The Enhanced Games has rejected a Guardian reporter’s request for media credentials to its Las Vegas event, telling Sean Ingle at 7.02pm on Friday that it could not approve his application for this year’s competition. The decision came days after a public relations man phoned him before speaking to organizers and pointed to the newspaper’s negative coverage of the doping-friendly event.
The email said, “After careful consideration, we are unable to approve your media credential request for this year’s event,” and added that “Due to the high volume of applications and limited media capacity, we could not accommodate all requests … thank you again for your interest and understanding.” Ingle had planned to fly to Las Vegas to report on the event on 24 May, where he wanted to speak to the athletes, billionaire backers and scientists involved, and to find out in person how much the organization could really be trusted.
The Enhanced Games allows athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs and has promoted six-figure salaries, a $250,000 prize for winning a race and a $1m award for breaking the world record. That is why the event has drawn such fierce criticism, including from, which has described it as “Grotesque” and as “Showcasing so much of the wrongness of the age.”
Supporters of the project present it as a new model for elite sport, but its critics say the central promise is impossible to square with safety, legitimacy and basic sporting ethics. Researchers have also questioned claims that banned drugs can be made safer under medical supervision, while the event’s critics have raised the further issue of legal exposure, including whether athletes could sue the Enhanced Games if things go wrong.
There is also a credibility problem at the heart of the spectacle. In 2016, Justin Gatlin’s 100m time of 9.45sec on a Japanese TV show came with a 20mph tailwind from a giant fan, a reminder that eye-catching numbers can hide the conditions behind them. The broader history is just as bruising: in 2005, reported that 190 former East German athletes had launched a case against the German pharmaceutical company Jenapharm.
Ingle said he wanted to do “a proper reporting job on the event on 24 May, including speaking to the athletes, billionaire backers, and scientists involved,” and to hear the athletes’ stories, ask the difficult questions and test how much an organization that violates so many of the values of traditional sport can really be trusted. The pre-screening process for media credentials gave the Enhanced Games control over who could witness that test firsthand, and in the end it kept one of its loudest critics outside the room.
The rejection answers the headline question cleanly: for now, the Enhanced Games is willing to stage a competition built on provocation, but not to open every part of it to scrutiny.