Featured Image Credit: Greg Doherty/Getty Images for Enhanced
The controversial Enhanced Games took place yesterday (May 24), which saw athletes compete in a variety of sports with one key difference to similar events - participants were allowed to use performance-enhancing drugs.
And the final event for swimming could be history-making as it saw Greek athlete Kristian Gkolomeev win first place, even breaking a world record in the men’s 50m freestyle.
It took Gkolomeev 20.81 seconds to complete the race, just 0.07 seconds faster than the official record set by Cameron McEvoy, but has earned the swimmer a huge paycheck.
Gkolomeev is a three-time former NCAA champion for Alabama and competed for Greece in four Olympic Games from 2012 to 2024, but never took home a medal.
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But at the Enhanced Games, Gkolomeev struck gold, scooping $250,000 for taking first place and earning an enormous bonus of $1 million for beating the non-enhanced world record.
As reported by the Guardian, the event’s CEO Maximilian Martin said: “We have arrived in mainstream culture. We are here to stay. We have changed the world tonight.”
Despite Gkolomeev’s achievement, his record won’t be officially recognized due to the fact he was doping for the event and wore a specialized skinsuit.
The event has proven to be controversial in the athletic world as participants are widely known to be taking performance related drugs, a common one being Human Growth Hormone (HGH).
HGH has become increasingly popular as it boosts muscle cell production and metabolic efficiency, allowing for faster recovery times which can be transformative during training.
Muscle mass can also be dramatically increased through the use of myostatin inhibitors, as it prevents the myostatin protein which naturally limits muscle growth among humans and animals alike.
Stimulants like Adderall are incredibly popular as well as they delay the perception of fatigue within your body, allowing you to exert yourself for longer which can prove to be the difference maker in a tight competition.
One of the biggest benefits of performance enhancing drugs comes through the ability for your body to carry greater amounts of oxygen, as the use of hormones like erythropoietin or HIF stabilizers stimulate red blood cell production to achieve this result.
However, despite all of the assisted help the athletics were taking for the Enhanced Games, the event surprisingly only produced one so-called world record.
In three sports, it also saw three ‘clean’ athletics come out victorious over their doping competitors.
