At the 18-mile mark in last month’s Los Angeles Marathon, runners had the option to veer off the course and head for a finish line marked out for a separate charity event. They would still receive their finisher’s medal and could wear it without whatever sense of pride deemed appropriate.
I am not making this up. With warm, sunny conditions forecast for later in the race, the organisers decided any runner “having a tough day” could finish after 18 miles. No questions asked, and apparently no laughing matter either.
Now, anyone who has ever run the 26.2 miles of a marathon will know the race only begins after 18 miles. It’s nothing only tough going from there. Turns out about five per cent of the 23,374 runners did stop at the 18-mile mark, but they will always know who they are, and God knows how they live with themselves.
This was one of several stories which appeared on the homepage of the popular LetsRun.com website on Wednesday. That being April 1st, they took great delight in mixing up some of the entirely factual stories of the last year with some completely made-up ones. Good luck trying to tell some of them apart.
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The truth, as we all know, is sometimes stranger than fiction. Among the other stories on Wednesday was the one about a 17-year-old US high school student winning the World Indoor 800m, and a 16-year-old kid from New Zealand running a 3:48 mile. There was also one about the Norwegian runner named Jakob Ingebrigtsen who failed to advance from the heats of the 1,500m at the World Championships in Tokyo. All perfectly true.
The people at LetsRun.com know all about the occasional absurdities of sport – The New York Times described the website as “something of a superego for American running”. So they were bound to poke some April Fool’s fun at the Enhanced Games, next month’s new sporting spectacle that openly allows and encourages the use of otherwise banned performance-enhancing drugs.
They carried two stories about the Enhanced Games – the first of which claimed the organisers had cancelled plans to stage a marathon at their event in Las Vegas in May, after they realised many of the world’s top marathon runners were already doping. Which was funny, if a little too close to the truth.
According to the latest figures from the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), Kenya currently has 146 athletes banned for various doping offences, including Ruth Chepngetich, who in Chicago in 2024, ran 2:09:56 to break the women’s marathon world record. Six months later Chepngetich tested positive for HCTZ, a banned diuretic also widely used as a masking agent, her sample containing 190 times the amount needed to trigger a positive test.
Chepngetich was subsequently banned for three years, and yet still gets to keep her world record. You couldn’t make that up. Last Monday, Albert Korir also joined the long list of banned Kenyans, the former New York Marathon winner given five years after admitting to three separate doping offences involving Cera, the modern and more powerful variant of EPO.
The website’s second story on the Enhanced Games looked at the US sprinter Fred Kerley, who signed up to the event last September. This being the same US sprinter who last month was banned for two years for anti-doping whereabouts failures.
Kerley won the 100m at the World Championships in 2022, and claimed he only signed up for the Enhanced Games for financial reasons. Considering that the Enhanced Games had hailed Kerley as their marquee signing, and would set out to prove what is possible for a sprinter who does take drugs, what exactly is their purpose now given this athlete is already serving a doping ban?
Dubbed by others as the Steroid Olympics, or the Pharma Games, the exact details of the Enhanced Games remain sketchy. We know they’re going to take place at Resorts World in Las Vegas on May 24th and include just three sports – the short sprint events in athletics and swimming, and the snatch, and the clean-and-jerk, in weightlifting.
Even with the headline $1 million bonus for any athlete breaking world records in the 100m sprint or the 50m freestyle, the times will still count for zilch, given they won’t mean anything in anyone’s books.
By the time Max McCusker became the second Irish swimmer to sign up in December, joining fellow Olympian Shane Ryan, there was already such widespread disapproval from Swim Ireland, Sport Ireland and the Olympic Federation of Ireland it hardly seemed to matter. By then, most people were seeing through the Enhanced Games for what they are. Just one click on their website will take you to the testosterone and various other drugs they are hawking.
If this is all part of their “mission to redefine super humanity through science, innovation and sports”, it’s already a dangerous and darkly cynical take on modern sport, and it can’t be a lasting one. Surely at some point the athletes who have signed up will realise that too.
Daniel Wiffen didn’t mince his words on the Enhanced Games, the Olympic 800m freestyle champion saying, “it doesn’t make sense to me morally that people would go out and dope just for a pay cheque” – and adding, “you’re risking your health at the end of the day”.
McCusker and Ryan are currently part of the Enhanced Games training camp in Abu Dhabi, frequently posting images of their progress on social media, and if anything, these images are only becoming more grotesque.
Travis Tygart, the head of the US Anti-Doping Agency, has already called it “a dangerous clown show, not real sport”, and World Athletics president Sebastian Coe described it as “b****cks, isn’t it?”
All of which makes the event on May 24th an increasingly hard sell, and one that is fast becoming a running joke. And we’ve enough of those already.
