Doped Olympics, the Enhanced Games, is “bollocks”, says Seb Coe

World Athletics chief Seb Coe has rubbished plans for a doping Olympics, the Enhanced Games, as “bollocks”.

The former Olympic champion was speaking ahead of this weekend’s World Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow.

“It’s bollocks. I can’t really get excited about it,” Coe said.

“There’s only one message and that is if anyone is moronic enough to want to take part in that and are from the traditional, philosophical end of our sport they’ll get banned. And they’ll get banned for a long time.”

Coe added: “There are crazy things happening in other sectors, we will occasionally get them [too].

“I really don’t get sleepless nights over it, it’s not going to be a page turner is it?”

The Enhanced Games – backed by the likes of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, life sciences and psychedelics investor Christian Angermayer’s Apieron Investment Group and former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan – aims to allow athletes to compete with performance enhancing drugs.

They argue that anti-doping policies are restricting the potential of athletes.

Former Olympian James Magnussen has said he’d happily be the poster boy of the project, which was founded by London-based lawyer Aron D’Souza.

D’Souza said: “Since we launched the Enhanced Games there has been a small line of establishment figures from analogue belittling our plans, with colourful descriptions such as “bollocks”, “horseshit”, and “a joke”. This reaction tells me that we’ve hit a nerve, and also indicates an inability by some incumbents to string together a cohesive argument against what we’re doing – based on science or ethics – so they default to these juvenile insults. 

“Encouragingly, the majority of responses have been serious and overwhelmingly positive. Just this week at the First Conference on Human Enhancement at the House of Lords, government and scientific leaders know that the future of sports science isn’t ‘bollocks’. Many leaders of the Olympic movement, some of whom I’m sure Lord Coe would regard as being on his team, do appear to be excited about it and have engaged with us in the interest of using science to advance humanity through sport. 

“We’re very open to any mature discussion about what we’re building, including with Lord Coe himself. 

“Let me remind you that the taxis thought Uber was a joke, just as Blockbuster Video famously thought of Netflix. But, as I always say, the future is not a joke.

“Lord Coe represents the analogue era of sports, which cherished the purity of the Game. We understand and respect that. But the Enhanced Games represents something new – the union of sports and science. He may call that bollocks, but name-calling won’t stop progress.

“The Enhanced Games are inevitable.”