'The Doping Olympics': a look inside the Enhanced Games
The Global Story
BBC
3.8 • 663 Ratings
🗓️ 21 May 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the inaugural Enhanced Games this weekend, something unprecedented is taking place; professional athletes from around the world will be encouraged to swim, lift, and sprint with the aid of performance enhancing drugs.
The competition — nicknamed the 'Doping Olympics' — has provoked enormous controversy in the world of sport. Enhanced runs counter to the many athletic organisations who have spent decades prioritising a crackdown on performance enhancing drugs. Many in the sporting world say that a competition that endorses doping will normalise unfair and possibly dangerous drug use. But supporters argue that the competition will facilitate the safe, open use of drugs that are often taken unsafely and without medical supervision at competitions elsewhere.
BBC sports editor Dan Roan joins us to break down all things Enhanced Games. His documentary, Enhanced Games: A Sporting Revolution or Dangerous Doping?, is available now on YouTube.
Producers: Xandra Ellin and Valerio Esposito
Executive producers: James Shield and China Collins
Mix: Travis Evans
Senior news editor: China Collins
Photo: Olympic swimming medallist Ben Proud has become the first British athlete to join the Enhanced Games, an event which allows athletes to take performance-enhancing drugs. Credit: Zac Goodwin/PA Wire.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:06.1 | This weekend, elite athletes from around the world are descending on Las Vegas, Nevada, |
| 0:11.8 | for the first of its kind sporting competition, known as the enhanced games. |
| 0:17.0 | It's kind of like the Olympics, but only for swimming, sprinting, and weightlifting. |
| 0:21.3 | The aim is to break world records. |
| 0:23.8 | In fact, some of these competitors are former Olympians, medalists, battling it out for money and glory. |
| 0:30.0 | But there's one big difference. |
| 0:33.0 | What might be possible to sport if performance-enhancing drugs were all allowed? |
| 0:37.8 | Well, we might soon find out the inaugural enhanced games, or the doping Olympics, as it's |
| 0:43.2 | been dubbed, aims to rival professional athletics with a twist. |
| 0:46.7 | At the enhanced games, athletes openly take drugs that are normally banned in high-level |
| 0:51.2 | sports. Stereids, growth hormones, various performance-enhancing drugs, |
| 0:55.6 | they're all okay at these games, |
| 0:57.7 | so long as they're approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. |
| 1:02.1 | Why on earth should we want or have a doping Olympics? |
| 1:07.5 | Because science is real, Pierce. |
| 1:09.6 | Medicine is real. |
| 1:13.4 | But this isn't just sports and medicine. |
| 1:18.7 | It's business. And in Vegas this weekend, the athletes who compete may be putting their reputations on the line, but they may also hit the jackpot. |
| 1:22.7 | One million dollars is up for grabs for any world record. 250,000 for the winners of each competition. |
| 1:30.8 | From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. |
| 1:34.7 | And today on the global story, we dive into the controversial world of the enhanced games. |
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