The inaugural Enhanced Games has delivered its promise.

Though what that promise actually entailed is harder to quantify.

At a purpose-built venue in Las Vegas in front a curated crowd of around 2,500 — tickets were not on sale to the general public — The Killers performed at the afterparty and DJ Alan Walker held a mid-competition set as 42 athletes competed in swimming, running and weight lifting.

As a no-expense spared advertising festival to advertise a brand whose goal is to sell performance enhancing drugs to wannabe biohackers, it worked.

And on one level, it delivered on the sporting side as Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev swam the fastest 50m free in history, taking 0.07 seconds off Cam McEvoy’s legitimate world record.

Sure, he did it while doped to the eyeballs and while wearing a super suit of the like that has been banned by World Aquatics for a decade-and-a-half, but that was the whole point.

And yet, outside of that one world record there was little more than an underwhelming conclusion to an over-hyped mess of mixed messages and false claims.

Make no mistake, we are not peering through the looking glass into a world of distorted reality where down is up and wrong is right — this was far from the sporting Wonderland organisers would have us believe it would be.

But it is clearly opening a path towards a perversion of the sporting world we have accepted as correct and true for generations.

But how successful was this, even?

Enhanced Games organisers bombarded viewers with proclamations of a brand new era in sport, where “elite athletes push the limits of human performance”.

Yet of the 22 personal best performances produced across 79 individual efforts on the day, three were produced by swimmers that were not on the juice: Egyptian Sohib Khaled and American Hunter Armstrong.

With that, they claimed $175,000 (Australian) and $522,000 respectively in prize money and, in theory at least, can continue their competitive careers with reputations tarnished only by association.

The other two non-enhanced athletes competing on the day — Tristan Evelyn and Fred Kerley — ran off with the two blue ribband prizes in the 100m sprint — albeit miles off the world record marks they were chasing.

“They gotta do better than that,” Kerley said of his doped up competitors after beating them to the $350,000 prize that came with winning his event.

“They need to train a little harder, get on that s*** a little bit more.”

Kerley ran 9.93 seconds in the heat and was the only runner to go under 10 seconds in the final, running a pedestrian 9.97.

Despite the fact that he was Olympic bronze medallist in one of the greatest 100 metres in Games history in Paris, Kerley has been issued a two-year competition ban by the United States Anti-Doping Agency for whereabouts failures, i.e. missing three doping tests, fans of the status quo may not have picked him to be the poster boy for clean sport.

But within these desperately turbulent, muddied waters, perhaps he’s the one we deserve. 

Back to the results of this ethically dubious, drug-fuelled experiment.

Of the 71 individual performances by “enhanced” athletes across running, swimming and weightlifting events, just 19 personal bests were set. 

Perhaps The Verve were right all along? 

That disappointing return does make one wonder whether signing up for this event and being “enhanced” was a fair trade-off for destroying their credibility as legitimate athletes.

And yet, every one of them came away from this Vegas farce with more money than they are ever likely to win via regular competition.

For winning both the 100m and 50m freestyle, as well as claiming the fastest time ever in the later, Gkolomeev came away with a staggering $2.8m in prize money.

Presenters and supporters hailed Gkolomeev’s “new world record” as something remarkable and, in many ways it was.

But it will rightly never be ratified as such and, being so widely lauded by the Enhanced Games as a world record says as much about the bread and circuses approach to this event as anything else.

Because, at its heart, this was an event about money.

None of the competitors at these games truly believed that anyone outside of their bubble would praise them for any personal bests or records they set.

But the money they earn? That is real.

British swimmer Ben Proud said the money on offer made him feel that “someone knocked on the door and left a lottery ticket on the floor” and for so many of these athletes, that is exactly what this is. 

Proud finished second behind Cam McEvoy in the 50m freestyle at the Paris Olympics but earned nothing from Team GB, the British Olympic Association or World Aquatics.

McEvoy, by comparison, earned $20,000 for his gold medal — and only because of Gina Rinehart’s benevolence via a private contribution and earned no prize money for his world record in China.

No wonder the British swimmer was emotional when finishing first in the 50m butterfly — just 0.05 seconds outside the world record — when it meant that he could take home “a big chunk of money” to his family.

That, plus the money for finishing second in the 50m free, netted him a total of $522,000.

