records with these drugs.
You know, that's very controversial.
It's a real taboo.
Athletes openly taking drugs, both in terms of safety and in terms of the commodification of sport.
The organizers have talked about being pro-tech, pro-science in sports.
They say athletes are going to be monitored by doctors and it's going to be very safe.
I did speak to...
a coach with the Enhanced Games.
His name is Brett Hawk.
He's a former Olympic swimming coach and he was coaching all the swimmers at the Enhanced Games.
And he gave me kind of some of the reasoning for why he got involved in the first place.
I've also been interested in how far can we go?
How fast can we swim?
How far can we run?
How much weight can we lift?
I've always been intrigued by human potential.
Brett's been around for a while as a coach, and he actually lived through a pretty big change in rules around tech in swimming.
About two decades ago now, this had to do with the super suit, which is a specially designed suit that's supposed to help reduce friction and basically help you swim better in the pool.
At one point...
This was breaking all the world records, and then sports regulators decided it was essentially too radical, and they banned that bit of technology.
And the enhanced athletes who were competing over that weekend in Las Vegas, they were all wearing these super suits.
And basically, the enhanced games was reviving this piece of technology.
I coached the world record, two of the world record holders, fastest swimmers in history back in 2009.
That's when we had the super suit era.
There was technology in swimming and that technology was taken away.
And I felt like we hit a ceiling for many years.
And then the idea of enhanced games came along and the potential to take performance enhancing substances and then also look at the technological side of advancing swimming through super suits coming back as well.
And at the Enhance Games, in their training camp in the months sort of leading up to the games, he actually watched the effects of the doping.
He wasn't administering the drugs himself.
Enhance has this team of doctors, and they say monitor and study the effects.
That's all part of their business model, part of selling supplements.
But Brett did get to see how it changed their performance in training in the pool.
The athletes were stronger.
The athletes were recovering faster.
They were performing better in the training pool.
Not dramatically, because you're learning as you're going.
And you're, well, where's the edge now?
Where's the edge today?
Where's the edge this week?
And you're pushing up against it.
You've talked about athletes, but who are we actually talking about here?
What kind of athletes have been attracted to this thing?
It was a real cross-section.
You had people who were...
really top tier, got medals in the Olympics, and then were kind of at the end of their careers.
You also had quite a few athletes who were very much past their prime, but they were coming back to compete with these performance-enhancing drugs.
I spoke to one weightlifter, her name's Maryam Usman, she's a Nigerian lifter.
She'd competed in the Olympics, but she hadn't actually been lifting at an elite level in over 10 years.
Personally, I feel like a superhuman because...
I've been gone 11 years, had a baby.
I wasn't doing anything.
I wasn't going to the gym.
I wasn't doing anything to keep up.
And I just trained eight months to get to this level.
That's some superhuman stuff.
You know what I'm saying?
How different was the training for these games compared to when you were training, you know, 11 years ago when you were in your career?
It's a lot more different because I have everything I needed.
Literally, I feel like an elite athlete for once in my life.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, in the same hotel, we have doctors.
It's a lot different.
I felt like a professional, not a lie.
Did it feel like, you know, you had an unfair advantage?
No.
These people have been doing this many years ago.
I was a victim of...
doping.
In the Beijing Olympic Games, somebody tested positive and this has been going on.
We are just open with ours.
She was basically saying doping is already part of sports.
This is part of the premise of the Enhanced Games.
She said that she had actually been the victim of it during the Olympics, as in other people she was competing against had been doping and she had been trying to stay clean.
And what she liked about the Games is that at least they were transparent about the fact that athletes are taking drugs.
So we've talked about the why and we've talked about the what.
How did it actually all turn out in the end?
So Sunday rolls around, spectators start arriving.
They've actually invited influencers rather than selling tickets.
So that's the kind of crowd.
Enhanced are giving out these supplement packages for energy and sleep and whatever else.
This is what they're trying to push.
