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The Olympics have been marred by a number of doping scandals involving athletes who used performance-enhancing drugs to gain an edge on the rest of the competition. Now, a swimmer who won a silver medal in France is essentially retiring from the sport so he can do exactly that while competing in the controversial showcase known as the Enhanced Games.
Olympic athletes have been turning to illicit remedies to get a leg up since the games were first held in Ancient Greece more than 2,700 years ago. They may not have had access to the steroids and supplements on the market today, but there’s evidence they harnessed opiates, hallucinogens, and questionable natural remedies in the hopes of boosting their performance.
Various forms of doping were also very abundant after the Olympic Games were resurrected in Greece in 1896. A cocktail containing strychnine is just one of the many wild aspects of the marathon that was held in 1904, and in 1960, amphetamine was linked to the death of a Danish cyclist who died while racing in Rome.
The IOC officially banned PEDs in 1967, but it’s spent close to 60 years playing a game of whack-a-mole while combating the increasingly sophisticated doping regimens that have been harnessed by athletes from dozens of countries over the decades.
British swimmer Ben Proud has not been implicated in any of those scandals, but he has opted to see what all the hype is about by abandoning his career as a competitive swimmer in order to enter a competition that’s swimming in controversy.
Olympic silver medalist Ben Proud effectively announced his retirement in order to compete in the Enhanced Games
Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, and Ben Johnson are just a few of the many notable athletes who’ve had their legacy tarnished by the PEDs that played a central role in their ability to ascend to the top of their sport, and they also highlight the simple reason many competitors have turned to steroids, HGH, and other illegal substances: they work.
Those substances are obviously banned in the name of fairness, but they also tend to be accompanied by a number of health risks that have contributed to the criticism directed at the Enhanced Games, the competition set to be held for the first time in 2026 that will allow participants to use FDA-approved PEDs in their quest to break world records that won’t be officially acknowledged.
The Enchanced Games were founded by Australian businessman Aron D’Souza in 2023. They’ve managed to attract the support of Donald Trump Jr. and Peter Thiel, who have helped fund a competition where winners of events in disciplines including swimming, weightlifting, and track and field will get $250,000 in addition to $1 million if they can break a world record.
Australian swimmer James Magnussen has undergone a dramatic physical transformation in the hopes of taking home that dough, and now, a new challenger has emerged in the form of Ben Proud, who won a silver medal in the 50-meter freestyle while representing the United Kingdom at the Summer Olympics in France in 2024.
Proud recently won a silver in the same event at the 2025 World Aquatics Championships in Singapore, but according to The Athletic, that will seemingly mark the last time the 30-year-old takes part in a competition overseen by the World Anti-Doping Agency after he announced he’ll be partaking in the Enhanced Games in 2026.
The current world record for that event was set in 2009 when Brazil’s César Cielo swam it in 20.91 seconds. He benefited from the polyurethane suits that were banned by the International Swimming Federation the following year, and while it’s unclear if those will be allowed at the Enhanced Games, Proud will also have PEDs on his side.