Donald Trump Jr. appears to have picked up his father’s business acumen when it comes to the world of sports. Don Jr. is a co-organizer of the inaugural “Enhanced Games,” which took place in Las Vegas over the weekend and was ignored by almost everyone, becoming the most pathetic new sporting venture since the XFL.
An event that promised smashed world records and never-before-seen performances instead turned into a wet fart, Temu version of the Olympics games, which utterly sucked. Don’t just take my word for it, because the early returns on the event were so spectacularly bad that the stock price of Enhanced Group, parent company of the games, are in freefall.
The marquee event was set to be the men’s 100m, in which Frank Kerley, the bronze medal winner from the Paris Olympic Games boasted that Usain Bolt’s world record of 9.58 would be “destroyed” by him running on performance-enhancing drugs. Instead, he ran a hilariously slow 9.97, slower than his time at the Olympic Games. After failing to “destroy” Bolt’s record, Kerley turned on his fellow competitors, saying they needed to up their game.
“They gotta do better than that,” Kerley said in a post-race interview. “They need to train a little harder, get on that s*** a little bit more, and go a little harder some more.”
It wasn’t just on the track where things were sad. The pool saw Hunter Armstrong win the 50-meter backstroke as a non-enhanced athlete, tearing apart the entire premise for the games. Then retired Australian swimmer James Magnussen, who came out of retirement for the event, promised he would be ‘juiced to the gills” and break his own 100m freestyle record. He finished two seconds slower than his record mark.
There was a pattern to the entire weekend. Time, and time, and time again, athletes who were on drugs either posted times far slower than anything that would be considered record-breaking, or got outright beaten by athletes who were not doping.
None of this should be a surprise for anyone who has followed the genesis of this farcical event. It was an idea incubated by tech bros and morons with no athletic background, working under the assumption that performance-enhancing drugs could turn any moderate athlete into a superhuman. Not only was there nothing compelling about the games, but nobody seemingly cared they were even happening — especially with competition taking place during the NBA and NHL Playoffs, the MLB season, and a stacked weekend of motosport with Indy 500, F1 GP from Canada, and the Coca-Cola 600 in NASCAR.
Enhanced Games CEO Maximillion Martin said the event is “here to stay,” making The Enhanced Games the herpes of the sports world. We’ll see an occasional unwelcome flare-up, and be happy when it’s gone.
