The Enhanced Games - dubbed the "Doping Olympics" by critics - runs from Thursday 21 to Sunday 24 May at Resorts World Las Vegas, where around 50 athletes will compete in swimming, sprinting, and weightlifting with performance-enhancing drugs not just permitted, but encouraged.
Byron Hyde, Honorary Research Associate in the School of History, Law and Social Sciences at Bangor University, argues in the journal Sport, Ethics & Philosophy, that the event's big financial rewards may be putting athletes in an impossible position. The study draws on established medical ethics to make the case that offering someone a life-changing sum of money to accept health risks doesn't constitute genuine free choice - especially if they're already struggling financially.
The argument works like this: in medical ethics, it's long been recognised that paying people to participate in risky experiments can be a form of coercion. If the money is large enough, people may say "yes" not because they genuinely want to take the risk, but because they feel they can't afford to say "no." Hyde argues the same logic applies here. The Enhanced Games offers prize money of up to a million dollars, and $25 million in total athlete compensation across the event - sums that could be very hard for athletes, particularly those from poorer backgrounds, to turn down regardless of any personal concerns about their health.
The Enhanced Games has consistently emphasised athlete safety, saying drug use will be medically supervised. But Hyde argues that safety monitoring doesn't resolve the consent problem - if the financial pressure is what's driving athletes to participate in the first place, then the consent isn't truly voluntary, no matter how careful the medical oversight is.
Hyde says that "The Enhanced Games claim to give athletes the freedom to choose what they do with their bodies, but you can't champion athlete autonomy while creating conditions that compromise it. Whether they realize it or not, the lucrative payments offered by the Enhanced Games are forcing upon ageing athletes a difficult decision: enhance or retire. If traditional sporting bodies can't pay athletes better, the Enhanced Games should at least stop targeting financially vulnerable athletes in their recruitment campaigns."
The paper arrives at a pivotal moment. Governing bodies of the sports involved, the International Olympic Committee, and the World Anti-Doping Agency have all strongly condemned the Games, and athletes who participate face bans from mainstream competition. That threat of career consequences makes the financial lure even more significant: for some athletes, the Enhanced Games payday may feel like their only option.
The conclusions of Hyde’s research have implications well beyond Las Vegas - raising questions about who really benefits when sport and big money collide, and whose interests are truly being served. Hyde calls for a greater focus on athlete autonomy in sports, which is often ignored while ethicists focus on concepts like fairness or integrity.