Because of the way the stadium is set up, they can go from weightlifting events, pan the camera over to sprinting events, and then over to swimming.
And they're doing them back to back.
And we get the weightlifting first.
We have a sequence of weightlifters.
Doesn't go great for them.
Mary Ann Ousmane doesn't break any records.
None of the lifters break any records, surprisingly.
The early performances, you know, while the sun is still up and it's blazing hot, are okay.
But we're not seeing any great performances from anybody straight off the bat, which makes people kind of nervous.
What about the sprinting?
That's the big blue ribbon event, certainly at the Olympics.
The 100-metre dash, that's the Usain Bolt's record.
Did anyone get close to that?
Short answer is no.
Interestingly, at the Enhanced Games, athletes were allowed to compete without having doped.
So quite a few athletes who were participating on this evening very publicly said, we're not going to take performance-enhancing drugs.
One of the athletes who said that was American gold medalist Fred Curley.
He's a sprinter.
And in the race, he very clearly won against these dope athletes.
And it led to a pretty unusual back and forth between the enhanced commentator and Fred Curley.
Fred, congratulations.
Winner of the men's 100 meters race.
Quarter of a million dollars.
Well, you look disappointed.
Man, they gotta do better than that.
He was basically saying the athletes that I'm up against here just aren't very good.
They need to be better.
And he basically criticized the enhanced games for what they were doing.
We get no records in weightlifting, nothing in sprinting, not even close, actually.
Finally, we get to swimming.
This was the last opportunity, really, to make sure that the games went.
as they intended.
We have these swimmers.
Some of the swimmers are very, very good.
Ben Proud is a fantastic British swimmer.
He had a really great Olympic career.
There are four swimmers in this final 50-meter freestyle event, and they're all wearing super suits.
They all are incredibly muscular, and they dive in.
They go for it.
Christian Kolomeyev, 20.81 in the final events.
We have our first world record.
Wow.
Unbelievable.
The four-time Olympian.
Coach Hawk's in the water.
Brett Hawk, the coach you heard from earlier, the swimming coach, he jumped in the pool as well.
But I'm not really sure it was a slam dunk for the Enhanced Games, at least in terms of what they set out to do.
OK, so if we're being generous, we could call it a mixed result.
for both the athletes and the organization.
They were aiming for loads of world records.
They didn't get that.
They had one guy who was wearing a super suit who did break a world record, but then in other events, it was the non-doping athletes that actually won their races.
So is there going to be another Enhanced Games?
What does the future look like, do you think?
There were lots of ideas floating around about what Enhanced was going to do next.
The main investor behind the event, this is one of the co-founders, his name is Christian Engermeyer.
He's a big biotech investor.
He was teasing different ideas during the course of the weekend.
We're already casting an enhanced trekking team to go up the Mount Everest, hopefully in the fastest time ever.
Yeah, it would be complicated, but this would be a pop-up event.
Or think about there is a world record, the fastest cycling team ever going from L.A.
to New York.
Yeah, and things like that.
And Brett Hauck, the swimming coach, actually said something really interesting during the press conference after the event as well.
My phone has been blowing up from all of the top swimmers in the world.
They're all watching it.
Most of them now want to be part of it.
So it's an incredible first event that we've put together.
And I think the best athletes are seeing what we're doing and they're putting their hand up.
So he sounds pretty convinced that this is the future of sports.
I think it's worth taking what he said with a pinch of salt.
We don't know if all the top swimmers in the world are calling him up.
But I think it's testament to the fact that, yeah, Enhanced Games really believe that they can challenge the idea of fairness and the conventions around performance enhancements.
And that's going to reshape international sports forever.
So maybe they just need a few more enhancements next time.
We may well see that at next year's event.
It could just be that they take more drugs.
Okay, when we come back, we'll hear from some critics of the Enhanced Games and grapple with some of the difficult questions around fairness.
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The enhanced games may have been groundbreaking in many ways, but a lot of what happened there in front of the TV cameras has been going on in secret across the world of sport for decades.
