LAS VEGAS / GENEVA / WASHINGTON — Yolanda would like to begin this article by stating the marketing claim that the Enhanced Games was created to demonstrate, and then by stating what the event actually demonstrated. Yolanda will not editorialize between the two statements. Yolanda will simply place them next to each other, the way Yolanda has been trained, over a career in scientific journalism, to place a hypothesis next to the data that test it.
The marketing claim, per Enhanced Games founder Aron D’Souza, is that performance-enhancing drugs — taken under medical supervision, in optimized regimens, by elite athletes — can produce performance levels that exceed what unenhanced athletes are capable of, and that the demonstration of this exceedance will, over time, normalize the use of these drugs in human performance contexts beyond sport. The marketing claim is framed in expansive terms. D’Souza, at the Enhanced Games launch event last year, said: ‘We are here to move humanity forward.’ At the May 24 event itself, he reiterated this framing repeatedly. The framing is: enhancement produces superhumanity. The demonstration was supposed to be the games themselves.
The data from the May 24 event are as follows. Fred Kerley, a two-time Olympic medalist who publicly stated he would not use performance-enhancing drugs, won the men’s 100-meter dash. Hunter Armstrong, also publicly non-enhanced, won the men’s 50-meter backstroke. Both Kerley and Armstrong beat fields of athletes who, per the Enhanced Games’ own programming, were on the drugs the games were organized to celebrate. The one event in which an Enhanced Games athlete set what the organization is calling a world record was the men’s 50-meter freestyle, won by Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, who beat the long-standing official record by 0.02 seconds while wearing a full-body inline open-water suit that has been banned from World Aquatics competition since 2010 because the suit provides buoyancy and hydrodynamic advantages that produce performance gains independently of the athlete’s physiology.
Yolanda is going to restate the two paragraphs above in compact form, because the compact form is the entire scientific argument of this article. Marketing claim: drugs make athletes superhuman. Demonstration: the clean athletes won, and the one record-setting swim was set partly by a swimsuit that is banned because the swimsuit, not the swimmer, sets the record. Yolanda is not going to draw the inference. Yolanda is going to let the inference draw itself.
The Kerley And Armstrong Results, Which Yolanda Will Discuss
Fred Kerley is, in Yolanda’s reading of the published results, the single most consequential figure in the May 24 event, and Yolanda wants to be clear about why. Kerley is a two-time Olympic medalist in the 100 meters. He arrived in Las Vegas, paid the appearance fee that the Enhanced Games offers all participants, and announced — at the pre-event press conference, on the record, in front of multiple cameras — that he would compete without taking any of the performance-enhancing substances the event was designed around. Kerley then competed. Kerley then won.
Yolanda would like to note that Kerley did not win by a margin that could be attributed to randomness or to the field being weak. Kerley won an open international 100-meter dash against fielders who had, per the event’s framing, been chemically optimized. Kerley was not chemically optimized. Kerley was, by his own statement, a clean athlete competing in a competition that had been organized as a demonstration that clean athletes are slower than enhanced ones. The demonstration produced the opposite finding. The finding is now in the event’s official results. The official results are the event’s own data. The event’s own data contradict the event’s marketing claim. The contradiction is not Yolanda’s interpretation. The contradiction is in the table.
Hunter Armstrong’s 50-meter backstroke produced the same pattern in the pool. Armstrong was clean. Armstrong won. The other swimmers in the race were, per the games’ programming, enhanced. The enhancement did not produce victory. Armstrong’s victory did. Yolanda would like to be specific that this is not, on its own, a complete refutation of the claim that performance-enhancing drugs work — performance-enhancing drugs do work, in well-documented physiological pathways, for specific kinds of training adaptations and recovery, and the peer-reviewed literature on this is extensive. The Enhanced Games’ results do not show that the drugs do nothing. The results show that the drugs are not, in elite competition, the dominant variable. The dominant variable, as the unenhanced winners’ presence on the podium indicates, remains some combination of innate physiology, training quality, technique, and the irreducible human factor of who shows up to compete with the right thing to compete for. The drugs are, at most, a contributor. The drugs are not, on the May 24 data, the decider.
The Gkolomeev Record, Which Yolanda Will Discuss In Detail Because The Detail Matters
Kristian Gkolomeev is a Greek swimmer. He has competed at four Olympic Games. He has never won an Olympic medal. He finished fifth in the 50-meter freestyle at the Paris 2024 Games. He is 31 years old, which is, in elite sprint swimming, advanced. The Enhanced Games organization has presented Gkolomeev as their flagship success story. They have argued, in pre-event marketing, that Gkolomeev’s case demonstrates what is possible when an athlete is no longer constrained by the rules of conventional competition. Yolanda would like to walk through what Gkolomeev’s case actually shows, because the case is the heart of the marketing campaign, and the heart should be examined.
