Former world sprint champion Fred Kerley has become the first track athlete and first American to join the no-drug-testing Enhanced Games, the competition said on Wednesday, weeks after the Athletics Integrity Unit slapped him with a provisional suspension for whereabouts failures.
The 2022 100m world champion is the first track athlete and the most high-profile signing for the start-up league that permits athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs that are banned in official competition.
“I’m looking forward to this new chapter and competing at the Enhanced Games,” Kerley said. “The world record has always been the ultimate goal of my career. This now gives me the opportunity to dedicate all my energy to pushing my limits and becoming the fastest human to ever live.”
Photo: AP
The 30-year-old has two medals at the Olympics — silver in Tokyo in 2021 and bronze in Paris last year in a historically close 100m final.
The Enhanced Games is set to debut in May next year in Las Vegas, with track, swimming and weightlifting contests offering US$500,000 per event, including US$250,000 awarded to first place. There is also a US$1 million bonus for breaking world records in the 100m sprint or in the 50m freestyle in swimming.
World Athletics president Seb Coe said he had heard the Kerley news.
“We’re in a championships,” Coe said, referring to the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo. “There’s nothing more I need to say. We’ll look at it when we get out of here.”
Earlier this year, World Aquatics passed a rule to banish athletes who participated in the Enhanced Games. Enhanced Games then filed an US$800 million lawsuit against the federation and others for what it said was an illegal attempt to get athletes to boycott its league.
In May, Kerley was charged in Florida with punching a woman, a hurdler who also competed in the Olympics. That came just a few months after he was arrested for allegedly punching a Miami Beach police officer on Jan. 2, an incident in which police used a Taser on him.
Kerley joins several elite swimmers who already signed on for the competition, including Olympic silver medalist swimmer Ben Proud, the first Briton to sign on.
However, six-time world champion swimmer Kyle Chalmers of Australia turned down a “life-changing” sum of money to join the Enhanced Games, his manager, Phoebe Rothfield, said in comments published by the Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday.
“It is life-changing money for a swimmer — or any Australian Olympic athlete, for that matter,” Rothfield said. “It could have set him and his young family up and helped with the mortgage, but Kyle said ‘no’ from the onset. It was a brief discussion. What drives him is competing for his country, standing on the podium in the green and gold, and doing the sport because he loves it.”
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