The Enhanced Games funded the demonstration of its own irrelevance

Forty-two athletes on full pharmacology. One world record broken by seven hundredths of a second. The Certainty Deficit at the inaugural Enhanced Games.

May 27, 2026|Matthew Green

The Certainty Deficit is the space between what you can do and what your body will let you do when it counts. It is context-specific. You might have zero deficit in one situation and a significant one in another. Forty-two enhanced athletes performed in Las Vegas on Sunday night with every chemical and equipment advantage money can buy. Only one world record fell. This is what happens when an organisation builds the colosseum and forgets what it takes for a body to deliver inside it.

What the money bought

The chemistry was thorough. Each "enhanced" athlete arrived with their own combination of FDA-approved substances. Drugs to build muscle. Drugs to grow taller. Drugs to repair tissue while they slept. Drugs to keep the heart calm under load. The Enhanced Games later disclosed the aggregate. Ninety-one percent of competitors were on testosterone. Seventy-nine percent on human growth hormone. Twenty-nine percent on anabolic steroids. James Magnussen, the public face of the project, told SwimSwam he put on ten pounds (4.5 kilograms) of muscle in his first ten days on his cocktail.

The equipment was equally comprehensive. The polyurethane supersuits clean swimming banned in 2010 after they triggered dozens of world records in a single season, those were back. There were carbon-plated sprint spikes with no height limits. Lifting suits. Lifting straps. The Enhanced Games rule book even allows prosthetic limbs and shoe technology, in case any of that becomes relevant.

The medical management was real. Three doctors on the Independent Medical Commission. Cardiology. Endocrinology. Pharmacology. The kind of neuroscience that maps the brain as an organ. A Director of Athlete Safety and Performance.

The broadcast was star-staffed. Bryan Johnson, the Don't Die biohacker. He was the on-air science voice, hired to translate each athlete's protocol and explain bodies to the world. The other commentators were technical specialists in swimming and weightlifting.

The arena cost twenty million dollars and was built in eleven months. The compensation prize-money pool was twenty-five million dollars. The record bonuses ran to a million dollars each. The Killers headlined the closing concert.

What the money refused to buy

I searched the Enhanced Games protocol from end to end and you know what I found? Nothing. Not a single sport psychologist. Maybe one was there somewhere, but in amongst the hullabaloo of the drugs and the equipment and the venue, not even a whisper.

There is none on the medical commission. The Director of "Safety and Performance" is a clinical physiologist from Red Bull North America. There was none in the broadcast commentary booth. There is none in any athlete's publicly described preparation. Not one of the named athletes mentioned working with a mental performance practitioner before the event. Their public language was substance and team and equipment, every time. Magnussen on what his drugs did to him. Gkolomeev on the team behind him.

No enhanced athlete named the layer where the body actually meets the moment.

In 1990 you could have built a sports project this way and nobody would have noticed. Sport psychology emerged as a discipline in the late 1960s, became Olympic-standard practice by the 1990s, and has been part of every credible elite organisation for two decades. Biles withdrew from Tokyo in 2021 to protect her mental health. Osaka named her depression at Roland Garros the same year. Phelps has spoken openly about depression since he retired. Every Premier League club has a sport psychologist on staff. Every Olympic federation. Every NBA team.

In 2026, ignoring this layer is a choice. The Enhanced Games made it, emphatically.

Four days before the event, Professor Kim Wolff, head of the Drug Control Centre at King's College London, published a piece in Nature naming what was missing. The Enhanced Games, she wrote, disregards discipline, technical mastery, psychological control, and collective trust. The establishment had named the elephant in the room in the world's leading science journal before the gun even went off.

What the money couldn't do

Then Sunday night happened.

James Magnussen

Magnussen finished fourth in the 100m freestyle in 49.44 seconds. Two and a half seconds slower than his lifetime best, set fourteen years ago when he was clean and lighter. He came out of retirement, "juiced to the gills" in his own words, and swam a club-swimmer's time. He had told the Irish Times the week before that his speed dropped as his size increased. My lay-person take on this, floating stick versus dropping stone.

Hafthór Björnsson

Hafthór Björnsson planned to break his own deadlift world record at five hundred and fifteen kilos. He won the contest at four hundred and seventy-five kilos and failed the record attempt. Ten days earlier, in the gym, on the same drugs, with nobody watching, he had pulled four hundred and eighty-five kilos. On the night, in the arena, with every camera in the room and every input maximised, he could not match what he had done alone. The bar locks out or it does not. His body did less under the lights than it had done in private.

Fred Kerley

Fred Kerley had predicted Bolt's 9.58 record for the men's 100m would be destroyed and teased a 9.4 on social media. He ran 9.97, in a body he had declared clean. His Paris Olympics bronze medal time was 9.81. He told the Associated Press afterwards they would have to do better than that, that he had to train a little harder. The AP reporter wrote that Kerley was "blaming everyone but himself".

Clean athletes

Three clean athletes won events. Hunter Armstrong, who had declined the drugs, took the 50m backstroke. Armstrong also beat Magnussen into the silver medal in the 100m freestyle. Kerley took the men's 100m sprint, the marquee track event of the night. Tristan Evelyn took the women's 100m.

Three of the night's winners had nothing to do with the body-level optimisation and chemistry the Enhanced Games had built itself around.

