A transatlantic cleavage in sport regulation: French policy responses to the Enhanced Games

This article examines how the Enhanced Games (EG), a sporting competition explicitly permitting the use of performance-enhancing pharmacological substances, destabilize national sport regulation in France. Drawing on the participation of French sprinter Mouhamadou Fall, the only French athlete officially engaged in the inaugural edition of the EG, we analyze the rhetorical and institutional confrontations triggered by his public announcement of October 23, 2025. The public stance taken by an elite athlete already sanctioned for doping and unlicensed since 2023 compelled sporting authorities to make their moral and regulatory boundaries explicit. The study combines three empirical sources: Fall's public statements between October 2025 and May 2026 (press interviews, a long-form YouTube interview, an EG promotional video, and Instagram posts, n = 54); a review of the French press from June 2023 onward (n = 97); and institutional communications from French and international sporting and anti-doping bodies (n = 4). Results show that Mouhamadou Fall deploys three registers of legitimation: bodily autonomy, medical supervision, and fair remuneration for sporting labor. French institutions respond with a coordinated normative reaffirmation, without engaging substantively with the health or economic questions raised. This case reveals a displacement of the doping controversy toward a dispute over status, value, and the governance of sporting labor, and crystallizes a transatlantic cleavage between the European tradition of public regulation and a market-driven logic of performance contracting.