Let’s be clear, this isn’t a column about sport. It’s a column about a circus freakshow, masquerading as sport.
The concept of the Enhanced Games is grotesque. Where, apparently, the rules are there are no rules. Thunderdome-style. Boundaries offer nothing beyond a suggestion derived from someone’s perverse imagination; where nobody says no to anything.
Some Greek tragicomic, Kristian Gkolomeev “breaks” the men’s 50m freestyle world record, and trousers $US1 million. B.U.L.L.S.H.I.T. Kristian Gkolomeev didn’t break a world record any more than I wouldd break the 10km open-water swimming world record if I competed on a jetski. It’s a farce.
And it’s dangerous. Just think of James Magnussen jabbing himself with needles, and overdosing on testosterone, CJC-1295 and cocktails of lolly water and whatever other substances he has used that have not been properly trialled for human use. Before this week, CJC-1295 and Thymosin hadn’t made the news since the days of Stephen Dank.
Those growth hormone-releasing peptides? Well, Magnussen had better hope he’s not suffering from some undiagnosed cancer of some type, with cells starting to multiply in his system. Because introducing those peptides to cancer is like chucking petrol on the last embers of a bonfire. You can’t put on 10kg in as many days with just a diet of protein shakes and grilled chicken.
James Magnussen is injected with a performance-enhancing substance.Credit: Enhanced Games
The inescapable reality is that Gkolomeev becomes the poster child for the freak show, the first edition of which will be held, fittingly, in Las Vegas this time next year. If absurdity had a dictionary definition …
This column shouldn’t even be in the sport section of this newspaper or website because while the Enhanced Games might be a lot of things, sport it certainly ain’t.
The promulgators of these Enhanced Games – including a wake (I can’t think of a better collective noun) of vultures in suits – seek to spear the Olympic Movement and the notion of clean sport on multiple fronts, to argue there is a need for elite, international-standard athletic competition where doping is hyped as embodying the pursuit of human excellence. What absolute rot.
That the Olympic Movement is a dreadfully corrupt artifice, which forces Olympians to scratch out an existence in poverty-driven squalor and incur insurmountable debt, whereas participants in the Enhanced Games will be paid handsome base salaries and compete for “prize winnings, which will be larger than any other comparable event in history”. Garbage.
That the “anti-science dogma” of the International Olympic Committee and the most prominent professional sports leagues should be replaced by systems of supervised medical performance enhancement.
Because, apparently, “science is real and has an important place in supporting human flourishing”, and the Enhanced Games intends to serve as a “celebration of the union of athletic excellence and scientific achievement”. Again, bullshit.
And because “the Enhanced Movement believes in the medical and scientific process of elevating humanity to its full potential, through a community of committed athletes”, whereas the IOC has “weaponised the athletic community against science”.
Arrrggghhh!!! We must be deadly serious. The Enhanced Games are a dangerous, iniquitous concept.
Yes, the history of the Olympic Movement is replete with examples of those who’ve mastered the art of corruption and deceit. Yes, the IOC wastes millions and millions of Swiss francs. Yes, most athletes, worldwide, are underpaid and underfunded.
And yes, the IOC has an appalling history when it comes to matters of corruption and double-dealing. But would you seriously trust this mob to do any better, let alone to improve on it and run an entirely ethical, fair and clean show?
If you accept the essential premise of these dystopian alternate Olympics that performance-enhancing substances are required to compete at all, you must also accept the proposition that there’s no issue with very young athletes being exposed to sanctioned “enhancement” initiatives, even though it’s never once worked out well for any young athlete so indoctrinated.
And if you reckon that exposure won’t happen, there’s a dedicated page on the Enhanced Games website, where soon they’ll be selling an “enhancement plan with personalised optimisation”. You can join right now and get priority access, all for $US99 ($156). If you believe in all this hocus pocus, go join up now. Sign your own kids up, too.
Because could you countenance a day, where your 14-year-old up-and-coming athlete is put on an enhancement regime legitimised by all of this?
Australian Olympian James Magnussen.Credit: Enhanced Games
The book Faust’s Gold documents the evil inflicted on thousands of athletes manipulated by the East German doping machine. Athletes who were lied to and used as lab rats for political purposes. Athletes who in many instances took Olympic gold back to East Berlin – East German athletes “won” 107 Olympic titles between 1972 and 1980 – only to later succumb to terrible disease, irreversible organ damage and horrible cancers, all caused directly by doping.
Where’s the threshold of distinction between a state-sponsored doping program overseen by the Stasi, and this nascent concept promoted as the Enhanced Games?
Doping isn’t a recent phenomenon. It’s been around forever. The Ancient Greeks were in on it. In the late 1800s, athletes in an array of sports started using strychnine – rat poison – because of its convulsant effects and consequent performance enhancement. A century ago, whole clubs in European football were hooked on cocaine and sipping on “speedy coffees”.
Contrastingly, what’s far newer is the adoption of rules and methods to combat and govern doping. For the Olympic Movement, those rules were first enacted in the 1960s; the first person to fail a test in 1968 was using alcohol, of all things.
Australian Enhanced Games athlete James Magnussen.Credit: Enhanced Games
Sports outlaw doping for hardly illogical reasons. First, the laws of many countries regulate the prescription, possession and administration of many classes of substances that are banned in sport: anabolic steroids are the perfect example. Because it’s dangerous, potentially deadly, and because doping renders elite sport pointless.
Moreover, in countries like Spain, France and Italy, using and trafficking substances prohibited in sport is a criminal offence. Many offenders have been locked up.
The improper administration of certain substances, including those which are illegal to possess for no valid reason, can contribute to or cause permanent injury and disability, or worse. Athletes have died on the quest to achieve pharmacological superiority. Often, they’re hoodwinked by shady doctors and other nefarious types who pretend to care for the welfare of athletes. The use by desperate and unwitting athletes of human growth hormones and growth factor modulators is tremendously dangerous.
James Magnussen after taking performance-enhancing substances.Credit: Enhanced Games
If the outcome of sporting competition is permitted to be influenced by, or determined by which athletes have the access to the best doctors and chemists, sport ceases to be sport in its essential sense; it becomes a kind of travelling circus. The glorious uncertainty and all that evaporates.
And as to the notion that non-doped athletes might end up competing side-by-side with juiced-up competitors; that’s absurd. James Magnussen has called out Cam McEvoy already. Can you just imagine the shenanigans that’ll transpire over the next year, as the Enhanced Games craves legitimacy.
First, why in hell would McEvoy, an Olympic champion, ever stoop so low? Second, do you reckon the IOC, WADA and World Aquatics would just sit back and decide to not introduce rules to cover off on the consequences of clean athletes competing against doped ones?
If there’s no code of conduct or sporting rules in force at the moment to cater for the issue of aspirants to compete at Los Angeles in 2028 being forced to not compete in the Enhanced Games, the threat of expulsion will be introduced into international sporting rules in coming months. Either that, or sports governing bodies will use existing codes of conduct and rules to their full effect.
Athletes can’t be designed, constructed and endlessly tinkered with like Formula One cars. The concept of an alternate games, at which athletes are expected to juice themselves to the eyeballs and do God-knows-what-else in the quest for high prizemoney, is obscene and a human tragedy waiting to happen.
