Greek swimmer breaks record at Enhanced Games, but it won't count

Kristian Gkolomeev swam the men’s 50-meter freestyle in 20.81 seconds and claimed the only world record broken at the inaugural Enhanced Games, but the time will not enter the official books.

The Greek swimmer’s effort came at Resorts World Las Vegas in a 2,500-seat arena over Memorial Day weekend. His finish was faster than the official men’s 50-meter freestyle world record of 20.88 seconds set by Australia’s Cameron McEvoy in March 2026, and Gkolomeev received a $1 million bonus for the performance. Even so, the result has no standing with official sporting bodies because the Enhanced Games operate outside the anti-doping and record-keeping systems run by World Aquatics and other federations.

That disconnect is the central fight around the event. Gkolomeev, who represented Greece at the 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024 Summer Olympics, became the face of an experiment that openly allows performance-enhancing drugs and sells itself as “enhanced” sport rather than standard competition. The organizers also offered large cash prizes and staged swimming, athletics and weightlifting in Las Vegas as a challenge to the way international sport defines fairness, enhancement and legitimacy.

World Anti-Doping Agency has spent more than a year trying to draw the boundary sharply. In May 2025, WADA condemned the Enhanced Games as a “dangerous and irresponsible” concept and warned that it would jeopardize athlete health by promoting powerful prohibited substances and methods. WADA’s Athlete Council said the project threatened clean sport, while the IOC Athlete Council joined in denouncing it as “a betrayal of everything that we stand for.”

The institutional clash widened in December 2025, when WADA welcomed the final dismissal of a U.S. federal antitrust claim brought by the Enhanced Games against WADA, World Aquatics and USA Swimming. That legal defeat, followed by Gkolomeev’s unrecognized record in Las Vegas, leaves the same question at the center of the dispute: whether a swim can be called a world record when the competition itself rejects the rules that make records official.