The viewership of traditional athletics has always been dwarfed by MMA, boxing, and football. The Enhanced Games, commencing this week, might change that. The organizers have recruited an impressive cohort of ex-Olympians to participate in the first event to openly permit performance-enhancing drugs.
Despite all the moral panic it has generated, the Enhanced Games introduce nothing genuinely new to sport. It merely makes explicit what has long been implicit: that we tolerate, and even celebrate, extraordinary physical risk when the entertainment is compelling enough.
The objection from sporting bodies has been swift and categorical. World Athletics president Sebastian Coe called the concept “bollocks,” whilst WADA president Witold Bańka dismissed it as “dangerous and irresponsible.” These responses treat the Enhanced Games as an unprecedented threat to sporting integrity. However, this framing obscures a more uncomfortable truth about what we already accept in the name of sporting entertainment.
Consider boxing, a sport we’ve sanctioned for over a century. Research indicates that approximately 20% of professional boxers develop a progressive brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and the American Association of Neurological Surgeons estimates that 90% of boxers will sustain a brain injury during their careers. Boxers live approximately five years less than the general population, with some studies showing even more dramatic reductions in life expectancy.
This isn’t news: we’ve known it for decades. Yet we continue to fill arenas to watch boxers trade blows and celebrate knockout victories in full knowledge that each concussive impact accelerates neurological decline. Fighters like Anthony Joshua command seven figure purses of up to $93 million as we queue for tickets to watch him send fighters to an early grave.
The spectacle justifies the risk. That’s the bargain we’ve already made, repeatedly, across multiple sports. MMA fighters break bones; rugby players incur spinal injuries; motor racing claims lives. We don’t shut these sports down because they deliver what athletics increasingly cannot: narrative drama, physical intensity, and the kind of compelling entertainment that keeps spectators engaged year-round, not just during Olympic cycles when a bit of national pride kicks in and gets blood pumping.
The Enhanced Games simply extends this logic to a new domain. If we accept brain trauma for entertainment, why reject the risks associated with pharmaceutical enhancement? The answer can’t be that drugs are somehow different because doping has never been absent from elite sport. Despite decades of anti-doping efforts, positive tests continue to emerge. Detection consistently lags behind innovation.
The real issue is that traditional athletics has failed to evolve into the entertainment paradigm modern spectators demand. Track and field offers athletic purity but struggles to match the drama that boxing and MMA deliver naturally. The market responds to this. The Enhanced Games can offer prize money that dwarfs traditional athletics because it has : sustained public interest. Every month brings headlines as new athletes sign up. Each announcement generates coverage, debate, controversy. This is the attention economy at work.
The Enhanced Games is a symptom of athletics’ entertainment deficit, not its cause. When athletes can earn millions risking brain damage in boxing while track and field offers minimal financial reward, pharmaceutical enhancement with financial security becomes rational. The market speaks clearly about what spectators will pay to watch.
Critics worry about normalising harmful practices, but danger and injury are already part and parcel of most sports – even in swimming, 53% of athletes get injured each year. The ethical outrage directed at chemical enhancement is inconsistent with silence about these established harms. We’ve long since decided that athlete harm is acceptable when the entertainment justifies it. The Enhanced Games merely forces us to confront that decision directly.
The question isn’t whether the Enhanced Games introduce something morally unprecedented but, rather, whether we’re honest about the bargain spectators and athletes have always struck: extraordinary performance in exchange for extraordinary risk. We’ve answered that question affirmatively every time we buy a ticket to watch two people fight.
Byron Hyde (@bvehyde) is a philosopher of science and public policy at Hokkaido University with honorary appointments at Bangor University and Bristol Medical School.