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The news that American sprint star Fred Kerley had signed up to compete in the Enhanced Games was less an announcement than a multi-front news rollout that rippled through both social and traditional media.
For analog-minded people, the Enhanced Games — a proposed new multi-sport event with an “anything-goes” policy on PEDs — issued an old-school news release, paired with an in-depth interview published on Sports Illustrated’s website. And for people with more modern news consumption habits, here came collaborative posts on Instagram, with slideshows and IG stories generating valuable engagement.
It’s a publicity campaign befitting the occasion.
In the two years since the competition was first announced, the Enhanced Games has promised big money to athletes willing to compete in their event, where a PED use isn’t just allowed but encouraged. Each event offers a $500,000 US in prize money, plus a $1 million bonus for surpassing a world record.
But big-name active athletes didn’t follow.
Australian swimmer James Magnussen signed up first. He has three Olympic medals, but he’s also 35, and last competed in 2018.
WATCH | Trackside’s Perdita Felicien, Donovan Bailey and Kate Van Buskirk on Fred Kerley and the Enhanced Games:
A few more swimmers came on board, but no Olympic medallists until England’s Ben Proud, who won two silvers last summer in Paris, agreed to compete. Securing his commitment showed the games could nibble at the fringes of the big time.
And then came Kerley.
The 29-year-old native of Taylor, Texas is an elite performer with recent-vintage accolades. He’s won two Olympic medals in the 100 metres, including bronze in Paris last summer. In 2022 he won world championship gold in the 100, and earlier that year became the only sprinter in history to record two wind-legal, sub-9.8 second times on the same day.
Factor out hype and spin this is still big news. Every upstart sports venture needs a breakthrough signing, and Kerley is it for the Enhanced Games. First non-swimmer, first American. He’s not Herschel Walker spurning the NFL for the USFL, but he’s as close as the Enhanced Games can hope for right now. He has credentials and tread on his tires, and, judging by his jam-packed podcast guest appearance schedule, good standing in the track-and-field talkosphere. His signing signals to a certain level of athlete that the Enhanced Games are worth their attention.
But Fred Kerley is one person, and he’s not signing up for a televised time trial. So until organizers put together quality fields to accompany their early signees, Kerley’s arrival raises as many questions as it answers.
We don’t have to guess at Kerley’s motives. The day he announced the move he also peppered his Instagram feed with posts about money, including this photo of Batman’s nemesis, The Joker, standing before a pyramid made of stacked up bundles of cash.
Welcome to 2025, where the five words that explain almost every plot twist are, “if the money’s right.”
Sometimes that mantra produces magic. Terence “Bud” Crawford and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez expressed little interest in fighting each other until the Saudi boxing power-broker Turki Alalshikh made the money right and the fighters agreed to meet. Last Saturday, Crawford authored an instant classic in defeating Alvarez for the super-middleweight title.
But most often, making the money right gives us curiosities, like Tom Brady and crew of NFLers playing flag football in Saudi Arabia, or sideshows, like 59-year-old Mike Tyson agreeing to box an exhibition against Floyd Mayweather.
The Enhanced Games could turn into any or all of the above, but we know that track and field paydays can be precarious. Friday afternoon Front Office Sports reported that Grand Slam Track had hired a law firm as the startup track leagues braces for the prospect of legal action from the various athletes and vendors to whom it owes a cumulative eight figures. So when a promoter calls promising a chance at a million-dollar payday, a lot of track athletes will answer.
Then there’s opportunity.
Kerley is currently serving a provisional suspension from the Athletics Integrity Unit for missing three drug tests in 12 months. The possibility of him contesting a full slate of sanctioned track meets next year is about as remote as the prospect of him collecting his prize money from Grand Slam track this week.
Which is to say Kerley is the perfect target for this venture. He has a world-class résumé, a wide open 2026 schedule, and no drug testers to deter him from pursuing the enhancement of his choice.
But if eclipsing Usain Bolt’s 100-metre world record is the dream for Kerley and Enhanced Games organizers, here’s the reality check.
Bolt ran 9.58 seconds in 2009. Kerley’s best time this season was 9.98.
To the casual sports fan likely to compose the bulk of the Enhance Games’ broadcast audience, the gap is incidental; the difference between 4th-and-1 and 4th-and-inches. Doesn’t matter. Either way, run the tush-push. First down, Eagles.
But people who follow track know that 0.40 of a second separates several tiers of athletes. It’s the difference between winning worlds and missing the final because you finished seventh in your semi. In football terms it’s the difference between Patrick Mahomes and whoever is backing him up. It’s not something you can wish away, and it’s a gap you’d have a hard time bridging with PEDs.
And if the goal is to have the winner emerge from a group of similarly talented and enhanced peers, we’ve run into another dilemma. If Kerley blows the doors off a group of jobbers who happen to take steroids, it’s a lacklustre broadcast product that also undermines the event’s premise. PEDs are the constant, and Kerley’s immense talent becomes the variable.
But it might not be possible to lure eight top-tier sprinters across the sport’s bright red line. And whoever might do it needs to hurry, lest they give Kerley a head start in the PED arms race preceding the 100-metre dash.
From a standing start, it’s a tall task for organizers.
Friday morning Noah Lyles performed another signature walkdown, going from third to first in the second half of the race to win another world championship in the 200. After that Melissa Jefferson-Wooden conducted a 200-metre clinic, winning the women’s race wire to wire. Neither champion approached a world record, but both races produced drama thanks to the stakes, the setting, the sub-plots, and the supreme depth of each field.
The Enhanced Games can acquire a U.S. superstar, but it can’t manufacture world championship atmosphere from thin air, and Kerley can’t create on-track drama by himself. Whether the Enhanced Games delivers as a competition, a TV event and marketing vehicle depends heavily on what happens from here.
Signing Kerley is a start, but that’s all it is.