“In reality, us athletes in the Olympic programme don’t earn enough money to retire off the back of this and I am always seeking something that can see me through a bit longer,” Proud told the BBC when he signed up for the Enhanced Games.

“It would have taken me 13 years of winning a world championship title in order to win what I could win in one race at this games.

“I love what I do, I love my sport and to continue it a little longer gives me that satisfaction.”

Given that Aquatics GB pay up to $55,000 for their “podium class” swimmers, while his two world championship gold medals earned him a combined total of $65,000, it’s understandable.

That grant is less than 10 per cent of what he earned in one glitzy evening in Vegas.

Even finishing last in the four-person swimming events nets $70,000, meaning James Magnussen claimed $140,000 essentially just for turning up.

World Aquatics, in a statement provided to the BBC, said the Enhanced Games were “a circus” while Travis Tygart, chief executive of the US Anti-Doping Agency, called it a “clown show”.

But if this is a circus, at least the performing monkeys are getting well renumerated for their participation — even if it’s more accurate to call them lab rats.

The Enhanced Games’ expert commentator Bryan Johnson noted that when Magnussen first went on his “protocol”, as the supervised drug-taking regimes are referred to in this twisted version of a sporting Wonderland, he actually went too far.

“He actually started sinking in the pool,” Johnson said.

“He was also measuring his lactate — normally you can get to 25 but it got so high that the device errored out.

“They were looking for a device used for horses that could measure higher, it got off the charts.

“James Magnussen also had a limitation where there was no suit that actually fit his body, so he had the inability to go further.”

None of what Johnson earnestly said on the YouTube broadcast, that had around 60,000 live viewers at any one time, instils much confidence.

But then again, Johnson is a man whose various controversies relate to, among others, an unsettling oversharing of data about his and his own teenage son’s erections.

That is the same teenage son whose plasma Johnson harvested to inject into himself to promote unproven anti-aging benefits, part of a reported $2m a year regimen he undertakes in an attempt to delay the inevitable march of age.

So perhaps be your own judge on his credibility.

Enhanced Games does list the medically qualified doctors who are involved in the program, as well as what they are taking: Over 90 per cent of the 42 athletes involved took testosterone esters, 78 per cent took human growth hormone, 62 per cent took stimulants, half doped with metabolic modulators and just over 40 per cent used EPO.

And, despite all that and despite all the fanfare, just one world record time was beaten.

“I think a lot of people have come into today expecting world records to drop,” Johnson said on the YouTube broadcast.

Well, yes, they probably did — the event’s own advertising material heralds “a new era” being established and mentions “world record” three times in just over 300 words.

“This is a baby step into a new world,” Johnson added.

“These athletes were in training camp for four months, they were able to enhance for two months.

“So it’s not a defeat … I wouldn’t be discouraged, it’s a victory that they are opening up the possibility that you can have substances.”

Maybe so. 

Because at the end of it all, perhaps it is really all about the money, a reality sport is dealing with as readily as it is attempting to deal with performance enhancing drugs and the cheats that look to benefit from their use.

Cody Miller, Olympic gold medal winner in Rio, walked away with $500,000 for two wins in the breaststroke events five years after he retired.

The lure of that money and a competition held in his home city of Las Vegas was enough to get him back in his togs.

He acknowledged in a post-race interview that he had still been “excommunicated from a lot of places” after signing up for the Enhanced Games but said he was very happy with his choice.

“This is one of the best nights of my life for sure,” Miller said.

“Honestly, it’s even better because the road to get here was paved with a lot of speed bumps.

“There’s been a lot of pushback, a lot of people in our sport don’t love the idea of enhanced because they don’t understand what it really is, and that’s going to take a lot of education.

“The drugs work yes, but they’re one element to success. We still get up every morning … It’s a tool in the tool belt.

“If you don’t love it, that’s OK.

“It’s just the world is changing.”

How much this spectacle will change the world is debatable, unless you are an investors in the Enhanced Games brand, whose main goal is to set up an online pharmacy that sells performance enhancing drugs to the public or so-called “bio-hackers” under medical supervision.

What will change though, is the lives of the athletes who earned such impressive windfalls from this event: for better and worse.

As Enhanced Games CEO Maximilian Martin, said, “it’s just the beginning.”