Fred Kerley won the men’s 100-meter final at the Enhanced Games in Las Vegas on Sunday, clocking 9.97 seconds in a race that took four tries to get under way because of false starts and untied shoes. The American sprinter, who won bronze in the 100 meters at the Paris Olympics two years earlier, said Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second world record would be “destroyed.”
Kerley’s 9.97 would have placed him last in the Paris final, a reminder of how far the mark was from Olympic medal territory even as it topped the field in Las Vegas. That result came on a day when the Enhanced Games also handed out a rare sprint title to a swimmer, with Kristian Gkolomeev winning the men’s 100-meter freestyle final and covering 50 meters in 20.81 seconds.
The event is being staged in a specially built stadium on the Las Vegas Strip and mixes swimming, weightlifting and track. Its defining feature is the one that keeps it outside mainstream sport: it allows performance-enhancing drugs that are banned elsewhere. That made Gkolomeev’s day even more unusual, because he was the only athlete to earn the $1 million bonus for going faster than the world record over four hours of swimming, weightlifting and track.
Kerley’s win gives the Enhanced Games its first major sprint headline, but the time also underlines how much of the spectacle still rests on comparison rather than supremacy. He ran 9.81 seconds to win bronze in Paris in 2024, and on Sunday he was faster than the field in Las Vegas while still well short of Bolt’s standard. Gkolomeev, meanwhile, left with the biggest reward on offer and the clearest sign yet that the event can produce moments designed to be measured against the sport it challenges.
The next question is whether these results draw more elite athletes into an event built to provoke a debate that traditional sport has avoided for years. For now, the opening weekend delivered exactly what its organizers wanted: a time, a record claim and a prize check that will keep the enhanced games results in the conversation far beyond Las Vegas.