Gkolomeev’s record-setting 50-meter freestyle time at Enhanced Games was 20.89 seconds. The official world record in the event is 20.91, set in 2009. Gkolomeev beat the record by 0.02 seconds — two hundredths of a second, the smallest measurable margin in elite swim timing. Gkolomeev set this time while wearing an inline full-body open-water swim suit. The suit is not a standard competition swimsuit. The suit is the kind of suit that swimming’s international governing body, World Aquatics, banned from sanctioned competition in 2010 after the 2008-2009 era — known in swimming circles as the ‘plastic suit era’ — produced an avalanche of world records that were subsequently understood to be more about the buoyancy and surface-tension properties of the suits than about the swimmers wearing them. World Aquatics banned the suits because the suits made the records meaningless. The suits provided non-physiological performance gains. The bans restored the records’ meaning by requiring that the records be produced by swimmers, not by garments.
Gkolomeev’s record was set while wearing one of those banned garments. The garment is the variable that swimming spent fifteen years removing from the sport precisely because the garment confounded the measurement of human performance. The Enhanced Games brought the garment back. The Enhanced Games then claimed that the resulting record demonstrates the effect of pharmaceutical enhancement on human performance. Yolanda is going to state this plainly: the Gkolomeev record is, by available evidence, primarily a demonstration of the buoyancy properties of the banned swimsuit, with some unknown additional contribution from whatever pharmaceutical regimen Gkolomeev was on, which the Enhanced Games has declined to disclose, citing ‘medical confidentiality.’ The pharmaceutical regimen is the part the games were ostensibly designed to demonstrate. The pharmaceutical regimen is the part the games will not disclose. The part the games will not disclose is the part the marketing campaign is built around. The part the games will disclose — the suit — is the part that is, by long-established sports science, the simpler explanation for the result.
The Business Model, Which Is The Actual Subject Of This Article
The Enhanced Group, the publicly-traded company behind the Enhanced Games, is, per its own corporate disclosures and reporting by NPR and KPBS, in the business of selling peptides and dietary supplements. The Games are, in business terms, a marketing event for the company’s product line. The athletes are, in product-marketing terms, endorsers — they are the consumers, the testimonials, and the demonstration in one. The performance-enhancing substances the athletes are using are, in many cases, available for purchase from the Enhanced Group’s commercial arm. The athletes are, in addition, research subjects: the company is documenting the drugs’ effects on their bodies for its own research.
Yolanda is going to address this last point carefully, because the last point is the structural issue around which this entire enterprise is organized. In conventional clinical research, the relationship between researcher, subject, and product is heavily regulated. Subjects must give informed consent. Trials must be approved by Institutional Review Boards or equivalent ethics oversight. Sponsors must disclose conflicts of interest. Adverse events must be reported. Outcomes — both positive and negative — must be published or registered in trial databases. The regulations exist because, historically, when research subjects are also commercial endorsers of the products being studied, and the researcher is also the seller, the data produced are systematically biased toward the seller’s commercial interests. The bias is not, in most cases, a result of dishonest researchers. The bias is a result of the structure. The structure produces the bias. The regulations correct for the structure.
The Enhanced Games’ research operation is, by available reporting, not conducted under conventional clinical research oversight. The athletes are paid endorsers of the products being studied. The researcher is the seller. The outcomes are not registered in independent trial databases. The adverse events are not reported through conventional pharmacovigilance channels. The data are, by structural definition, the kind of data that the regulations were designed to prevent the production of, because the data are the kind of data that, historically, mislead the public about the safety and effectiveness of pharmaceutical products. Yolanda is not asserting that the data are wrong. Yolanda is asserting that the data are produced under conditions that, in conventional biomedical research, would render them inadmissible to peer-reviewed journals and to regulatory submissions. The data may be correct. The data may be incorrect. The structure under which the data are produced is not one that would allow either possibility to be reliably distinguished.
Dr. Aaron Baggish, professor of medicine at the University of Lausanne — Lausanne, Yolanda would like to note, being the city that hosts the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee and is, by long tradition, the international center of sports medicine — characterized the Enhanced Games as ‘border[ing] on the lines of ethics.’ Dr. Baggish spent twenty years working with sports teams in Boston. Dr. Baggish is not an outsider to elite athletic medicine. Dr. Baggish is, in fact, one of the relatively few medical professionals globally whose career places them in a position to evaluate the kind of work the Enhanced Group claims to be conducting. His professional assessment is that the work borders on the lines of ethics. The line is being approached. The line may or may not have been crossed. Yolanda will accept Dr. Baggish’s characterization as the professional assessment of the matter and will report it as such.
