RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: So why couldn’t the Enhanced Games ever get off the ground?

Something amusing happened within the course of a surreal week. It’s to do with that band of agitators at the Enhanced Games and a particular tool they’ve used to push their vision of a drug-charged Olympics.

If you’ve had a peek into the nonsense of it all, you’ll know the video. It’s the one with the mystery sprinter they claim can run the 100m in 9.49sec. The guy who wants your help to ‘come out’ as an ‘enhanced’ athlete.

To pick the most ludicrous moment within it is tricky — the aspirational music was fun, the tone of the messaging, too, and then there’s the workout itself, in which our faceless missile is shown crouching in blocks that have been set up on the finish line. It’s quite ridiculous and provocative in ways they may or may not have intended.

But here’s another detail: it can also be bought in high definition for £48, because if you do a quick search on pond5.com, you’ll find it. You see, it’s not a man who can run faster than Usain Bolt; it is stock footage shot for adverts or commercial presentations. A farce within a farce.

The Enhanced Games won’t get off the ground, of course. They just won’t get the athletes, the sponsors or the venues to sign up. To go by the conversations I had with their president, Aron D’Souza, this is the era of the ‘disruptor’, of LIV golf, of Dana White’s slap league and freak shows, except some associations can be just a little too toxic. Even now.

Enhanced Games founder Aron D’Souza is pushing for a drug-charged version of the Olympics

13 months out from Paris 2024, how many clean athletes will foot the bill to drugs cheats 

But he also misses a crucial point — there is no gap in this market. There is no need for a dopers Olympics when you already have one. So it’s not just the video that’s laughable, it’s the inference that what they are offering is new, given that every four years we have fresh data for the decades-long study into what a jacked-up human can do. 9.49sec? 

Ben Johnson was three-tenths slower and his bloody eyes were yellow. Tyson Gay was a tenth quicker than Johnson and also served a ban. As did Yohan Blake, Asafa Powell, Justin Gatlin and Christian Coleman.

They’re among the fastest men in history and they’ve all been banned for various infractions along the spectrum of doping offences. Just as 154 Olympic medals have been seized from cheats and the careless across the years and state-sponsored scandals have stretched from Russia to China to East Germany, like links in a filthy chain that reaches back to the Sixties. That’s before we get to countries like our own and the exploration of grey areas, if we are to be generous with the terminology.

This can be a slippery topic, because we shouldn’t just look at the Olympic Games in the context of its flaws. In my view, it remains the greatest show on earth. It’s about the journeys. The dramas. The rainbow of all those sports and nations and the delivery of excellence through the smallest of windows.

We all have our lists and I’d place the sight of Simone Biles in flight among the finest in any athletic pursuit. But it’s also about cognitive dissonance, because repetition has conditioned us to query much of what we see. 

One by one, the failed tests have gnawed away at the Games. They increased our suspicions and lessened the sum of the whole, which then makes you think differently about the L-carnitine and the iffy conditioning coach and the sprinter who came from nowhere.

It can become a spiral of ever-diminishing faith, and somewhere during the tumble, you might read a few of the statistics. One will show that less than two per cent of those tested in elite sport produce a positive; another will point to a survey of competitors at the 2011 World Athletics Championships, which was conducted under a guarantee of discretion by the World Anti-Doping Agency. 

About 29 per cent of respondents admitted to doping in the previous 12 months. All of that has caused massive damage to the Olympics over time.

Jamaican sprinter Yohan Blake (left) and former team-mate of Usain Bolt (right)was found to have doped previously

American sprinting pair Tyson Gay (right) and Justin Gatlin have both served bans in the past for doping as well

Drugs cheat: Ben Johnson (centre) speeds to win the Olympic 100m final in a world record 9.79 seconds in Seoul 

Not as a living and breathing thing, because that would be obscene, but the mere concept should act as a jolting reminder for the International Olympic Committee of what not to be. It might wish to have a glance at D’Souza’s house of horrors, see how it is all a little too familiar, and plot a course in the opposite direction.

But change is hard. Change requires the sort of backbone they lacked in their dealings with Russia. On that front, it would be timely to look at the reporting by my colleague Nick Harris this weekend and the hair-raising details of their doping regime and a whistleblower’s fears of assassination.

Those stories capture how multiple Games of the very recent past were violated and corrupted, but where were the meaningful, unilateral bans once it all came to light? Not on flags and team names, with hundreds of Russian athletes allowed in through the back door, but in the form of a wholesale message of zero tolerance.

At the 2022 Winter Olympics, Kamila Valieva then 15 was found to have tested positive for a banned substance

The mere concept of the Enhanced Games should act as a jolting reminder for the International Olympic Committee 

Having covered the 2022 Winter Olympics, where a Russian child of 15, Kamila Valieva, was found to have tested positive for a banned substance, you do wonder if the bods at the IOC ever joined the dots. 

Or, if there is any limit to the number of times you can pee on their rug and still receive an invite. For now, it appears not, and 13 months out from Paris 2024, how many clean athletes will foot the bill in this cycle?

It’s the same price that has been paid by athletes for decades, such as Sharron Davies, going right back to 1980 and the futile business of beating the chemists of East Germany.

Mail Sport has been campaigning to right that wrong — if the IOC value clean sport, it would be high on their job list. It’s a nice thought, if not blissfully naive. Much like any idea that the Enhanced Games are something new, when they’ve been around for years.

Mount’s Chelsea departure is another act of self-sabotage 

Declan Rice to Arsenal for £105million would be near enough the perfect deal — West Ham pocket a fortune and Arsenal land an immense talent who might well captain England one day. Happy all round.

But that also steers the mind to one of the more lopsided switches of the transfer window. Chelsea have made an art of tripping over their laces lately, but to lose such a lovely player as Mason Mount to a rival is among their biggest acts of self-sabotage yet.

Mason Mount’s departure for Manchester United is Chelsea’s biggest act of self-sabotage yet

In this instance, it is the structure of the fee that is interesting, with Manchester United due to pay £55m up front and a further £5m in the usual extras for performance milestones, trophies, and the accumulation of other success markers.

If Chelsea eventually do get that £5m bonus, the penny might finally drop about the quality of the player they let go.