Enhanced Games: Sport isn’t always fair but doping isn’t the answer

Did you get clapped over the finish line in the school 800metres minutes after everyone else was done?

Do you occasionally still wake up panicking about how you fumbled the handover in the 4x100m, losing both the respect of your team-mates and the county championships? Is your abject performance in the dads’ egg and spoon still being brought up at parents’ evenings?

Well, great news! In 2024 you can put those humiliations behind you. It’s time to become not just a professional athlete, but a brave and pioneering one. There’s just one thing you need to do – get a serious doping regimen. And ready the wheelbarrow to collect the cash.

Even better, you will not be called a ‘dope cheat’, as that is non-inclusive language with colonial overtones. You will be known as an ‘enhanced athlete’.

Or at least that’s if founder and president of the ‘Enhanced Games’ Aron D’Souza has his way by staging an Olympic-style event next year where doping is allowed.

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Admittedly he would prefer former world champions – like Aussie swimmer James Magnussen, who says he would ‘juice to the gills’ to win a million quid by breaking the 50m freestyle record– to be headlining.

But the further you’re willing to push it, the ‘braver’ you’re willing to be, the greater, presumably, the competitive advantage.

Many – or even most – elite athletes have attributes that give them an advantage. Take Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time. He’s blessed with physical characteristics that help him swim including a disproportionately long torso for his height, above-average wingspan, lower lactic acid production rates and double-jointing in his ankles that makes his kicks more powerful.

You don’t have to think hard to identify what helps out superstars Simone Biles or LeBron James height-wise. But what about mid-20th century baseball great Ted Williams or ice hockey’s Wayne Gretzky? Both were blessed with special eyesight, useful when trying to hit small objects moving at high speeds.

Williams had 20/10 vision – superior to 99 per cent of the population – while Gretzky’s peripheral vision was 
his superpower. And what about the unusual levels of focus lurking behind the eyes of England’s leading runscorer Sir Alastair Cook or squash world No.1 Nour El Sherbini?

If we all started from the same genetic point competitive sport could be equal, but then it would be exclusively down to things like affluence, support and national sports funding.

Clearly these are all significant today. There is no level playing field. Sport isn’t fair. So why not dope yourself to the eyeballs and give it a go? Sorry, heroically ‘demonstrate science’, per the Enhanced Games.

Well, because elite sport only really works when people come together in cohesive formats. In competition there are regulations on how bikes can be developed for speed, limits to what can be worn in the pool when targeting records, specifications around trainers for marathon runners.

Teams rail against restrictions and debate how fit they are for purpose. But ultimately, these are the rules. Sport is a rules-based order. You may not like how, say, the offside law has been applied, but if your striker keeps being flagged for it, there’s not much point in him saying he doesn’t agree with the principle. He needs to find another sport.

The Enhanced Games do have that sense of the kid trying to run off with the ball because they haven’t scored: ‘Fine! I’ll play my own game! It’s a one-player game.’

But hey, your body, your choice. So long as those involved don’t look too closely at the physical and mental damage caused to German Democratic Republic athletes during the period of state-sponsored doping called ‘Illustrious’ by the Enhanced Games website.

And leaving the ethics aside for one moment, the aim of the show is to beat records set in globally and historically significant contests like the Olympics, but by taking drugs. How radical are these drugs going to be?

Will the athletes be growing extra limbs? Because otherwise the sell is just a contest that looks the same but isn’t as good.

Unless… could they make the athletes glow? I do
love a light show.

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