At the height of the Cold War, states like East Germany systemically pumped their Olympic athletes with steroids to help them win medals.
The US Olympic swim team watched in disbelief as East Germany, a country that had never won a single gold medal in women's swimming, seemed unbeatable in 1976.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, the Tour de France, the world's top cycling event, was rocked by a series of doping scandals.
Yes or no?
In all seven of your Tour de France victories, did you ever take banned substances or blood dope?
Yes.
In your opinion, was it humanly possible to win the Tour de France without doping?
Seven times in a row?
Not in my opinion.
And more recently, a 15-year-old Russian figure skater set to compete in the 2022 Olympics was disqualified after testing positive for a banned heart medication.
She later claimed she'd accidentally been exposed to the drug after eating strawberries prepared by her grandfather.
The Enhanced Games might be a fringe event, but in this context, it challenges a central idea of sport.
That to keep sport fair, you have to keep performance-enhancing drugs and technologies out of it and punish anyone caught doping.
Should you engage with something like the Enhanced Games, you would not be able to step foot on a UK sport.
funded site.
This is Kate Baker, Director of Performance and People at UK Sport, which oversees the British Olympic programme.
She says any athlete who competed in the enhanced games would be banned from using the UK's elite training facilities.
And that would be a real travesty because most of the time these individuals will have given a huge amount to their sports and to be cut off completely would be catastrophic.
Ben Proud, the British swimmer who competed in the 50 metre freestyle at the Enhanced Games, faced that fate.
But Kate's concern is that the Enhanced Games and the endorsement of doping will have the biggest impact on young people at the beginning of their sporting careers, particularly as more and more supplements hit the market with a promise to improve performance, either legally or illegally.
It's harder than ever for young athletes to navigate the landscape of supplements.
For example, there are more supplements available than there have ever been before.
And if steroids or super suits were allowed, that would mean athletes who wanted to stay competitive would need to spend way more.
For us, the only barrier should be your potential.
If you are talented enough, we have a system that means that you can get absolutely to the top of the podium in your sport and you shouldn't be hampered by the ability to buy it.
£50,000 swimming costume.
But even within the rules of conventional sport, those with financial means can gain an advantage.
Think about the Olympics.
Some nations, like the UK, have the money to buy the latest aerodynamic cycling kit or build high-tech bobsleigh training facilities.
Many nations don't.
If we're talking about kind of fair competition...
At, say, an Olympic Games, there are some nations that have a bigger pot of money to spend than others.
Is there a risk then that technological advantage that finances allow does mean that in certain sports, it will just be countries with the deepest pockets that are able to squeeze out that extra 2%, 3% that gets you the medal?
Look, I think in many respects, we've been living in that world for the last four, eight...
12 years, that where you've been able to invest in, whether it's technology or innovation, or even just access to coaching and some world-class training facilities, that can be the thing that has made the difference historically between not being on the podium and potentially winning a gold medal.
I think from our perspective, we've obviously run an innovation programme for a number of years in the British system.
It's the envy of the world in many areas, aerodynamics with cycling and skeleton and triathlon.
And we're really...
proud of innovative work that we have done.
But you're right, there comes a point where we have to ask ourselves the question of how much is too much.
How much is too much?
As sports technology develops and the level of tracking, monitoring and tweaking of athletes improves, how can we tell when we're no longer comfortable with the role being played by technology?
The most obvious recent example of this is the Adidas Supershoe.
The midsole splits down in two foam pieces.
This is our lightest.
super political foam ever.
Patrick Nava, head of running at Adidas, helped develop the super shoe that broke the two hour marathon record earlier this year.
It's one of the biggest breakthroughs in athletics that we've seen in decades.
In the middle, like a sandwich construction, you have our stiffening elements.
The stiffening elements in super shoes evolved from a plate to the rods, which is what we have, which basically mimic the bones in your foot.
Every part of this shoe is engineered to recover as much energy as possible for the runner from every step.
