The contents of this article are the opinion of its author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of SwimSwam as a whole.
We’ll start with the money. That’s where these things always start, right? You can’t pay a mortgage with morals, can’t live off liberty. The best way to ensure something new like this is a success is to go around offering huge stacks of cash to the people you need involved.
Because it works, doesn’t it? Sport is a sanctimonious pursuit, a level playing field that isn’t really very level. There is a lot of money involved but relatively little of it ends up with the people generating the product, the thing that, y’know, people are paying to see.
Sports like football, baseball, basketball, soccer (it pains me as a Brit to say that) are flush with cash, their stars on multi-million dollar contracts and with enough money trickling (and I mean trickling) down their respective pyramids for a relatively deep field of pros. The others, handily named “Olympic” sports after the competition which doesn’t really financially support most of the athletes involved, are less well off.
But sports are expensive. More so at the top level, where an athlete’s life must revolve around their training, their aims, decisions made with both eyes if not sometimes a hand as well on how to extract the absolute most from themselves to achieve a singular goal. Nutrition. Equipment. Coaching. Competition. Travel. Nutrition again. These things don’t pay for themselves.
That is why you get athletes competing at the highest level who have to fund it themselves. Georgia Hunter Bell, the 2024 Olympic bronze medalist in the women’s 800m, worked full time in cybersecurity until after the Games. Nic Fink started working at Quanta Utility Engineering in March 2023, winning two silver medals at the 2023 World Championships and another silver medal in the 100 breast at the Paris Olympics while working.
What could those athletes do if their sport allowed them to earn enough to fund themselves? What would athletes like that do if someone came along and promised exactly that? Freedom to focus on yourself full-time. Just sign on the dotted line. Bob’s your uncle.
Hunter Armstrong quite possibly would have had to retire before the LA Olympic Games in two summer’s time. With a few hundred thousand dollars in his back pocket, that is no longer the case. He didn’t dope. He wore the suit, one which most swimmers would probably love to try out, just once, just for the thrill. And he swam two fairly fast times, 24.21 in the 50 back and 48.09 in the 100 free.
No, the latter was not a PB, as Enhanced’s stream showed. But he did win the former event, the first of three clean athletes last Sunday to take top spot and the quarter-million dollar bonus that came with it. He was drug-tested by USADA right after racing. Kurt Hanson claimed at the start of the livestream that he had already been tested three times in Las Vegas.
That can be the story lost amid the online histrionics around the Enhanced Games. For those athletes involved, this will be the best a competition will ever treat them. And, they could compete clean. The death knell which rang for the legitimate careers of so many involved did not ring for everyone.
That is important. It is a little like offering a diver the opportunity to unlock the shark cage door, but with just a touch less risk and a whole lot more payoff. Show that we are not purely doing this to sell our own pharmaceuticals. We are a serious event. And we will make it worth it to you – without you having to give up on your future Olympic dreams.
Among the major Olympic sports, swimming is potentially one of the worst funded for its top athletes. Winning gold at the swimming World Championships nets an athlete $20,000 – doing so at the athletics World Championships is worth $150,000. Winning Olympic gold comes with no prize money from the IOC at all.
Ben Proud, the biggest name to join Enhanced’s swimming program, has won almost every title it is possible to win in the 50 free. He is the 2022 world champion in the event, the 2024 Olympic silver medalist, the 2023 European Short Course champion, a top-five performer in the event. But he still struggled for funding. His $375,000 payout in Las Vegas was more prize money than he won in a swimming career spanning over a decade.
That makes it easier for someone who is willing to offer that kind of cash. And those people are rarely the ones with the sport’s best interest in mind. Konstantin Grigorishin, the ISL founder, had a genuine passion for swimming and established the elite Energy Standard Swim Club in 2012. Christian Angermayer, Enhanced’s majority shareholder? The man who employs bounty hunters to find dinosaur fossils for him strikes you as a little more vain.
So no, even with the money on offer, a $25 million prize pool in total, the three sports involved have not materially changed. They are not professional now. The newly-announced $10 million bonus for breaking Usain Bolt’s 100m sprint world record does not allow athletes to “get paid”. It opens up the possibility of a single athlete being paid.
Pointing it out feels a little fastidious. But it is an important difference between Enhanced and something like baseball, where a whole league is earning. LIV Golf was a recent example which felt similar to the Enhanced Games. It paid huge amounts of money to select world-class athletes, who, in turn, were open supporters of the organization. Five years on, with little going for its participants outside of the money with no PGA tour points available, its main backer, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), has just pulled their funding and the future of the competition is decidedly murky.
