Athletes Need To Be Paid. The Enhanced Games Isn’t the Answer

Next December, the inaugural Enhanced Games are scheduled to take place showcasing athletes across the world who are allowed to use performance-enhancing drugs to give them an advantage. This idea concocted by Australian entrepreneur Aron D’Souza does not only go against the entire spirit of competition, it also creates an unsafe environment for athletes.

In my line of work in the running industry, I’ve had the pleasure to engage with innumerable professional runners. I’ve witnessed 100+ mile training weeks, international track meets, world records, marathon victories, and losses by mere hundredths of seconds. In the world of running, just like many other sports, a single bad day at the office could mean the end of a career, a missed Olympic team, a slot on a World Championship squad gone. It’s a career of the thinnest of margins–from finish times to take-home pay. In our sport, only the mainstream household names and top 1 percent will receive life-changing sponsorship deals, endorsements, and notable prize money. For the vast majority of professional runners, a sports career is one of part-time jobs, cramped shared housing, delayed non-athletic careers, and constant worry about making ends meet.

There is no lack of corruption and cronyism in many of our modern sports leagues and organizations. Athlete protections have often been an afterthought (see USA Gymnastics and the Larry Nassar era) and compensation and even the right to an athlete’s own name and likeness fought all the way to the Supreme Court by the NCAA. The Olympics certainly are not a bastion of purity of sport and not without their significant management and corruption issues either. But they don’t encourage athletes—many of them young adults or even kids—to indulge in the temptation and false belief that performance-enhancing substances will lead to career success.

Enter the Enhanced Games. They bill themselves as athlete-centric and an alternative to the Olympics, but underlying is a troubling reality that is antithesis to the athletic spirit. This spectacle risks exploitation and puts athletes’ health at grave danger by allowing and even encouraging the use of performance-enhancing substances. Who really wins? Not the athlete.

If the leadership behind the Enhanced Games were interested in modernizing the “Modern Games,” they would create a program that centered the athlete and their health, not hanging carrots of prize money while encouraging athletes to take performance-enhancing, sometimes illegally-obtained substances. If they truly believed in centering the athlete, they wouldn’t make them test subjects in the name of false science. They would create systems and programs that took care of athletes throughout their careers, such as provision of health care, housing, and travel.

The Enhanced Games will want the best in the world to compete. Athletes will have to choose between their traditional sponsors, many of which will want no association with a spectacle like the Enhanced Games. While the Enhanced Games has invited all athletes—including “natural athletes” defined as non-performance enhanced athletes, any professional athlete worth watching will think twice before compromising their sponsorship deals. So will the Enhanced Games actually attract the best athletes in the world? Highly doubtful.

Solving athlete pay is critical and the current model of athlete compensation in the sports world is broken for most professionals you don’t see any given Sunday on TV. We need fairer distribution of income for our athletes. They need stability in their day to day lives as they train. They don’t need vultures willing to exploit them for entertainment.

Is the Olympic model broken? Yes. Are the Enhanced Games the answer? No.

Kathy Dalby is CEO of Pacers Running and the former president of the Running Industry Association.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.