Las Vegas is ballyhooed as America’s new big league sports mecca these days, but it’s good to see it hasn’t lost its trashy side.

In addition to the NHL’s Golden Knights, NFL’s Raiders, and eventually even the American League’s A’s, Resorts World Las Vegas is scheduled to provide the glitzy backdrop for the inaugural Enhanced Games, a chemistry-fueled athletic competition planned for Memorial Day weekend in 2026. For my money, nothing honors our fallen soldiers like a day of remembrance featuring ‘roided-up jocks in a made-up track meet.

This doper Olympics will feature swimming, sprinting and weightlifting events with big cash prizes for the winners. Get caught using performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, and it’s a healthy suspension. In the Enhanced Games, it could mean a healthy raise.

And the losers? Maybe those who finish out of the money will receive free rehab. I kid. They’ll get nothing but the knowledge that this is now part of their forever story on the internet.

But come to think of it, didn’t the former East Germany and Soviet Union already invent this? Wasn’t the new, improved USSR that we call Russia suspended from competing in the 2016 Summer Olympics for state-sponsored doping? Sure it was. Oh, Vladimir, how could you?

That’s the problem with communist governments and dictatorships. They lack capitalism’s marketing savvy and entrepreneurial spirit.

Fans of the Olympics may have difficulty telling the difference between the “enhanced” athletes and the boring old milk-drinkers who choose to compete without lightning in their veins. In truth, though, Olympic history is positively festooned with athletes who tested positive for banned substances and were barred from the games and suspended for years.

So, you might say cheating runs out our genes. Even with that acknowledged, doesn’t this dope-cathlon send the wrong message to impressionable youth and those who actually desire to watch sporting events with athletes who aren’t jacked up on performance-enhancing drugs? Absolutely.

But look, ma, no one cares.

Well, almost no one. There are those sticks-in-the-mud at the World Anti-Doping Agency who reacted to the announcement by stating the grim reality that, “As we have seen through history, performance-enhancing drugs have taken a terrible physical and mental toll on many athletes. Some have died.” The agency’s CEO Travis Tygart added, “It’s a dangerous clown show, not real sport.”

Agreed. But one man’s dangerous clown show is another man’s weak excuse to blow a few thousand bucks on a trip to Vegas to see the performance-enhancing drug freaks set new records that don’t mean anything. That’s real marketing, Mr. Clean.

The truth is, Las Vegas has always been more about spectacle than sport.

I know. I’m from the place that once allowed casino maverick Bob Stupak to hire a man for $1 million to jump off the top of his Vegas World hotel. Stupak then charged him a $990,000 “landing fee.” Bob was clever that way.

It’s the place where Jay Sarno hired a guy to jump nightly from the high ceiling of Circus Circus and land on a glorified sponge in the casino. The daredevil performed the stunt perfectly until the night he didn’t.

I grew up in the Las Vegas where Evel Knievel jumped his motorcycle over the fountains at Caesars Palace and somehow failed to break every bone in his body. This, my friends, was big league sports, Vegas style.

Since then, the place that’s been a center of championship boxing matches has managed to get even more violent. I’m not talking about Marvin Hagler-Tommy Hearns violent with gloves, a referee and the Marquess of Queensberry Rules. I’m talking about anything produced by Mr. Ultimate Fighting Championship, Dana White.

White has made a billion promoting glorified cage matches where combatants are encouraged to hit and kick each other when they’re down. Who knew an old-fashioned biker bar beatdown would become so popular. Hells Angels, you missed your calling.

When it comes to marketing violence, White is some kind of innovator. In his spare time, he created professional slap fighting, presumably to give the nation’s spouse abusers their own sport.

In football you wear a helmet to avoid concussion. In slap fighting, the concussion is the goal. Few things are as entertaining as a brain bleed, am I right? Let’s hear it for our first responders!

Imagine what he’ll think of next. Just remember, Dana, “Celebrity Samurai” was my idea.

While we’re using our imaginations, just ponder what might happen at the Enhanced Games if some overjuiced sprinter or weightlifter blows a heart valve before a live audience. Whoa, Nellie. Talk about entertainment.

For the sake of discussion, would he be put down like a derby thoroughbred with a busted fetlock, or carried from the field of battle like a fallen gladiator? Cue the Brian’s Song theme, but keep My Old Kentucky Home close at hand.

In an internal talking-points memo, as The Guardian reported, the event’s big idea men write off the danger with an existential fortune cookie: “There are always risks in elite sport. We believe the greater risk is pretending those risks don’t exist.”

Try selling that line to the insurance adjustor when something goes wrong.

The Enhanced Games’ wealthy promoters, who include scary-eyed tech billionaire Peter Thiel and professional presidential son Donald Trump Jr., imagine that legions of sports fans have been waiting for a chance to watch performance-enhancing drug-fueled swimmers in sleek suits try to set unofficial world records. I’m not so sure. It all reeks of a soft-core introduction to eugenics for the masses, Super Race 101, but the promoters make it sound as scientific as it is sporting.

Will it succeed, even in Las Vegas, much less in a roadshow?

Don’t bet your last crypto coin on it.

But here’s the caveat. Channel surf a bit and it’s clear there’s an audience for just about everything. People will pay to be entertained, but is watching former top athletes use performance-enhancing drugs to perhaps return to the glory days for a moment really a thing?

Of course it is, or there would be no market for Viagra.

I’m betting this Enhanced Games fades like the ink on a Trump University diploma, but I’ve been wrong before. Either way, it has real gawker potential.

John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Readers Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.