Dope and glory: inside the Enhanced Games | The Economist

Sport

Dope and glory: inside the Enhanced Games<br>Athletes want to break records. The founders hope to take performance-boosting drugs mainstream

May 21st 2026

By Barclay Bram and Natasha Loder

Almost every day for the past 15 years, Ben Proud had to make his whereabouts known to the doping authorities. Travelling for work? His hotel would have to be logged on a clunky website. Staying over at a new girlfriend’s place? That would have to be recorded, too. It didn’t make for the most spontaneous of lives. But it’s what you have to do if you want to be an Olympic athlete.

In 2024 Proud had won a silver medal in the 50-metre freestyle swim at the Paris Olympics. It had been his third Olympics and the high point of his career. But last November he was in a slump. He was 31, old for a competitive swimmer. His knees hurt and his back was shot. There was a persistent, dull pain in the tendons around his elbows.

One Wednesday at 6am he heard a knock at the door of his flat in Stratford, east London. He opened it to find a man and a woman, sent by UK Anti-Doping, Britain’s drug-testing body. They were there to check that Proud was complying with what is known among Olympic athletes as “the Code”, a set of regulations from the World Anti-Doping Agency that includes an agreement not to use certain substances.

Proud knew the testers might pay him a visit that day, but hadn’t expected them to come so early. He had gone to the toilet just before they arrived, so they would all have to wait before another urine sample could be collected. The three of them didn’t make small talk; rather, they sat on the sofa and looked silently out of the window at the view.

Nearly two hours later, Proud was ready. The male tester followed him into the flat’s only bathroom, an ensuite; they had to creep quietly through the bedroom to avoid waking Emily Barclay, Proud’s partner, who is also a competitive swimmer. Proud found the experience profoundly awkward. “You stand there with your trousers around your ankles and your bare arse out like a schoolboy,” he said.

Proud knew it was a Faustian bargain: taking part would tarnish his reputation, and he would probably be barred from mainstream competition for ever

After the testers left, Barclay emerged tentatively from the bedroom. She passed Proud her phone to show him a piece of news. “Kristian has just broken the world record,” she said. Proud stared at the screen, confused. He frequently competed against Kristian Gkolomeev, a Greek swimmer. They’d tied for fifth place at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, but Proud had comfortably beaten him in Paris. He couldn’t believe that Gkolomeev had somehow become the fastest 50-metre swimmer in history—in the off-season, no less.

Reading on, Proud learned that Gkolomeev had signed up with the Enhanced Games, a company that was seeking to disrupt conventional sport by allowing athletes to compete while on performance-enhancing drugs. Later that day, Enhanced (as the wider company is sometimes known) released a documentary about Gkolomeev’s swim, which he had done alone in a pool in North Carolina. Not only had he taken the world record—Enhanced had paid him $1m for the achievement. “The swimming world is going to hate every second of it,” Brett Hawke, Enhanced’s head swimming coach, says in the documentary. “This is where human performance is going. And I think a lot of people will start to embrace it over time.”

As the couple watched the documentary, Barclay had to pause it several times because Proud had been so overwhelmed with emotion. His pursuit of Olympic glory had come with steep costs. He’d grown up in Malaysia and moved to Britain to train when he was 16, leaving most of his family behind. There had been years when he had scraped by on nothing more than the £28,000 ($38,000) stipend provided by the national aquatic sports association to elite swimmers. He wasn’t sure what was in store for him after his swimming career came to an end—which, at his age, could be as soon as his next injury.

New highs Ben Proud, a swimmer, is taking part in the Enhanced Games If Proud joined Enhanced—and adopted its controversial drug protocols—he could keep swimming at the highest level, perhaps even faster than before, and potentially earn a life-changing amount of money. But he knew it was a Faustian bargain: taking part would tarnish his reputation, and he would probably be barred from mainstream competition for ever.

Proud asked Barclay if she would judge him if he threw in his lot with the Enhanced Games. When she said she wouldn’t, he called his agent. He was ready for something new.

On May 24th around 50 athletes—in swimming, weightlifting and athletics—will gather in Las Vegas for the first Enhanced Games. Up to $25m in prizes will be awarded, with $250,000 going to those who win first place and bonuses of up to $1m to world-record breakers. Around 2,500 people will watch from the...