Conference + Event Coverage Why the Enhanced Games is a sports marketing campaign you can actually believe I’ve been fooled once before, but not this time. Steve Madden May 21, 2026 2:03 pm Credit: Getty Images / P_Wei Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on LinkedIn Share on Reddit Share by Email Print To American cyclists of a certain age, the 1979 film Breaking Away is a sort of Rosetta Stone. In one especially gut-wrenching scene, Dave Stoller, the naive Indiana protagonist, is crashed out of a big race by his Italian cycling heroes while he’s trying to buddy up to them at the front of the pack. When his father asks him how he did in the race, he dissolves in tears. “Everybody cheats,” Dave tells his father. “I just didn’t know.” His father replies, soberly, “Well now you know.” I’m heading to Las Vegas to cover this weekend’s Enhanced Games, an event that allows athletes to use, under medical supervision, performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). The thing I like about the Enhanced Games: They’re honest about taking drugs. Like any form of marketing, sports marketing is filled with risks. But the spectre of doping can hang over million dollar sports campaigns. A months-long effort to create a new hero can be undone by a single positive drug test. That guy we told you was so great? Don’t believe it. He was cheating. The Enhanced Games is a sports marketing campaign you can believe, at least when it comes to the use of drugs. When drugs are legal, using drugs isn’t cheating. I’m sure I’ll be thrilled if world bests are set on Sunday night, when the competitions will be live streamed from a purpose-built venue at Resorts World. I love the spectacle and energy of big sports events, and I totally understand why brands are eager to align themselves with them. But I had an experience while I was editor-in-chief of Bicycling magazine that has left me skeptical of most above-and-beyond athletic performances, and offers a cautionary tale for brands going all-in all the time with athletes in certain sports. All too often, if a performance seems too good to be true, it probably is. I was the editor-in-chief of Bicycling magazine from 2002 until 2008, during the period in which doping, and rumors of doping, ran rampant in the sport, especially the Tour de France (track and field and baseball weren’t immune to the issues, either). Everyone knows about Lance Armstrong, but there were plenty of other riders who doped, and those are the ones whose cheating, far more than Armstrong’s, has stayed with me. There was Tyler Hamilton, who we prominently featured in our Tour preview one year. He had won the 2004 Olympic time trial, but later blamed a “vanishing twin” for a positive drug test. (Seriously.) Hamilton, who had a hard-earned reputation for being able to suffer in the saddle, mounted a vigorous and loud defense of his innocence before ultimately sitting out a two-year suspension, coming back to win the national road racing championship, testing positive yet again and finally retiring from racing. The “Ibelievetyler.com” website has since been taken down. But it was Floyd Landis who was especially interesting to us because of his backstory and guileless ways. Floyd was a Mennonite from Lancaster County, PA, who started to ride bikes as a way to get around when he was a kid. Goofy, funny, chatty, non-conforming, relaxed and readily accessible, he became the star of Phonak, a team sponsored by the Swiss hearing aid company. He and his friend David Zabriskie gave us one of the funniest, most insightful interviews of my tenure, and we gladly put them on the cover of the 2006 Tour issue, predicting correctly in Floyd’s case, that they were “America’s Next Tour Champs.” During that 21-day Tour, Landis slowly built a lead, then gave it all back on a single mountain stage when he blew up so badly in the mountains that he looked like he was sick. But the next day, on an improbable breakaway, he regained the lead and held it all the way to Paris. Victoire. It was a great sporting moment. And it was highly suspect. But Floyd wouldn’t dope. Would he? Floyd was on our cover again two months later. It was the best magazine cover I ever made, with a dramatically lit natural portrait of Landis on the roof of his Paris hotel the day after his Tour victory, gaunt from the punishment of riding a bike more than 2,000 miles around France. His yellow winner’s jersey hung off his emaciated frame and would have flapped in the breeze had there been any on that hot day. But it was the coverlines I remember best: “We Don’t Believe It: Did Floyd Landis cheat or was he cheated? Either way, we lose.” The source of our disbelief: Landis had tested positive for banned substances during the Tour and was stripped of his title and potentially life-changing winner’s purse. His positive sample was collected immediately after that amazing stage victory to regain the lead. Like I said: suspect. Still, there was a double entendre to the lack of belief. We couldn’t believe Floyd had lied to us, we didn’t believe he was stupid enough to get caught doping, and parts of some of us, me included, just didn’t believe he had doped. I didn’t want to believe it. Floyd seemed like such a nice guy that he wouldn’t possibly cheat. Besides, sometimes the college kids beat the Russians. Right? Make no mistake: doping is cheating. And even if “everybody’s doing it,” it’s still cheating. Like Hamilton, Floyd launched an aggressive campaign to defend himself, backed by several Wall Street titans who took up his cause. I asked to meet him in New York City one bitterly cold winter day, and he readily agreed. We caught up in the lobby of the midtown Sofitel, which was fragrant with floral arrangements. I told Floyd that not only was I strongly considering having the magazine take up his cause, but that I was also planning to agree to allow one of my staffers to ghost-write the book he planned to publish to vindicate himself. “But Floyd, here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m sticking my neck way out here. I need you to look me in the eyes and tell me you didn’t dope. If you can do that, we’ll support you.” Science has thoroughly debunked the idea that a person can’t make eye contact when they lie. I was counting on Floyd to avoid eye contact so I would be able to say no . He looked me in the eyes and said, “Steve, I didn’t dope.” And I believed him. My bad. A few months later, Landis published “Positively False: The Real Story of How I Won the Tour de France.” We excerpted it. Landis kept up this campaign until 2010 when he admitted to using a variety of performance enhancing drugs while competing. He now owns a Colorado cannabis dispensary, Floyd’s of Leadville. It’s also worth noting Phonak received a massive bump in brand awareness because of the controversy, but shortly after changed its corporate identity from Phonak Holding AG to Sonova Holding AG, while keeping the Phonak hearing aid branding. Floyd robbed me of one of the great gifts of fandom: being in awe of an extraordinary sports performance. 2006 was the year I learned once and for all that if a sporting performance looked too good to be true, it was. It’s a cynical view, one I learned the hard way and still hold close. I can only imagine what Phonak and Floyd’s other sponsors thought about the reputational hit they must have felt, always a risk when a company gets into the bed of a sport with a juice problem. That was a long time ago. The Tour goes on and I watch every single second of it, mesmerized by the beauty of the race and the feats of the riders. I’m sure there’s still doping in the peloton; I think they’re all just smarter and more careful about it, probably using microdoses or stuff the organizers don’t even know yet to check for. But I don’t care if they’re doping; I care about the lie. Tour de France riders are asked to do something so insanely super-human that a little bump only seems fair. French rider Jacques Anquetil won the Tour five times in the late 1950s and early 60s and was blunt about doping: “You’d have to be an imbecile or hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants” and the blunt “Leave me in peace, everybody takes dope” are among his better quotes. I hope the Enhanced Games games are a success not because I think taking drugs is the best way to get faster or stronger. I don’t think drugs are a shortcut. I think they let athletes work harder for longer, which gives the training edge. When Armstong said in that infamous Nike commercial, “What am I on? I’m on my bike, six hours a day. What are you on?” he wasn’t kidding. Dope allows athletes to train more, not less. That’s the point of most dope. I want the Enhanced Games to succeed because at least I know what I’m looking at. The athletes won’t be lying. Because now I know. 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Curated by Taleb Kabbara · Source: www.mmm-online.com