“Nothing’s changed for me,” British swimmer Ben Proud told The Athletic this week. “I’m doing exactly what I love. Just in a different competition.”
But that is not quite the case. Proud’s decision to join the Enhanced Games is far more significant than that. This is not merely a change of format, like a sprinter signing up for Grand Slam Track, or deciding to try padel or pickleball instead of tennis.
The Enhanced Games encourages the use of performance-enhancing drugs to break world records, part of a crusade to supposedly unlock the potential of human performance and save elite sport.
It is bankrolled by veteran members of the biohacking movement, with core investors including controversial tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, offering sums of up to $1million (£740,000) to break a world record. Founder Aron d’Souza told The Athletic last year that its ultimate goal is to “cheat death” because he believes “ageing is a disease that we should be able to treat, cure, and eventually solve.”
The first event in that quest will take place in Las Vegas next May, with Proud on the start line. And in signing up an Olympic medallist from Paris 2024 — Proud won silver in the 50m free — the Enhanced Games has landed its biggest fish so far.
Australian swimmer James Magnussen, a three-time world champion, was the first athlete to join the competition, though he was retired at the time, and failed in his bid to break a world record.
Then, four months ago, Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev did manage to go under Caleb Dressel’s 21.04 mark in the 50 metres freestyle, following two months of doping. His ‘achievement’ went largely unnoticed by the wider sporting world.
Despite claiming to have received 4,000 expressions of interest in a single day, the Enhanced Games had failed to announce the signings of any current top-tier talent. Proud changes that. He has an elite CV and, aged 30, had many years of high-level competition ahead of him.
It is concerning news, and for multiple reasons.
The first is athlete health. Historically, there have been clusters of athlete deaths linked to steroid use: across eastern Europe in the 1980s, throughout cycling in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And as Australian Sports Commission chief Kieren Perkins observed earlier this year, “Someone will die if we allow (the Enhanced Games) to continue to prosper and flourish.”
Greece’s Kristian Gkolomeev has signed up to the Enhanced Games (Andrej Isakovic/AFP via Getty Images)
D’Souza has said athletes will be screened “in particular for cardiac illness” and the Enhanced Games “aim to be the safest sporting event in history.” He added in his interview with The Athletic last year: “Because obviously, if an athlete has a heart attack on international television — it’s all over, right?”
Proud insists he will be judicious in his approach to performance-enhancing substances. “I’m not going to go into this thinking, ‘Just take anything you want,’” Proud said this week. “That’s not who I am and I don’t think that’s going to be helpful in sports.”
But when asked specifically about health concerns, Proud’s responses were remarkably light on detail. At best, he sounded naive; at worst, badly misinformed.
He admitted he was “coming into this blind” but insisted he was “only announcing my participation. It’s not something that I am fully understanding of. I’ve got four months to really dive into it and understand the process.”
Later, when asked what supplements he would be taking, he replied: “I probably couldn’t tell you about anything. I was sent a very brief list of things that are available and some seem really interesting.”
Had he received any assurances over financial or medical concerns? “I’m quite lucky,” came the response. “I’ve got a great agent who looks after me really well, and he managed most of those conversations.”
How heartening. Proud cites the Enhanced Games’ assertion that they have a respected medical and scientific council behind their decisions, calling it “the safest place to make the most informed decisions, because we have some of the greatest specialists from around the world.”
There is reason for treat this scepticism. When speaking to The Athletic last year, D’Souza set great store in Harvard genetics professor George Church, who had previously attracted media attention for his desire to regenerate the woolly mammoth.
In August, a paper into anti-aging gene therapy that Church co-authored was retracted by the journal that originally published it — a highly unusual step where the work within it is seen as discredited or fundamentally flawed, rather than merely posing an alternative viewpoint.
Another member of the Enhanced Games’ scientific panel, cancer specialist Justin Stebbing, was found guilty in 2020 of 33 out of 36 charges of failing to offer proper care to dying patients. He was suspended for nine months having, according to the tribunal, “breached the very core of the Hippocratic Oath”.
Stebbing, who admitted to 30 of the charges, said in his evidence to the panel that he “always did my best” but admitted he had “clearly fallen short in some cases and I’m very remorseful, upset and sad about that.”
In many ways, this all might be read solely as Proud’s concern — it is him, after all, that will bear the risk.
Proud preparing to compete at the Paris Olympics (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
But as much as it should be worrying to Proud, his defection should also sound an alarm to sporting bodies. They cannot ignore that an elite athlete, who was still a viable world and Olympic medal contender, has signed up for such a high-risk venture with so few guarantees. It demonstrates their current offering is not enough. The previous attitude of scant dismissal — “It’s all bollocks isn’t it,” said World Athletics president Seb Coe last year, when asked about the Enhanced Games — needs updating.
The Enhanced Games have targeted five sports — track and field, swimming, gymnastics, weightlifting, and combat sports — which have all had their issues with pay. The venture capitalists behind D’Souza’s offering have a far more significant bait to offer.
“They now need to make it a bit more incentivised for the athletes in the Olympics or else a lot of them are going to choose to go down this path of the Enhanced Games,” reigning Olympic gold medallist Duncan Scott told iNews in 2024.
“If there’s a lot of monetary rewards or if the sponsorships start to kick off, I can see a lot of athletes being like, ‘Yeah, why not do that for four or eight years? I can make way more money’.”
With his former team-mate’s defection, that has now come to pass. Proud will no longer be able to compete at any mainstream competition but has decided that, at this stage of his career, the economic benefits outweigh any loss in sporting prestige. As he noted in his Athletic interview, the lack of financial compensation for major success in British swimming was a running sore.
It is tempting to say good riddance but it is of no benefit to clean sport if its most talented athletes are competing in a souped-up and dangerous facsimile of their own competitions.
Duncan Scott (centre, alongside Proud, left, and Adam Barrett) warned about the lure of the Enhanced Games in 2024 (Clive Rose/Getty Images)
Imaginative ways of generating income and revenue are required to head off the danger of the Enhanced Games at the pass. It is a siren call that these bodies need to offer more, or at least stress the things they offer that the Enhanced Games don’t — long-term medical support, a pension, scientific support from widely-respected experts.
To win hearts and minds, they need compelling arguments for why they are the best option — not solely bashing the alternative. The allure of clean, open competition is self-evident. But the case needs to be made and reiterated, rather than the Enhanced Games’ threat being dismissed.
This should be a line in the sand moment — it is dangerous for Proud, dangerous for governing bodies, but also dangerous for sport itself.
(Top photo: Adam Pretty/Getty Images)
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