Nationals, World Champs, and why Brett Hawke is wrong about The Enhanced Games
This featured article was writen by Jacob Lea, an aspiring swimming coach and writer. Check out his work on Substack.
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Over the past two weeks - between work, and life - I was on poolside for the British Swimming Nextgen Championships in Sheffield, and was phone-side for the Swimming World Championships in Singapore.
It was a coincidence that these two competitions - one designed to feed the other - happened at the same time. And it elucidated something important about swimming - three years ago last week, a 19-year old, 100m backstroker named Oliver Morgan came 2nd at the British Nextgen Championships in Sheffield, achieving a time of 54.81. Last Tuesday, he swam a 52.37 - this time in Singapore, not Sheffield, and coming fifth in the world.
And there was overlap in the other direction, too - many swimmers competing in the British Championships had already represented their countries elsewhere. Swimmers completing this journey up to worlds; swimmers (on the cusp of Worlds) back competing at British Summer Champs - this illuminated a continuum, visible on poolside, and in the quickening race times as the heats climbed age groups. Ultimately, the last two weeks represent a bubble - a closed bubble - which, at the least is a community, a subculture. But, at the most - it is a family.
This bubble has, very recently, been punctured by a third, newly floating entity - the emergence, or possible emergence, of the Enhanced Games in the United States. The Enhanced Games is first sport competition that will support the use of performance enhancing drugs; not following the rules set by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). And there’s a cash incentive, too. And if you break a world record, 1,000,000$ will be deposited into your bank account. In May, it was announced that the Paris Olympian Kristian Gkolomeev, coached by Brett Hawke, had unofficially broken the world record for the 50m Freestyle - he is, now, 1,000,000$ richer because of this.
The effect of this new arrival on our bubble might only be clear in retrospect - in this moment we are all just speculators. In June, Brett Hawke made an appearance on the Abnormal Podcast. There, over the course of one hour, he made his case for joining the Enhanced Games. We are just speculators, but I listened to the points he made - I thought about them, and here’s why I think they are wrong:
As he is ready to admit - to advertise, even - the Enhanced Games will pay. And it will pay very well - something that cannot be said for many Olympic Sports. In swimming, there are world-class athletes at the British and World Championships with second and third jobs. Brett mentions his swimmer - the recent millionaire Kristian Gkolomeev - who, over 4 olympics, and 16-years competing, made just $50,000. Disrupting this globally complacent and greedy pay structure, then - by pouring funds into a new medium - is this such a bad thing? The problem with the Enhanced Games is that it disrupts two variables at once - pay and drugs.
The pay, in this company, has a putrefying, rather than disruptive, affect - it rots consent into coercion. And spews out other consequences.
This is the first: an increased likelihood of people aspiring to compete at the Enhanced Games - kids; adolescents; olympians. Clean athletes are welcome, they stress - but the monumental prize money means that it is more likely now that athletes (who otherwise wouldn’t) will be tempted to compete under the influence (come hither, poor athlete, and compete for cash - and yes, yes that’s correct - heat 2, you’re racing Goliath).
The second is a vested interest in cheating the system. Let’s see how far we can push the human body is a sentence thrown about often - the answer is (probably) pretty far, providing we’re willing to drag casualties onto each podium. But since this is sport, and not dulce et decorum est - the Enhanced Games say their regulated metric is athlete health, this as opposed to the mere presence of performance enhancing drugs.
They will do “comprehensive” tests to ensure athletes are healthy enough to compete. The problem here being that I’m sure athletes who wake up every morning to piss in a cup for WADA would call those tests “comprehensive”. And I’m sure the number of athletes who go on cheating would also call them inconsequential. Deciding what, exactly, is “healthy” - this is something that is monumentally difficult to do. Especially considering a severe lack of evidence for what safe consumption is, as well as a lack of understanding as to the short-, and long-term effects of PED use.
And now there’s millions in cash sloshing about. If it is simply more likely, here, that athletes will want to push the boundaries of their own health - finding ways to game the system; or failing to do so, and being kicked out with long-term health issues - then we have a huge problem.
In the worst case, I can imagine a world where athletes go from being accused of drugging to being accused of unhealthiness - with the same controversies, the same difficulties with arbitrary data-thresholds, the same secrecy, the same scandals - only now, with the goal posts moved to a different space. A faster, higher, and stronger space maybe, but a more dangerous one also. This is not trivial - in fact, this scenario is fundamentally antithetical to The Enhanced Games’s brand. It would mean we are not liberated from the very thing it claims to relieve us of: doping.
I have another objection; and this one, I’m happy to admit, is just subjective preference on what sport is. To go back to that favoured sentence - let’s just see how far we can push the human body. We’ve covered the let’s see how far. Now what, exactly, is a “normal” human body? It is interesting to note, here, that Brett and co are willing to use banned suits for their races, in empty pools, with loosened lanes - adding in mechanical, to chemical, doping. Although “normal” might be difficult to define (it might even be impossible) - somewhere between a Michelangelo-inspired behemoth actually swimming, and an engineer simply riding a torpedo down the pool, we would all draw our lines. Since he’s willing to use some mechanical, and chemical, advantages - why he isn’t willing to use flippers in his races, or hand-paddles, or snorkels - where are his lines? Where are the lines of the Enhanced Games? His combination of aids, at this stage, is more indistinguishable from flippers, hand paddles, and snorkels than (I think) he realises.
This is a deformed impulse - the impulse to see high performance - and it is intriguingly male. Both the founders, the head coach, and all the swimmers were male until just the other day, when they announced their first female athlete (for whom the evidence base for safe PED use is even less). But, for the same reason that watching cyclists with electric motors fly through the Tour de France wouldn’t feel real, or even entertaining - neither, I propose, should this.
The hope, for Brett, is to facilitate a new era in longevity science: the Enhanced Games will help us extend our health-span by discovering the optimised, safe dosage for performance enhancing drugs. This motive is strange, though, given he will keep his enhanced diet secret - this because he doesn’t want competition to know it, and he doesn’t want to encourage people to take drugs…
Despite this contradiction, by constantly stressing this ageless city on the hill, and being denialist, or at least naïve about the influence this could have through the sport - Brett’s descriptions of an Enhanced World end up sounding genuinely utopic. Well, anyone who has read, swiped, or listened their way through the online health sphere will be used to that. And having seen the trends, the people, and the companies that have come and gone out there - utopic in this sphere sets off all too familiar alarm bells: it rarely means more than profitable and cultish.
About the auther:
Jacob Lea is a Biochemistry graduate from the University of Manchester and a Sports Science graduate from the University of Glasgow.
Having coached swimming at the University of Glasgow, he now coaches at Southport Swimming Club in Merseyside.
Check out Jacob's Writing on Substack.
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