The investment by Enhanced does not stop at the prize pool. There are nutritionists, training camps, physical therapists, coaches, doctors, all geared (pun intended) towards maximising the performance of the athletes. Even with just 42 athletes, the sums would have been significant. The level of care was impressive. It just would never be scaled up to the athlete numbers of even a tenfold increase.
The company burned through over $20 million between December 2025 and March 2026, according to their accounts. With a $25 million prize pool and an estimated $50 million spent on the venue (it is unclear if any of this was included in the accounts up to March this year), that puts the spend at just under $100 million already in 2026. With no major sponsors, that cash has to be raised from, – drum roll please – selling the same enhancements the athletes are using to the general public.
Enhanced have not been hiding that fact. Kurt Hanson’s “if you’re a youngster, go check them out” in reference to the Enhanced products on the livestream seemed a bit on the nose, but the message leading into the Enhanced Games has been ‘these supplements not just safe – they are actively beneficial to your health’. Both Angermayer and Enhanced’s CEO Maximilian Martin have highlighted the prevalence in use of these drugs among those with the financial means to do so – Angermayer himself is an avid user of testosterone replacement therapy.
And this is actually somewhere where they do score a point on the IOC. Christian Angermayer pointed out in a recent interview with Sean Ingle at The Guardian that “the business model of sports is using athletes to sell products”.
The Olympics are probably the biggest marketing event in the world. Coca-Cola’s four-Games deal from 2021-2032 is valued around $3 billion. Visa’s is worth nine figures per Games. The Olympics is also being used to sell things, but none of the money, as IOC president Kirsty Coventry has so helpfully cleared up for us, either does or is likely to flow directly to the athletes.
There is a difference. PED use is not something to be encouraged. There is a reason many young cyclists died suddenly in the 90’s, and that these substances are not generally marketed to the general public. While the drugs Enhanced are peddling are FDA-approved, that can often be with medical purposes in mind rather than daily use, such as Sermorelin. The athletes involved are taking supplements under relatively strict conditions. There are no such limitations when you are taking them at home.
And no, Martin’s oft-repeated claim that 43% of Olympic athletes admit to doping is not quite correct. He is likely referencing a 2011 WADA survey based on anonymized randomized polling at two athletics events held in the same year – the World Championships and Pan-Arab Games.
The paper, not released by WADA for nearly six years in rather opaque circumstances, is an embarrassment for proponents of clean sport. But it was one carried out on a single sport a decade and a half ago. It was not a survey of Olympians, and it was not carried out by the IOC. That is not sufficient ballast to ground his claims that most Olympic athletes are doping anyway, just not being caught.
Is he aware of the actual paper and is being deliberately misleading? Or does he not really care about being factually accurate, because who in the echo chamber that is Enhanced was going to call him out? Kristian Gkolomeev’s 100 free time was also not the 2nd-fastest swim in history, as he claimed in an open letter this week. “Alternative facts” are all the rage nowadays; it is not particularly surprising they have been utilised by Enhanced.
So what about the marketing team – the athletes themselves? The track portion was rather lackluster. Fred Kerley is probably best described as “spiky”, but brings the peacocking and showmanship that the Enhanced Games so desperately wants. The fact that his winning time of 9.97 seconds would have placed him 2nd at the UIL Texas State 6A Championships a week prior, behind 10th-grader Dilon Mitchell’s 9.92, was a little less than ideal.
Given his claim prior to the Enhanced Games that he would “destroy the world record soon”, that time is objectively slow. Yes there were two resets due to false starts. But Kerley ran 9.81 in Paris in 2024, owns a best of 9.76, and was probably the most high-profile name on the lineup for Enhanced. Getting a slower winning time than all three Diamond League meets so far this season probably wasn’t what the organisers were hoping for.
Yes, no one is getting excited if Kerley had announced instead that he might, maybe, possibly get close to a time that was nearly as fast as Bolt’s. But the Enhanced Games seem to operate purely on superlatives and hyperbole. If it can’t live up to that, will anyone outside it be particularly interested in the event anymore?
The rest of the field was relatively poor. No other man broke 10 seconds in the final, with a steep drop-off in times after Kerley and second place Emmanuel Matadi (10.05). The women’s side was even less impressive, with a time of just 11.26 required for Tristan Evelyn to take the win. Shockoria Wallace placed 6th in a time of 13.30 to win $20,000, slower than every single runner at those Texas State championships.
Weightlifting, which had been so rocked by Olympic doping scandals that it was left off the initial program for the 2028 edition, fared slightly better. Several athletes set personal bests. Boady Santavy was close to exceeding the legitimate men’s 94kg snatch world record mark with a near-miss on his 183kg lift. Hafthor Bjornsson, the strict deadlift world record-holder at 510kg, was not far away from completing a lift at 515kg.