Last but not least, you have an extremely light upper.
The inspiration of the material was from the sales of kite surfing.
So we tried to have a very stable material to keep the foot locked in place while trying to go as light as possible.
So what stops this technological advantage, this shoe, from being considered cheating?
Well, actually, there are specific regulations for trainers set out by World Athletics.
That's the international body that regulates elite running competition.
It's very simple.
There's basically two, which is one, the total height of the midsole, so basically under the heel, cannot surpass 40 millimeters.
And then you have to have one stiffening element only in a single plane.
That's it.
And for an athlete to be able to race and that result to be valid, it has to be approved by World Athletics.
These simple constraints, 40mm and one stiffening element, are what separates this legal shoe from being illegal cheating.
But there's another issue, of course.
These shoes are expensive.
It is a very high price point at $500.
To be completely frank, this basically covers the cost of materials and not even the entire cost of development.
So with a $500 price tag, these shoes are too expensive for most amateur runners.
And even Adidas says they're making a loss.
But the company still thinks it's worthwhile because this technology can push the limits of what humans are capable of.
Mark Murkowski, Adidas' head of innovation, says that beyond the marathon, the company is looking at even more extreme endurance events.
We built a shoe for a race last year when we said, like, we want to be the first ones that kind of like run 100 kilometers under six hours.
So what we knew, we would run this towards the end of August in Nardo, southern Italy.
Around about 27, 28 degrees, we knew it's around 70% humidity.
So we built a shoe together with five ultra-endurance runners, which was a shoe where we said, like, let's ignore world athletics regulations for the time being.
A shoe with an engineered foam layer can return even more energy to the runner and make it more pleasant to run 100 kilometers in 28-degree heat.
And the fact is, sports companies are working on all kinds of new ways to push the boundaries.
Patrick and Mark at Adidas say that clothes are the next step.
There are vests made of freezer bag material that use chemicals to cool the body, shorts with special elastic components to aid muscle movement, and jackets with built-in fans for Formula One drivers.
But is all this slick technical kit fair?
Radical advances in sports technology are already a source of growing concern.
When those super shoes were first available in Ethiopia, the first thing that the Ethiopian Athletics Federation did was send them to the anti-doping office in Ethiopia, where they were cut up and the people looked at the spring inside them.
This is Michael Crawley, an anthropologist at Durham University who studies performance enhancements and has previously written a book about running in Ethiopia.
They were seen very much as an unfair advantage, but people...
You know, in the Ethiopian Federation didn't really have any power over what world athletics did when they decided to introduce those shoes.
Ethiopian runners, along with their competitors in neighbouring Kenya, have dominated long distance running for decades.
That's despite the fact they often lack the funding and training facilities available to their rivals in other countries.
New expensive super shoes became just the latest hurdle for these athletes to overcome.
The only way to get them was to buy them from athletes who were already sponsored.
by companies like Nike and Adidas at hugely inflated prices.
There's basically a secondary market that's popped up around these high-tech shoes.
And getting hold of a pair can be the difference between being another great Ethiopian runner and a world record breaker.
Michael's next project is about the enhanced games.
He thinks it's a really important development in the ethics of sport, and it raises some big questions about the role of science and technology.
He attended the event in Las Vegas, and he says to understand the debates around fairness, it's worth asking where the idea for clean, fair sport came from in the first place.
Controlling doping in sport has always been seen as very important for portraying a particular image of sport to society more generally.
So if you look at 19...
60s Council of Europe conversations about anti-doping, you have people saying things like, we have to keep the ideal of sports pure for all mankind.
We need athletes to be pure in order to set a particular kind of example, which I think is why things like marijuana and recreational drugs remain on the banned list.
It's not necessarily because they're dangerous or because they're performance enhancing, but athletes are expected to live up to these kinds of particular ideals of purity, which kind of go back to English boarding schools and this idea that we're creating particular kinds of people by getting them to play sport.
