The Enhanced Games — the openly performance-enhanced rival event that World Athletics president Sebastian Coe has called "bollocks" and World Anti-Doping Agency president Witold Bańka has labelled "dangerous" — will stage its first competition at Resorts World Las Vegas from 21 to 24 May, less than four weeks after Sabastian Sawe broke the two-hour barrier at the London Marathon. Three nights of swimming, athletics and weightlifting will run inside the casino's purpose-built pool and a temporary 100-metre sprint straight, with $250,000 going to each event winner and a $1 million bonus on the line for any world record. The roster of 38 athletes confirmed so far includes 2022 world 100m champion Fred Kerley, four-time Olympian Kristian Gkolomeev and British sprinter Reece Prescod.
The track programme is sprint-only and runs across two evenings, headlined by a men's 100 metres on Friday 22 May and a women's 100 metres on Saturday 23 May. Liberian-born American Emmanuel Matadi and French sprinter Mouhamadou Fall fill out the men's field alongside Kerley, Prescod and South African Clarence Munyai. The women's race is built around Jasmine Abrams of the United States and Jamaican Denae McFarlane, with Shockoria Wallace and Taylor Anderson confirmed in supporting lanes. Athletes train under medical supervision, declare their substances in advance and submit to the Games' own screening protocols rather than to WADA testing.
World Athletics is treating the event as a hard line. Coe used a pre-Boston press call to repeat his warning that "anybody moronic enough to feel that they want to take part in that, and they are from the traditional, philosophical end of our sport, they'll get banned and they'll get banned for a long time." World Athletics' integrity unit has signalled that any sanctioned athlete who competes in Las Vegas will face a long ineligibility period under the current code, and that the federation will treat the entry list as a notification rather than waiting for a positive test. Several national federations, including UK Athletics, are preparing to follow the same line.
The financial pull, though, is hard to dismiss. The advertised purse outstrips any single Diamond League purse by an order of magnitude, and the bonus structure is designed to draw athletes who feel the elite circuit no longer pays them what their times deserve. Kerley, who has not run faster than 10.05 since 2024, and Prescod, who has been outside the senior Great Britain team since the 2025 indoor season, are both visibly past the point at which a return to the World Championships podium looks likely. The Enhanced Games' pitch — that medically supervised PED use is safer than the doping that already exists in the shadows — is finding takers in exactly that demographic.
For the broader sport the calendar collision is awkward. The Enhanced Games sit in the gap between the Pre Classic on 4 July and the Stockholm Diamond League on 30 May, and they will dominate athletics social media for a weekend in which the Diamond League itself runs a Rome meeting. The Las Vegas weekend will not produce ratified records, will not affect World Rankings positions and will not feed into qualification for Beijing 2027. What it will do, by Coe's own admission this week, is force athletics to make a public argument for the legitimacy of its rulebook in front of an audience that has never been asked to care about anti-doping codes before. That, more than any 100-metre time, is the test that arrives in three weeks.