But outside the pool, the results overall were not particularly impressive. No world records, badly missing the commentator’s predictions of “several”, and a feeling that despite the drugs, these athletes were still materially the same as ever: some very fast, very strong men and women, who generally were not the fastest or strongest. World record hype turned into a discussion on how impressive it was that older athletes were still competitive.
In the pool though we did see some genuinely impressive swims, with the caveat that the best came from athletes who moved to Enhanced immediately after officially retiring.
Emily Barclay swam 24.09 in the 50 freestyle, a full 0.85 seconds under her legitimate PB from 2019. Ben Proud went 22.32 in the 50 fly, just 0.05 seconds off Andrii Govorov’s legitimate world record, and 20.98 in the 50 free. Kristian Gkolomeev added a scorching 46.60 in the 100 free to his standout 20.81 in the 50 free, both of them faster than any super-suited athlete ever swam. Cody Miller’s 26.55 in the 50 breast was one of the more unexpected swims, but was massively under his legitimate best and is a serious time.
Of course, every one of those athletes was in a full-length polyurethane suit. The effect of these should not be underestimated. The winning times at the 2011 World Championships, the first since they were banned, were mostly significantly slower than two years before. The winning time in just three individual events was faster at Shanghai 2011, while in a staggering 15 it was slower by at least 1.5%.
Is it then surprising that all of the truly “impressive” performances came in the pool? Not particularly. The bets were hedged. What casual viewer knows swimsuit discourse? That the benefit from the suits is somewhere between 1.5%-3.5%, with the full polyurethane suits estimated to provide a performance improvement of more than 3% in 50m or 100m races. It is an easy, and more importantly near-foolproof, way to boost performance for a spectacle built on that exact promise.
And the suits helped to do exactly that. A “PB” rate of nearly 50% (17/36) is relatively high, with ten of the 18 athletes involved dipping under at least one lifetime best. Gkolomeev’s 50 free gave Enhanced the world record-level performance that they were angling for all evening – and was certainly better broadcast than Gretchen Walsh’s 100 fly world record from the beginning of May.
But would the athletes be doing this if they did not have the money dangled in front of them? If they were paying for the supplements and the data tracking out of pocket? A lot of them have spoken about setting personal bests and feeling like they had a new lease of life over the last four months. How much of the latter is from the doping and the suits and the performance in the pool, and how much is from the financial freedom the promise of a minimum of $100,000 brings?
Some of the athletes, maybe most, genuinely believe in Enhanced’s message. But every single one of them has a financial incentive to do so. The money they are earning has been held up as one of the main themes of this event, by the organisers and by the athletes themselves. That is why they have targeted sports in which financial payoffs are almost non-existent. There will never be an enhanced soccer tournament. The intent may be soulless, but the people running this thing are smart.
That is why the Enhanced Games is unlikely to be more than a gimmick. Significant amounts of money have been invested by people who are generally keen to make a profit and quitting now, at what looks like its financial nadir, would be poor business. But the level of athlete care and the financial incentives from this edition? That almost certainly will not be rolled out to a 400-person event. Clean competitors are unlikely to be quite so handsomely rewarded in future. And without those two aspects, the calculus on whether it is worth it for an athlete, clean or not, becomes more tangled.
The Olympics is Enhanced’s white whale, the phantom they are chasing like a dog snapping at the stars. The people involved in the latter don’t really understand what it is that makes the former, for all its many, many, imperfections, the spectacle that it is. The majority of people are not obsessed with the bio-hacking and anti-aging agents that they themselves are. Bryan Johnson is an aberration. Watching influencers whip themselves into a frenzy over whether 50 Enhanced athletes could beat a gorilla seems mind-numbingly soulless.
We watch sports for the stories. We love the underdog, the returning champ, the athlete who reached the top of the mountain after all seemed lost. It’s tough not to get behind those narratives. But this? This was slightly sour. A bitter taste in the mouth. Not putrid, no. Not with the understandable reasoning for a lot of these athletes being here. But certainly not minty-fresh.
Will it get any sweeter with time? It does not seem too likely. Those who were on board were from the start. The stock price of Enhanced is just over half of what it was a week ago. The hype seemed forced, in the way that an elephant on the moon seems forced. Yes, it is possible. Yes, getting it there is somewhat impressive. But, why? And no, we don’t want to see you do it again.
As a marketing exercise the Enhanced Games may in time achieve its aim. The exposure so far has been disproportionate to both the size and quality of the event. But changing the world? That seems just another Las Vegas mirage.