Michael says this long-held tradition has put a huge focus on stopping athletes taking pharmaceutical performance enhancers.
Much less has been done to tackle the other inequalities in sport.
the global sort of ethical system works with sport, we basically boil down the fairness of global sport to the existence of particular kind of pharmaceuticals in the bloodstream.
And we ignore basically everything else.
So if you talk to Ethiopian athletes about fairness, they'll tend to say something like, sporting fairness is about everybody having access to the same thing.
They'll talk about the fair distribution of resources and opportunities, basically.
So I'll give you a little example from...
my ethnography in Ethiopia.
One morning we went to training and the sub-agent of our group had loads of multivitamins in a bag from this Dutch company called Virtuos, which is a, they do specifically batch tested clean vitamin pills.
But the sub-agent had wrapped each of the boxes of vitamin pills up with black bin bags and then taped them up.
And he gave them to the athletes in this very secretive way, told them to put them at the bottom of their kit bags and not show anybody.
And that was because not everybody had access to these.
particularly high quality multivitamins, they were seen as immoral in that Ethiopian context.
And while Michael's example might seem trivial, it's symptomatic of a far bigger dilemma facing the world of sport.
Do you think there's a risk here that we're going to end up with a sort of increasing bifurcation between athletes or countries, regions, even different sports where this sort of notion of purity causes a divide between the countries and the athletes that...
embrace every technological advantage and the others who want to keep sports as pure as possible.
Yeah.
And I think it probably won't even be between different countries.
I think even within countries, it will be like that.
I think we need to think about how that might change the meaning of sport as well, because if you interview...
the enhanced games athletes, some of them would say, it's very strange to take all these substances, train hard and wake up with no soreness and never feel discomfort and never feel like, you know, you can't get up and train.
Because if you think about what we tend to value in sport, it's sacrifice, putting up with suffering to a certain extent, working through these things.
If that's no longer something that people need to do, then, you know, what characteristics of the sports person?
are we going to be celebrating?
So if you think about the super shoes, for example, lots of the coverage of world records now focuses on the footwear rather than giving you any information about the athlete, their backgrounds, what their motivations are and things like that.
So I think we need to think carefully about how much we place emphasis on the technology and how much we want to maintain some sense of what sport means to us, I suppose.
The fear is that the more we embrace technology in pursuit of higher performance, the more we sort of shun the humanity of it all, which is what we're supposed to be celebrating in the first place.
Exactly.
Technological breakthroughs have meant fairness in sport is no longer clear cut.
The divide between haves and have-nots is worsening.
The world of sport decided long ago that certain things are cheating.
Namely taking certain drugs to boost the body's ability to train and compete.
But increasingly, the lines between innovation and unfair advantage are being blurred.
Sport will have to keep adjusting.
Beating the marathon time of two hours was unthinkable 20 years ago and would have seemed superhuman 100 years ago.
Sport, ultimately, is about discovering what the human body is capable of.
But guardrails are needed to keep the playing field as level as possible.
Whether it's for athletes, coaches or us spectators, technology is changing sports.
Now the challenge is managing how the tech is used without it destroying the reason we started watching and competing in the first place.
This season of Tectonic was presented by me, Josh Noble.
Our producer is Josh Gabbard-Doyon.
Our senior producer is Edwin Lane.
Executive producer Topher Forges.
Mixing and engineering by Breen Turner and Sam Giavinko.
Our head of audio is Flo Phillips.
Special thanks this season to David Shepard, Florian Muller and Robert Orr.
The latest episode of The Next Five podcast is all about logic and trust in AI.
I speak with Scott Wiltermuth at AWS.
With the Gen AI, there's always an error rate.
Automate reasoning, there's never an error rate.
Mary Martin at BCG.
It is culture, not code.
Organizational inertia is an incredibly powerful force.
And Varun Chikara at ADP.
What we should be teaching the next generation is this form of discipline judgment.
You can listen to the full episode of The Next Five wherever you get your...
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