A Record Isn't A Time. It's Who You Became.

In 1988, Saturday Night Live ran a skit answering a theoretical question that often echoes from office corridors to late-night kick-ons: How far could we push the human body if we removed all the rules?

Thirty-eight years later at Resorts World Las Vegas, 42 athletes gathered to compete for a piece of a $25 million prize pool at the Enhanced Games - an attempt to answer what would happen if we let athletes get on the juice and compete. Could they?

Many words have been used to capture the event and its outcome: a debacle, underwhelming, ridiculous. I thought it was honest.

Watching Kristian Gkolomeev break a swimming record didn’t captivate me the way it did when I watched Michael Phelps do it. I realised breaking records were never about beating the measurement of the sport - the time, the distance, the weight. That was merely the tip of the iceberg - the visible piece that implies the years of sacrifice and cost one undergoes to become the person they thought they could be.

The Enhanced Games asked what a body can do when you remove rules and regulations. The answer is a 50m freestyle in 20.81 seconds. But I realised this wasn’t the question we were actually asking. We don’t tune in to watch a body; we tuned in to watch a person find out who they can become, where the price of success and failure hang on the same continuum. We don’t really care about the record - that’s just the receipt.

A record isn’t a time. It’s proof a person became capable of it.