Enhanced Games are not a science experiment. They're a drug commercial dressed up as a series of events

Keep this in mind about the Enhanced Games, the multi-sport event in which doping is somewhere between allowed and encouraged, and which debuts in Las Vegas in May:

It’s an infomercial.

Yes, they’ve signed some accomplished sprinters in recent weeks. Shockoria Wallace has never cracked the 11-second barrier in the 100 metres, but she’s Jamaican, which makes her, in the eyes of the drive-by fan the Enhanced Games figures to attract, elite by association. 

Earlier this month, Marvin Bracy-Williams joined. He left the 2022 world championship with two silver medals, so he has been elite. Full stop. No qualifiers.

But he has raced sparingly since then for various reasons, the current and most pressing is that he’s serving a 45-month ban for using testosterone and misleading investigators.

And then there’s Hafthor Bjornsson, the world champion strongman and Game of Thrones star, whose presence attracts attention but muddies the event’s premise.

If you’re trying to demonstrate what’s possible when top tier athletes start taking PEDs, what do you even prove by adding a superstar from a sport where doping is the norm?

Refer to the previous sentence. It’s the attention. He has 4.4 million Instagram followers.

And those eyeballs matter, because while the Enhanced Games is a track meet, a swim meet, and a strongman event, all those contests combine to form an advertisement for testosterone replacement theory.

That’s why two separate buttons on the games’ website land on the same page, where you can take a questionnaire that helps determine which form of testosterone – oral or injectable – is best for you, and join an online queue to order Enhanced brand hormones when they hit the market.

Problem.

It’s product positioning.

British sprinter Reece Prescod, who committed in early January,  told reporters back home that he’s not taking any drugs… yet. And Fred Kerley, the 2022 world champ at 100 metres maintains that he’s a PED-free athlete, even as he preps for the kind of all-drug Olympics that was used to only exist as Saturday Night Live satire.

But if we don’t know for sure if the athletes competing in May are taking Enhanced brand PEDs, we can’t gauge the effectiveness of the company’s TRT regimen.