"I was like, you know what, let me do something for me for once. Let me make some money."
"My whole 20s I gave to Ireland, says Ryan, 31, from a training camp in Las Vegas, where the tournament will take place. Olympic athletes train so hard all their life and they just don't get paid."
"At the end of the day, people's opinions aren't going to pay me. They're not going to help me set up my future."
"Ideally I would like to pay my car off and then hopefully put a down payment on a house somewhere in Philadelphia. I need to be very, very smart with money because life's getting a lot more expensive."
Shane Ryan, an Irish swimmer who represented Ireland at three Olympics, agreed to compete in the Enhanced Games, where performance-enhancing drugs are allowed and sometimes incentivised. Ryan says years of training did not provide sufficient income and that competing offers necessary prize money to pay debts and plan for a house. Irish politicians, sporting authorities, the IOC and WADA condemned the decision on ethical and health grounds. Organisers promote the event as an alternative that normalises pharmaceutical and technological enhancement under medical supervision and markets a vision of superhuman performance.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]