Plenty of people have closed their eyes and had one a final throw of the dice in Vegas. Most of them walk away with nothing.
Tonight, Kristian Gkolomeev of Greece is going home with $1.25m after breaking the Men’s 50m Freestyle record, clocking 20.81 in the final event of the night at the inaugural Enhanced Games at Resorts World in Las Vegas.
The biggest winner, however, was Enhanced co-founder and CEO, Max Martin, cheering the swimmers on from the side of the pool and putting so much effort into his encouragement that he can’t have been far off jumping in and shoving the athletes towards the finish line.
What that record means for Enhanced as a project is hard to put a figure on. You could certainly add multiple zeros to Gkolomeev’s cheque. They have the headline they wanted. They have the record. They’ve done what they set out to do and what so many people in the media and across the sporting world said that they could not do.
But it was close. Far closer than anyone associated with the event would have wanted. There cannot be many publicly traded businesses whose fortunes have rested so significantly on someone and something they cannot control. But that is what it came down to at 9.25pm as Gkolomeev stepped onto the blocks.
Make no mistake, regardless of what anyone connected with the Games may claim, if a record had not fallen tonight, it would have been a failure.
Instead, they’re celebrating a victory. A juiced up fairytale ending to one of the most fascinating storylines in modern sport. Martin was quick to make the statement that this entire endeavour was created to enable. “What is the underlying fact that is undeniable, no one ever on this planet has covered 50 metres in the water quicker than Kristian did tonight,” he said. “That is remarkable.”
And it was remarkable. It won’t have won over every skeptic. But in terms of sporting theatre, something they had confidently promised to deliver, six hours of events rested on just 21 seconds, three years after Australian businessman Aron D’Souza announced an audacious plan to host the first ever competition where athletes would be allowed to take performance enhancing substances banned under World Anti-Doping Agency rukes.
The greatest clown show on earth
The reaction in June 2023 was unanimous and brutal. Double Olympic gold winner Lord Sebastian Coe said the idea was “bollocks”. Travis Tygart, chief executive of the US Anti-Doping Agency, called it a “clown show”. Kieren Perkins, the former Australian Olympic gold medal winning swimmer predicted that athletes would die. They did not die. Canadian weightlifter Boady Santavy pulled a hamstring, but that’s about as bad as it got.
The organisers had hoped for an early record. They very nearly got one.
Santavy opened with a comfortable 177kg snatch, leaving him within range of the 182kg world record at his weight. He missed his second attempt. He missed his third.
Wesley Kitts, the American, pushed past his personal best to earn a record shot of his own.
The Enhanced Games is not, as the night was about to demonstrate, especially tethered to convention. Both men were given a fourth attempt, a courtesy not extended in any sanctioned weightlifting competition, but neither lifter could justify the exception.
On the track, two-time US Olympic silver medallist Fred Kerley, who is not enhanced and had spent the previous days briefing the press that he felt confident of running the fastest time in history, lined up for the men’s 100m. There was a false start. The field reset. They got away cleanly, pardon the phrase, at the second attempt and Kerley came through in 9.93, with Emmanuel Matadi second on 9.95 and Marvin Bracy-Williams a distant third on 10.33.
A second sub-ten effort of the night from Kerley would follow in the final, this time in 9.97. Both runs were respectable. Neither was anywhere near Usain Bolt’s 9.58.
In the pool, the early swim events delivered near-misses. Ben Proud, the British Olympic silver medallist and two-time world champion, looked in the 50m butterfly as though he might finally break new territory. He missed the world record by five hundredths of a second, finishing in 22.32.
Cody Miller won the men’s 100m breaststroke, three seconds outside the world record but still picked up a $250,000 cheque to add to his earlier winnings of $250,000 and offered the night’s most American post-race line. “That’s pretty cool, huh. Great night in Vegas.”
Megan Romano, a full decade out of competition, won the women’s 100m freestyle in a time well outside the world record but well inside what most long-retired swimmers would be capable of. The event is selling itself, in part, as the proposition that ordinary adults can recover capacities they thought were gone. Romano was the shining proof of concept. So was Emily Barclay, who took half a second off her PB in the Women’s 50m Freestyle. “At the end of my career I wasn’t really enjoying it,” Barclay said. “This journey has been so much fun.” The $250,000 check probably helped.
Swim Coach Brett Hawke put Barkey’s performance into context. “Like, Emily Barclay, who’s Emily Barclay? No one’s ever heard of this girl. She’s retired. She’s a nobody. She comes out tonight and swims the time that would have got a bronze medal in [the] Paris [Olympics]. Which is phenomenal.”
If there was a banker on the card, it was probably big “Thor” Hafthor Julius Bjornsson, who attempted to break his own deadlift world record of 510kg. His first attempt of 425kg flew up. He made short work of 475kg before 515kg was placed on the bar. It started slowly and he got the bar to his knees but he couldn’t continue to a lockout.
At that point, it felt like luck may not be on the organisers’ side.
Swim or sink
The men’s 50m freestyle was the final event. Without a record, the headline of the inaugural Enhanced Games would have been a series of credible-but-short-of-remarkable performances and a cardiology operation that had, at the very least, not produced any disasters.
They desperately needed something sensational. Nearly three years of bullish marketing had been building to that outcome. And as the four finalists settled into their blocks, the entire commercial logic of the project, the consumer launch, the floatation, Max Martin’s personal fortune, the lot of it, was riding on the time the clock would show in roughly twenty-one seconds.
It showed 20.81.
Kristian Gkolomeev, the Greek swimmer who had set an Enhanced time-trial record earlier in the project, had taken nearly a tenth of a second off the world record of 20.88 held by Australia’s Cameron McEvoy.
The last three years have represented a narrative tug of war. On one side, the Enhanced Games. On the other, pretty much everyone else. They say that history is written by the victors. Gkolomeev and Martin believe that is them. That the occasion and the time give them the right to tell the story of how the Enhanced Games came to Vegas and hit the jackpot.
