The Enhanced Video games Has a Date, a Host Metropolis, and a Drug-Fueled World File

The Enhanced Video games—a sort of Olympics for athletes who’re doping—as we speak introduced the date and venue for its first competitors: Might 21-24, 2026, at Resorts World Las Vegas.

Athletes competing within the occasion might be allowed to take performance-enhancing medication like testosterone and anabolic steroids which might be often banned from elite competitors, offered they’re authorized, prescribed by a physician, and brought at protected ranges.

The inaugural Enhanced Video games could have three essential sports activities: swimming (50m and 100m freestyle, and 50m and 100m butterfly), observe (100m dash, 110m/100m hurdles, and 60m sprint), and weightlifting (snatch, clear and jerk). Moderately than splitting women and men into completely different classes, athletes might be categorized primarily based on their chromosomes: There might be an XX and an XY class for every occasion.

Gkolomeev swam the 50-meter freestyle in 20.89 seconds at a pool in North Carolina, breaking a 16-year-old file.

Courtesy of Paradigm

There might be as much as $500,000 in prize cash on supply for every occasion, with $250,000 for the winner, and a bonus of $1,000,000 for anybody who breaks the 100m dash of the 50m freestyle world file. (Different world file breakers will get a bonus of $250,000.) At a glitzy press convention asserting the small print of the primary occasion, organizers additionally revealed that the Video games had helped an “enhanced athlete” break two long-standing 50m freestyle world data in swimming.

Kristian Gkolomeev, a 31-year-old Greek-Bulgarian swimmer who got here fifth within the 50m freestyle on the Olympic Video games in Paris, began his enhancement program in early February. Towards the top of that month, at a pool in Greensboro, North Carolina, he broke César Cielo’s 50-meter freestyle world file of 20.91 seconds, which had stood for 16 years. Gkolomeev swam 0.02 seconds quicker. In April, he broke Caeleb Dressel’s 2019 so-called textile world file—executed with out carrying a pace go well with—of 21.04 seconds. He swam 0.01 seconds quicker.