Ben Proud

Ben Proud, another enhanced athlete, had told SwimSwam in September last year that there was no obligation for him to take anything. On the night he swam 22.32 in the 50m butterfly, five hundredths of a second off the world record. He said afterwards it was frustrating to be that close.

Shania Collins

Shania Collins, also enhanced, had spoken to ESPN in the lead-up about war paint, about the rituals of preparing to race, putting on headphones, doing her hair and makeup, the integrated state of getting ready. The Enhanced Games "felt gray" to her, she said. The pre-performance layer she described is exactly the layer the physical-only-optimisation protocol had no language for. She named an aspect of it before the event happened. The night confirmed it.

The Enhanced Games took the spectacle and dropped the care.

A new colosseum, an old mistake

It felt very much to me like we were going to watch a modern day version of the Colosseum, a comparison already in circulation in the media before the event ran. The organisers built an arena for two and a half thousand invited patricians in luxury boxes. They signed gladiators on multi-million dollar contracts with million-dollar bonuses for breaking the body to the limit. They arranged a closing concert. They opened a one-way door to a new superhero-esque life, because anyone who steps onto that deck is barred from conventional clean competition for life.

The comparison is sharper than it looks. In this context Rome had two components.

The more obvious and often popularised Colosseum spectacle with its steel, flesh and bloodied thumbs.

The other was the army, one of the finest fighting forces ever created. The army built the first professional military medical corps in history. Dedicated military hospitals, called valetudinaria, inside every camp. A tiered medical service from front-line first-aid attendants to senior doctors who held formal rank. Hygiene practices historians describe as remarkably modern. Sewers, safe water, regular health inspections. Published medical manuals so treatments could be standardised across legions. Special diets for recovery. Analgesics for pain management.

The Romans understood that a body, asked to perform across hardship and across years, needed ongoing care. They invested in keeping it.

The Enhanced Games took the spectacle and dropped the care.

The dark ages, in 2026 clothing

The Enhanced Games sold itself as the frontier of human performance.

Bryan Johnson is the high priest of the position the Enhanced Games has adopted. His entire public life is a sermon to it. He photographs his body daily, measures every input that goes into it, refers to it in the third person as though it were a piece of equipment he happens to own. He has spent a decade reducing himself to a set of biomarkers and biological age scores, broadcasting the results, and selling the protocol. A modern day relic hired by the Enhanced Games as an aligned witness.

Johnson's life is the personal embodiment of the dark ages model in 2026. The body as a machine the person operates from the outside. Never the body as the place from which the person actually lives.

With all the fanfare appropriate for a gladiatorial spectacle of this nature what the event actually delivered on Sunday night was a museum exhibit of how elite sport used to think about bodies before the integration happened.

Mainstream sport has spent the last fifty years building the mental layer into how it works. The recognition that a body's output under pressure is not a clean function of inputs is now common place. That what an athlete carries internally is part of what they release on the day, in the moment. That a body and a person are the same thing, and you cannot optimise one without consulting the other. It is the model every credible elite organisation has operated on for twenty years.

The Enhanced Games walked past it. They funded the colosseum. They funded the chemistry. They funded the equipment. They funded the broadcast. They funded the gladiators. They funded the biological mech-suit but they refused to fund the layer that actually matters.

The Enhanced Games funded the demonstration of its own irrelevance.

The body still decides

And now we get to my work. What the Enhanced Games refused to acknowledge is not only the mental layer of performance, but something that has been operating in human bodies for as long as bodies have existed. The body that did not want to climb the mountain. The body that could not say the difficult thing. The body that froze on the edge of the conversation it had rehearsed. The body that trained for one thing but delivered something else when it counted.

Below the level of thinking, the body, your body too, is deciding all the time what it will and will not release. When a moment carries more than the body has learned to hold, the body protects. It is documented science. It does not matter the context, but in the bright light of the Enhanced Games it could mean the legs go heavy. The shoulder tightens. The breath shortens. The stroke, the lift, the sprint does not arrive the way it did in practice. The way the optimised body said it would.

The space between what a body can do and what it will let itself do when it counts is the Certainty Deficit. It is specific to the moment. The same body can deliver in one situation and not in another.

Magnussen smiled for the cameras and walked off with fifty thousand dollars for fourth place. Björnsson congratulated Hooper at the bar. Kerley said they had to do better. Gkolomeev kissed his medal and went home with one and a quarter million dollars. The broadcast wrapped to The Killers and the patricians went to dinner.

The Enhanced Games, advocating itself as the future of human performance, missed the layer of mental optimisation. It consequently has no way of recognising the next layer and frontier of human performance: reducing the Certainty Deficit when it counts.

Matthew Green
About the author

Matthew Green

Reducing the Certainty Deficit in high-performing people and teams · Emotional fitness coach for high-functioning men

Matthew works with athletes and performance teams to reduce the Certainty Deficit, the space between what you can do and what your body will let you do when it counts. The body holds beliefs. These run deeper than self-talk and they run faster than any conscious strategy. When those beliefs shift, the ceiling shifts.

He also supports high-functioning men to develop emotional fitness so they can live and lead from a place of clarity and inner stability. The work is somatic-first, practical and grounded.

If you're seeing a pattern current approaches haven't shifted, let's talk.

My origin story: Why elite athletes underperform when it counts

Read more articles by Matthew Green →

More articles from 5th Place

You may also enjoy reading these