A seven-hour Enhanced Games event in a Las Vegas parking lot featured a newly installed 100-meter six-lane sprint track, a 50-meter four-lane pool, a weightlifting stage, and spectator seating. Giant screens and LEDs ran from 6:00 pm to 1:00 am, while streaming across multiple platforms drew hundreds of thousands of viewers. The event presented a $15 million prize pool with payouts for race winners and a $1 million bonus for breaking a world record. Forty-two athletes competed, most previously using anabolic steroids, amphetamines, EPO, and growth hormone. Only one world record was set, by Kristian Gkolomeev in the men’s 50m freestyle, using drugs and a polyurethane swimsuit model banned for nearly 20 years.
"They closed the night with The Killers, vegan rock, but there were no fatalities: no athlete burst a vein or had artificially hypertrophied muscles split open mid-effort; ligaments and tendons held up in the Las Vegas parking lot where, in 35 days, organizers had installed an elevated 100-meter, six-lane sprint track, a 50-meter pool with four lanes, a weightlifting stage and a long platform to seat thousands of spectators."
"Via streaming across half a dozen platforms, hundreds of thousands of people watched parts of the seven-hour Enhanced Games, a delirious advertising platform in an exceptional space, outside the laws of sport, competition, and health. A glittering commercial enterprise and a mediocre sporting contest in which 42 athletes (36 of them previously doped with anabolic steroids, amphetamines, EPO, and growth hormone) competed for a $15 million prize pool: $250,000 for the winner of each race, $1 million for anyone who broke a world record."
"Gkolomeev, who joined the enhanced culture a year ago and had already beaten the record, used not only drugs but the banned physics of a polyurethane swimsuit that floats and penetrates the water a model that has been illegal for nearly 20 years. It was the night's final event, the only chance for the CEO of the Enhanced Games, Maximilian Martin, to breathe easy; he fell to his knees in a theatrical genuflection at the feet of the Greek giant."
"Then, moved, he proclaimed that the future is already here. We can prove, through the power of science, we are the best we could ever think of and you are living proof, he said, as reported by the Guardian journalist present, before an enthusiastic audience of fitness influencer"
Read at english.elpais.com
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