<strong>The Enhanced Games Flopped—But It Could Have an Effect on Sports Culture for Years to Come</strong>

Reported by Women's Health Magazine.

The Enhanced Games arrived with a provocative premise—a self-styled superhuman Olympics where doping wasn't just permitted but celebrated—and left with a whimper. Across swimming, track, and weightlifting, only one world record fell: Kristian Gkolomeev shaved 0.07 seconds off the men's 50-meter freestyle mark, while wearing a polyurethane suit that's banned in sanctioned competition. Hardly the dawn of a new era. But according to Women's Health Magazine, NSCA-certified strength and conditioning specialist Aja Campbell—who has coached UFC fighters, Team USA Olympic athletes, and high school competitors—warns that the Games' underwhelming debut doesn't mean it disappears quietly. The cultural damage may already be in motion.

The pitch sounds almost reasonable on the surface: everyone's doping anyway, so why not make it safer? What that argument conveniently skips is the actual risk profile. The substances reportedly administered—testosterone, anabolic agents, human growth hormone, erythropoiesis-stimulating agents—are FDA-regulated, not FDA-endorsed. They've been linked to myocardial remodeling, arrhythmia, thrombotic events, and sudden cardiac death. These effects are cumulative and largely irreversible, which is precisely why both WADA and USADA ban them. The Games attempted to counter safety concerns with an internal clinical trial involving 36 of 42 athletes over 25 weeks, with a 5.5-year follow-up window. Campbell is unequivocal: that timeline is insufficient to measure true long-term consequences. It's observational data collection dressed up as science.

Who Actually Gets Left Behind

The trial's design also exposes who was deprioritized from the start. Female participants were required to be post-menopausal, sterile, or using two forms of birth control—conditions that don't reflect the actual female athlete population. With a small sample, a narrow timeframe, and those exclusions baked in, the research doesn't hold scientific weight. Women, as usual, were an afterthought. And the framing of PED use as a career-extension tool deserves the same scrutiny: a few extra competitive years financed by long-term cardiovascular damage is not athlete empowerment—it's a bad trade with a glossy rebrand.

Zoom out further and the systemic implications get worse. If performance enhancement becomes the norm, excellence won't belong to the most disciplined or talented athletes—it'll belong to the best-funded ones. Wealthy investors, many of whom have a direct financial stake in the PED and supplement industry, would effectively become the gatekeepers of elite sport, choosing which bodies get backed. That kind of consolidation of power has a documented track record of failing marginalized groups along lines of gender, race, and disability. Meanwhile, young athletes watching from the sidelines absorb a different lesson than the one sports are supposed to teach. Research consistently shows that youth sports build work ethic, self-esteem, cognitive performance, and mental health resilience—and 80% of female Fortune 500 CEOs played sports growing up. A generation that views competition as rigged will disengage, and lose far more than a trophy.

The Enhanced Games may have flopped in execution, but dismissing it entirely misreads the moment—the normalization of optimization culture is already reshaping how athletes at every level think about their bodies, and the cost of that shift will be paid long after the cameras are gone.

Read the original at Women's Health Magazine.