The Enhanced Games, last week’s Olympics-lite event for athletes on performance-enhancing drugs, was meant to be a triumph of humankind’s ability to get one over on nature. What it showed instead is that enhancement isn’t always improvement — in finance as well as sports.
Despite the juiced-up contenders producing a crop of personal bests and one record-breaking swim time, losers abounded. Notably, of the monetary kind. In the three weeks since Enhanced became a public company, its shares have fallen more than 70 per cent from their initial $10. Since the Games, they have halved. A business momentarily valued at $1.2bn is now worth just $350mn.
That might be less to do with athletic outcomes, and more with the way it came to market: through a special-purpose acquisition company. Spacs are publicly traded cash shells that merge with young, daring start-ups, endowing them with listed stock and money to spend. They account for about a third of all US IPO fundraising this year, Dealogic estimates.