LAS VEGAS — Fred Kerley ran 100 meters in a pedestrian 9.97 seconds Sunday night to win the Enhanced Games in a race where the sprinters had to be placed in the starting blocks four times because of false starts and untied shoes.
Kerley, who predicted Usain Bolt’s world record of 9.58 seconds would get “destroyed,” ran a time that would have placed him last at the Paris Olympics two years ago, where he ran 9.81 and won bronze.
The only athlete to win the $1-million bonus for going faster than the world record over the four hours of swimming, weightlifting and track in the specially built stadium on the Las Vegas Strip was Kristian Gkolomeev, who closed the night by swimming the 50-meter free in 20.81 seconds.
That record won’t go into the books, however, because the Enhanced Games, true to its name, allows performance-enhancing drugs that are banned in mainstream sports.
The men’s 50-meter freestyle world record of 20.88 seconds was set two months ago in a sanctioned event by Cameron McEvoy.
Gkolomeev had also won a $1-million bonus from Enhanced last year for swimming faster than the world record during a “trial.”
“Another million, it’s not bad at all,” he said. “It’s going to change my life to the good, for sure.“
The most iconic marks in Olympic sports, though, are in track, and when Kerley called out Bolt’s 17-year-old record, it made headlines and even got Bolt involved with a short post on social media: “OK,” he said.
By the time the starting gun sounded (or maybe long before that, depending on who you ask) it was clear there wouldn’t be much to worry about.
Kerley was in a line of six runners who had to be called out of the blocks three times — an energy sapper — first for a sprinter to re-tie his shoe, then twice more when the false-start signal went off, but early motion was, apparently, undetectable and nobody was disqualified.
“A lot of false starts, a lot of jumping, a lot of people who didn’t want to run their heats,” Kerley said of the less-than-full field for a basically meaningless prelim race in which he false started but wasn’t DQ’d. “Got to do better than that. I’m ready to run fast.“
Kerley, who said he is not using performance enhancers, still pocketed $250,000 — the first-place prize for all the events.
Most athletes are making money they could only dream of in mainstream Olympic sports.
The real stakes, however, could be for the investors in the company that brought the world the Enhanced Games with the idea of turning it into a new-age online pharmacy that peddles performance enhancers under medical supervision.
“It’s just the beginning,” Chief Executive Max Martin said in front of a specially curated crowd of around 2,500.
Tickets were not on sale to the general public.
The women’s sprints didn’t have anywhere near the star power Kerley injected into the men’s.
What the two races did have in common were winners who claimed not to be taking drugs — results that force questions about both the effectiveness of performance enhancers and the level of the athletes who signed onto the league that began with mega investments from the likes of Peter Thiel and is now a publicly traded company.
Tristan Evelyn’s winning time of 11.25 seconds in the women’s sprint was more than three-quarters of a second slower than Florence Griffith Joyner 38-year-old world record (10.49). It would have been .21 seconds behind the seventh-place finisher at the Paris Games two years ago.
In all, Enhanced said there were 14 personal bests set by 12 athletes, all of them swimmers and weightlifters.
Among those who made runs at world marks was Ben Proud, the British Olympic silver medalist, who finished .05 off the 50-meter fly mark of 22.27.
“I think I am,” he said when asked if he was happy after winning $250,000. “But I think we all know what we came here for, and that’s a world record.”
Kerley didn’t come close to it. When it was over, he seemed to be blaming everyone but himself.
“Man, they gotta do better than that,” he said. “Gotta train a little harder, train on that [expletive] a little more.”
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