The 1789 Capital Connection, Which Yolanda Will Note Without Editorializing
The Enhanced Games is, per public disclosures, financially backed by Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm. The firm is named 1789 Capital. The number 1789 refers to the year the U.S. Constitution went into effect — a numerological choice in the same family as the $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund’s allusion to 1776 (the year of American independence), which this publication covered in last week’s filing on the IRS settlement, and the same family as the $PATRIOT memecoin that funded the Don Colossus gold statue at Trump National Doral Miami. The pattern, across these three financial vehicles, is consistent: politically aligned capital is being deployed through entities whose branding invokes founding-era American history. Yolanda is documenting the pattern without making a claim about its significance. The pattern exists. The pattern is in the corporate filings. The corporate filings are public.
Yolanda would also like to note, as a matter of factual context, that the Enhanced Games is co-financed by Peter Thiel — the technology investor whose previous public investments have included companies developing longevity therapies, anti-aging biomedicine, and human performance optimization platforms. Thiel’s investment thesis on human enhancement has been publicly stated over a span of decades. The Enhanced Games is, in this sense, consistent with Thiel’s prior commitments. The consistency is not, by itself, evidence of anything other than consistency. Yolanda is documenting it for the record.
What Yolanda Would Like To Say In Closing, Which Is Brief
The Enhanced Games happened. The marketing claim was that enhancement produces superhumanity. The result was that the clean athletes won their events and the one record was set partly by a banned swimsuit. The business is the sale of peptides and supplements. The research operation is structurally outside conventional ethics oversight. The funding includes a venture capital firm named for the year the Constitution went into effect and a billionaire with a long-standing public commitment to human enhancement. The athletes received their appearance fees and went home. Kristian Gkolomeev received his $1 million bonus. Fred Kerley and Hunter Armstrong won without the help the Enhanced Games was organized to demonstrate the value of. Aron D’Souza will say more things about superhumanity in the coming weeks, and the things he says will be quoted, and the next Enhanced Games will be planned, and the company will continue selling peptides.
Yolanda would like to note, in closing, that the most useful test of any claim — scientific, commercial, political — is the test the claim’s own proponents construct to demonstrate it. The Enhanced Games constructed its own test. The test produced its own result. The result is not the result the proponents predicted. The result is on the record. The proponents will continue to make the claim. The result will continue to be on the record. Future tests will continue to be constructed. Yolanda will continue to read the data. Gerald the houseplant, Senior Counsel, has reviewed this article. Gerald is not enhanced. Gerald is unmodified. Gerald photosynthesizes within standard biological parameters and is, by every measurable standard, performing at a level appropriate for a member of his species. Gerald is fine.
Yolanda Tippington, Science Correspondent, filed this piece on May 27, 2026, with a confidence level of 100% and zero fake sources, because every element is documented. The Enhanced Games inaugural event on May 24, 2026 at Resorts World Las Vegas is confirmed by NPR, KPBS, the AP, AFP via Malaymail, ESPN, GearJunkie, The Daily Caller, the Boston Globe, and The Independent. The results — Fred Kerley winning the 100m unenhanced, Hunter Armstrong winning the 50m backstroke unenhanced, Kristian Gkolomeev’s 50m freestyle ‘world record’ of 20.89 seconds in a banned full-body inline open-water suit, Ben Proud winning 50m butterfly — are from the published results, confirmed by The Daily Caller. The 2010 World Aquatics ban on polyurethane and similar non-textile suits, and the historical context of the ‘plastic suit era’ of 2008-2009, are from World Aquatics public materials. Aron D’Souza’s verbatim quotes are from Reuters and NPR. Dr. Aaron Baggish’s ‘borders on the lines of ethics’ quote is from KPBS, sourced to NPR. Dr. Baggish’s University of Lausanne affiliation and prior Boston-area sports medicine career are matters of public record. 1789 Capital and Peter Thiel as financial backers are from NPR and KPBS. The $250,000 first-place prize, $1 million world record bonus, and appearance fees are from ESPN and the Boston Globe. The Enhanced Group’s publicly-traded status and peptide/supplement business are from KPBS. The numerology callbacks to $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund and $PATRIOT memecoin are documented in this publication’s prior reporting. Gerald photosynthesizes within standard biological parameters.