Why McEvoy's Magic Cannot Be Broken By The Boosted In Bodysuits
The wisdom of Cam McEvoy and his take on the doping games this month invites us to think laterally along a front line of tick boxes in a battle that calls on swimming to engage the brain not just the brawn of enhancement
“Within the Enhanced Games camp, I’m sure they will think of it as a world record. Outside of that camp, no one is going to see it in that light.” - so says Cameron McEvoy in comments made to Australian media - and so say all of us.
It's the week before the Enhanced Games and the usual nonsense about "world records" being broken is swilling about once more.
In his chat with McEvoy, the World record holder, Olympic and World champion in the 50m freestyle, Tom Decent at The Sydney Morning Herald trips over the truth when he writes in his intro: "In just over a week, Cam McEvoy may no longer be the fastest human in history to get from one end of a 50-metre pool to the other."
The missing word: enhanced. The report clarifies the context, of course, and McEvoy, known as The Professor for an academic capacity and qualification not without its usefulness in sport, is spot on when he delivers the bottom line in the piece: whatever any clock may tell us when the extremely limited confines of the minuscule Enhanced Games unfolds - "It won't count".
The fastest swimmer in swimming history down one length of a pool is McEvoy, with his sizzling 20.88 from the China Open last month, and it will still be him and that time when the EG event ends. Chief executive of EG Maximilian Martin describes the doping games as “the Super Bowl of the Olympics”.
It's neither Super Bowl (banned substances there may be but American football, like many other pro-sports, is just a tad more popular than any event focusing on sprint events mainly for bulked up men in swimming, athletics, and weightlifting) nor Olympics, for obvious reasons, including the fact that at the one-day EG, the competition allows what the WADA Code defines as banned substances and methods, there is no independent random testing and regular whereabouts system in place, the action is all between members of the same team, and no nation or rival team lends a flag to any of it, etc,. etc,.
Among other key swimming-specific truths that keep the EG in its box:
- Any times set at the EGs can only ever be EG records, the permission to use performance-enhancing substances and methods and the lack of independent anti-doping testing reinforcing that reality
- Whatever times may be seen in the pool at the EG, they are highly unlikely to represent the fastest humans to ever travel down one length of a 50m pool, even if the term enhanced is used ... Here are the World records for Fin swimming:
- Men's 50m Surface (Monofin): 15.00 seconds - Mauricio Fernandez (2016).
- Men's 50m Bi-Fins: 17.96 seconds - Szebasztian Szabo (Hungary), set on August 11, 2025.
Fastest 50m Backwards with Fins: 8.82 seconds - Christian Roberto López Rodríguez (Spain) in 2023
Meanwhile, as Decent notes of McEvoy: "The Australian’s 50m freestyle world record, set in China in March, marked the culmination of a lifetime of dedication and hard work."
The next sentence relies on opinion, in my opinion, and leans into the EG playbook, however: "But it may soon be eclipsed by a swimmer taking performance-enhancing drugs and wearing a banned swimsuit in a makeshift sporting arena at Resorts World Las Vegas in front of a global audience at sport’s most controversial new event – the Enhanced Games."
Apples and oranges, chalk and cheese, disparate entities, non-comparables and incommensurate. We might as well have a discussion about economic value vs. human life; or a byte of data vs. A kilo of sugar, or, perhaps the colour blue vs. the note C-sharp.
What would any of it tell us? Nothing except that those things are simply not comparable.
The place where the two worlds meet - McEvoy and the men who will compete at the Enhanced Games knowing full well that they are not as fast as McEvoy, whatever the clock says - is the bank.
Read on...
