‘Someone will die’: more warnings issued about drug-fuelled Enhanced Games
Australian Sports Commission chief executive Kieren Perkins has warned the push to allow athletes to take performance enhancing drugs and compete in an organised event dubbed the Enhanced Games could lead to deaths.
The games are being promoted by venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs, and Australian former Olympic medallist and world champion swimmer James Magnussen said in February he wanted to compete.
Perkins refrained from commenting about Magnussen specifically when asked for his opinion at the SportNXT conference in Melbourne on Tuesday, but he said the entire proposition was dangerous and posed legal and ethical issues.
“The idea of an Enhanced Games is laughable,” he said. “Someone will die if we allow that sort of environment to continue to prosper and flourish.”
Australian Olympic Committee chief executive Matt Carroll described the games last year as “dangerous and irresponsible”.
But publicity around the games continues to build and organisers have indicated a US$1m prize would be offered for anyone who breaks an existing world record.
That was enough for 32-year-old Magnussen, who said he was prepared to be the games’ first athlete to get a chance to break the record in his preferred 100m swimming event. “I’ll juice to the gills and I’ll break it within six months,” he said last month, before later saying he regretted the use of those exact words.
“It’s all going to be very scientific, but because I said that comment people just went bam and ran with it,” he said. “It’s the one quote that I regret.”
Perkins urged caution before anyone considered participating in the games, and reminded those at the conference that drugs were banned to protect athletes.
“The reason why drugs in sport were banned is because a cyclist fell off his bike and died,” he said, referring to the death of Danish cyclist Knud Jensen at the 1960 Olympic Games which prompted the modern drug-testing movement.
“We don’t want people to be taking performance-enhancing drugs because of the significant impact it has on them and their future and their future families.”
He said people who had used performance enhancing drugs had children with “serious malformities due to the impact of those drugs”.
Chief executive of Sport New Zealand, Raelene Castle, was on stage alongside Perkins and said the mooted competition was like “Squid Games or Hunger Games”.
“There are well-known drug cheats that aren’t with us any more because they didn’t live past 45,” she said.
Australian-born founder of the Enhanced Games Aron D’Souza has said the international event would go ahead in 2025, and qualification would get under way this year.
Perkins said he has doubts over whether the event would go ahead at all.
“We need to be a little more sensible as a humanity to understand the choices that we are making and those impacts that they are having, so it’s very silly and I doubt it will get up.”