Competing in the pro-doping Enhanced Games
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This is The Guardian. Today, why elite athletes are openly doping for the year's biggest sporting spectacle.
I was always talented in the water, right? I always had a natural affinity to water. And it's a place of peace, right? When you put your head under the water, there's no one's talking to you. It's just you and your thoughts or you just pushing yourself. So there's that part I always thought. But my dream was always like when you're a little kid, it's a win the Olympic gold medal.
Why are elite athletes openly doping in the Enhanced Games?
As you get older, you start understanding how rare that is. So it kind of shifted towards, you know, just making the Olympic Games.
Meet Max McCusker. He's an elite swimmer with the shoulders to prove it. Max trained with military discipline in his childhood. Six to eight sessions a week, entering every competition going. And it paid off.
All right, they're off now for the last final of day two here at the national championships. Look at that breakout from McCusker.
He represented Ireland as a finalist in the European and World Championships.
Three strokes to go. McCusker wins at 23-44. That's pretty slick.
I missed the Tokyo 2021 Games by a couple of hundredths of a second, maybe.
But Max did make it to the Olympics. Paris 2024. You'd have thought this was just the beginning of a glorious career. An Olympian, representing his country and being skilled at a level most of us can barely physically imagine.
Pretty much straight after Paris Olympics, I retired due to like mainly financial reasons, but just had no support or funding from the governing body. So just decided that, you know what, I've made my childhood career dream and I had to go work in the corporate world for a bit.
At 24, Max thought his swimming career was done. A year later, he got a call.
The Enhanced Games, a new era where sport meets spectacle, where records fall and traditions are rewritten. The world's best athletes, fully unleashed and powered by science.
Yeah, so it was actually an old teammate who reached out to me, Shane Ryan, and was like, there's a spot for a butterfly swimmer. I've told them about you and I've told them that you might be interested.
Max was invited to compete in the Enhanced Games, the world's first sporting event where athletes aren't just openly taking drugs. They're being encouraged to do so.
I always thought there was more for me. I always thought I was continuously improving. And then, yeah, I kind of went from there, started speaking with the team and the coach. And then before you know it, I was out on a plane to the training camp.
This weekend, the first ever Enhanced Games will take place in Las Vegas. Where else? To show the world what it looks like to turn affinites into superhumans using a radical cocktail of drugs, peptides, supplements, so-called longevity medicine. all of which you can conveniently buy from their website. From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, selling superhumans. Are the enhanced games looking to get us all hooked? Sean Ingle, you're a chief sports reporter at The Guardian, and you recently wrote about not getting your media pass for the enhanced games. Can you tell me how come?
We all thought it'd be quite interesting to go along. We applied for accreditation and we got a reply back saying, sorry, no. I then got an email from the Enhanced Games people saying it had nothing to do with scrutiny from the Guardian. We don't care about that.
What motivated Max McCusker to compete in the Enhanced Games?
It's because the Guardian's not big in America.
Right, okay.
I pointed out that actually we are one of the sort of bigger news media websites in America and the world without sort of picking up the trumpet and blowing it too loudly. And at the end of last week, they said, okay, you can actually go.
So the Enhanced Games, they're absolutely embracing that sports should be aligned with drug use and that it's fair game for everyone to be taking them.
Their starting point, I guess, is that they believe that lots of elite athletes take banned drugs already. They're just not caught. So the Enhanced essentially say, look... We're honest here.
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