4 June 2026
"It is therefore inevitable that the Enhanced Games provoke robust opinions"
Dr Paul Davis, Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Sport at the University of Sunderland, has explored how the Enhanced Games have shaped the sporting world after its first event last month.
“The Enhanced Games touch off a scattergun of questions, including questions about sport; about personal autonomy, risk and harm; and about money. These questions are not new. However, the Enhanced Games provide a new site for them. It is therefore inevitable that the Enhanced Games provoke robust opinions.
The questions are trickier than some people might think. Philosophers and sociologists of sport have written and debated, since long before the Enhanced Games, about doping and technological enhancements. Ditto money in sport, which implicates media, sponsorship, advertising and globalisation.
It is not clear that any of the standard anti-doping arguments are conclusive. The argument that doping is unnatural (and should therefore be prohibited) confronts the twin challenges of demarcating the natural and showing that sport is a natural enterprise, given the latter’s imaginative construction, permissions and prohibitions, training and lifestyle regimes, equipment and sociocultural scaffoldings.
The notion that doping provides a shortcut to victory is highly dubious, given sport’s range of performance-relevant variables, illustrated by the fact that only one world record fell in the first Enhanced Games. Should doping provide an advantage, the claim that this advantage is unfair is also dubious and was powerfully challenged in the 1980s by sport philosopher, Roger Gardner.
The paternalist argument that doping should be prohibited because of harm to the doper runs into the liberal objection (echoing J.S. Mill’s famous ‘harm principle’) that rational adults should be allowed to decide for themselves which risks they take in pursuit of their objectives. The liberal outlook requires, however, that one has the relevant information about risks, and it is here that the Enhanced Games arguably have considerable merit, since competitors must undergo health profiling and are permitted to use only a medically supervised, curated list of Food and Drug Administration-approved substances (finally limiting the liberty of performers).
Sport philosopher Claudio Tamburrini argued approximately 25 years ago that legalization of doping would make for safer practice, since competitors wishing to dope could have open medical supervision, and research on safe practice could take place openly. The Enhanced Games seem to manifest this vision.
A final argument against doping is that it is incompatible with the spirit or essence of sport. This is a precarious argument, because there is a plurality of ‘models’ of sport, despite the hegemony of certain models (e.g., the ‘gentleman amateur’) in certain times and cultural habitats. The current boundary-blurring sports landscape arguably puts bells and baubles on this plurality.
Sport philosopher Scott Kretchmar articulates six models of sport (which he recognises might not be exhaustive). Some and possibly most (if not all) can support enhancement. For instance, the achievement model of sport is about achievement and excellence. Motifs of this model include progress, preparation, effort, dedication and rewards. Enhancement sits comfortably with all of these, arguably especially in the structures of the Enhanced Games. Kretchmar’s communitarian model of sport, on the other hand, captures sport’s capacity to be a site of community and belonging. Enhancers, a merely informal and heavily furtive community before, can now be a formal and open community through the Enhanced Games.
Sport sociologists Hughes and Coakley argued in the 1990s that some sportspeople (and bodybuilders) dope dangerously to safeguard their membership of a community. In the community of the Enhanced Games, however, there is neither pressure nor permission to dope dangerously.
The status of money in sport, again, is a long-established worry, with the 1990s developments of Murdochisation, satellite television channels, and digitisation considered a defining point, giving rise to sport philosophers’ talk of ‘pathological commodification’. The most anxious observers in the 1990s would not have imagined that a million dollars, let alone 10 million (supposedly for the next Enhanced Games) would be on offer for breaking a world record. Dissent and sombre writings have done little in the last 30 years or so to staunch the arguably obscene money in elite sport and now the Enhanced Games. The bleak truth is that so long as the public continues to provide the market by attending and watching on sundry media, it is unlikely to change.”