The Enhanced Games has shown exactly where we are failing elite athletes

Written by Associate Professor April Henning, sociologist and Head of Research in the Management Department at Heriot Watt University’s Edinburgh Business School

Should elite athletes be paid to compete? If you ask the International Olympic Committee leadership, the answer seems to be a firm no.

If you ask the Enhanced Games, who have now offered $10 million to any athlete who breaks Usain Bolt's world record, the answer is considerably more attractive for athletes.

I believe that somewhere between these two views lives the bigger issue that athletes are not being listened to by sport organisations.

Our image of elite athletes starts in the wrong place. Competitions such as the Premier League have convinced many people that high-level sport means high-level earnings. This is not the case.

Many Olympic-level athletes hold full-time jobs, train full-time, and still live below the poverty line, even in wealthy countries that finish near the top of every medal table. Athletes in developmental programmes and sports academies may sacrifice other areas of their lives before being released without ever earning money.

Prize money at elite athletics races can be as little as £1,000. That won't cover a month's rent, let alone the coaching fees, equipment, travel and recovery that define the life of a serious competitor.

When the Enhanced Games first offered $250,000 for first place and $1 million for a world record, the debate centred almost entirely on the drugs. The financial reality that drove athletes there is barely discussed.

The people making the rules, setting the agendas and speaking to the press are not, by and large, the people who must choose between training and paying rent.

Elite sport's governance is built almost entirely from the top down, and those with a seat at the table are overwhelmingly those who have already succeeded within it. Which means the voices that most need to be heard, rarely are.

The athlete working a second job to fund their training. The competitor questioning why a substance is banned. The player facing a four-year ban for a contaminated supplement they had no reason to suspect. These are not rare cases. They are the everyday reality of elite sport for many.

And the system has one answer for all of them: strict liability. The rules are the rules. The same standard applied to an honest mistake – which is, admittedly, hard to prove – as to deliberate cheating. The standards in sport

It does not have to be this way. In several North American professional sports, leagues with player unions collectively bargain their drug and conduct policies, athletes and organisations sitting across a table, negotiating something both sides have to live with.

That distinction matters enormously when you are asking people to invest in a system and abide by its rules.

The goal is not no rules. It is the right rules, informed by the right people. A genuinely inclusive process might change very little. But a system athletes have helped shape is one they are more likely to actually believe in. Right now, many don't. And that gap is exactly what the Enhanced Games walked through.

There was always the chance that someone would exploit these issues for their own profit. That it turned out to be a would-be pharmaceutical company with sharp marketing instincts and willingness to incentivise athletes is telling. As is the interest athletes have shown in the money on offer by Enhanced.

These athletes are pushing their bodies through the boundaries of human potential, training through injury, sacrificing financial security, living under whereabouts requirements that demand they be trackable every day.

The least the institutions that profit from their efforts can offer in return is a genuine seat at the table.

The hard conversations about enhancement, payment, and athlete welfare are not going away. The only question is whether international sport chooses to lead them or continues to cede that ground to those with far less interest in getting the answers right.