Why we should say no to the 'enhanced games'

In recent months, the talk of the “Enhanced Games” has been getting louder. Promoters pitch it as a new frontier of sport: a stage where performance-enhancing drugs are permitted, even celebrated, and where athletes supposedly compete “without hypocrisy.” They argue it’s time to abandon outdated restrictions and let science take the shackles off.

I find this vision deeply troubling. Beyond the hype, there are serious legal and ethical reasons why we should not entertain such an event. Sport is more than speed, strength, or medals. It’s about fairness, safety, and integrity. The Enhanced Games undermines all three.

This post takes a broad principle-based position but coaches with similar views will also have personal reflections and experiences to add. For example, at a quite personal level, having spent most of my adult life coaching athletes — from kids taking their first uncertain steps onto a platform to lifters preparing for national championships — I can’t stay silent on this. What they’re proposing isn’t progress. It’s a betrayal of what sport means.

Athlete safety and duty of care

Every coach carries a duty of care to their athletes. We’re charged not just with improving performance, but with ensuring long-term wellbeing. Allowing, let alone encouraging, unrestricted use of performance-enhancing substances flips that duty on its head.

Drugs like anabolic steroids, EPO, and human growth hormone have well-documented side effects: cardiovascular disease, liver damage, reproductive harm, psychiatric disorders. For younger athletes, the risks are amplified and lifelong. Ethically, no sport can justify a structure where harm is a prerequisite for participation.

Law also plays a role here. In many jurisdictions, the supply and administration of these drugs outside therapeutic use is illegal. Organising a competition that openly promotes their use could expose athletes, coaches, sponsors, and organisers to criminal liability.

Coercion by culture

Proponents of the Enhanced Games like to talk about “freedom of choice.” But anyone who has coached knows that athletes don’t operate in a vacuum. If the gold medal is reserved for those willing to inject, swallow, or inhale more than the next competitor, then choice disappears.

Young athletes with dreams will face an impossible calculation: enhance or walk away. That is not freedom; that is coercion by culture.

Ethically, this creates a sport where only the chemically modified can compete at the top level, excluding those who value their health or wish to stay clean. It’s no different from workplace environments where unsafe practices are normalised — we rightly regulate those industries. Why should sport be different?

Integrity and the ‘spirit of sport’

Sport has always relied on agreed boundaries. The rules define the game, and within those lines we measure greatness. Remove the rules, and you remove the meaning.

The Enhanced Games asks us to applaud numbers stripped of context. Did the sprinter’s 100 metres come from hours on the track, or from a lab formula? Did the lifter build their total through disciplined training cycles, or through chemical loading?

Without integrity, records lose their resonance and audiences lose their trust.

From a legal perspective, sports governance bodies — from WADA to the IOC — have embedded anti-doping codes recognised by governments worldwide. Hosting an alternative that openly defies those codes risks lawsuits, bans, and international isolation.

Commercial and social responsibility

Sponsors, broadcasters, and governments are acutely aware of reputation. Aligning with a competition that promotes drug use would expose them to accusations of negligence or complicity. Insurance, too, becomes a major issue — who underwrites an event where participants knowingly risk serious harm?

And what message does it send to our communities? In New Zealand, we work hard to teach kids that sport is about teamwork, discipline, and respect. A competition that celebrates shortcuts undermines decades of positive role-modelling.

This is a line we should not cross

The Enhanced Games is not a bold step forward; it is a dangerous step backwards. Legally fraught, ethically compromised, and socially corrosive, it fails the test of what sport should stand for.

Our job as coaches, athletes, and fans is to protect the integrity of competition and the welfare of those who dream of greatness. We need to align principles with practice - my next post will take a look at that. In the meantime, we can celebrate science in training, recovery, and equipment. But when it comes to performance-enhancing drugs, the line is clear.

A line not to cross