The CEO of the highly controversial Enhanced Games has delivered a defiant manifesto for his project, arguing that embracing performance-enhancing science is the only true way to stamp out 'shadow' doping and protect athlete safety.

Speaking at a packed press conference ahead of Sunday's inaugural multi-sport event in Las Vegas, CEO Maximilian Martin rejected the condemnation from traditional sporting bodies - with critics labelling the event as the 'Doping Olympics'.

Instead of a reckless experiment, Martin pitched the event as a necessary evolution that shifts the focus of modern medicine away from treating illness toward maximizing human capability.

'When we launched Enhanced, we set out to do something simple but undeniably precious,' Martin explained to reporters. 'To redefine what human performance can be once we allow science to be important.'

The CEO took direct aim at the current anti-doping regime run by organizations like the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), arguing that strict bans have merely driven athletes into dangerous, unmonitored behavior behind closed doors.

'What's happening right now in the shadows is that people resort to unsafe drugs in unsupervised usage to get away and circumvent the testing that lets them allow to cheat,' Martin stated bluntly.

By legalizing performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) within the boundaries of the competition, Martin claims the Enhanced Games can finally drag an unregulated black market into a tightly controlled clinical environment.

'Our approach - not being naive and pretending it's not happening, but taking what's happening in the shadows, putting it in the open, putting the right clinical supervisory government in place - is actually the right way to do it,' he insisted. 

'That's the way to make it safe for the people that choose to do it.'

Martin argued that the goal of the project is to shift how we look at medicine, moving away from simply treating sickness toward actively improving what the body can do. 

'Traditional medicine has been all about 'something is wrong with me,' and we try to get back to your baseline,' Martin noted. 

'The space that we're playing in is moving into the space of beyond, letting athletes and people alike tap into a lot of potential that they otherwise wouldn't be able to tap into. Our mission is clear: move your baseline health through the help of science.'

To illustrate how an enhanced athletic meet could eventually benefit the average consumer, Martin pointed to the automotive industry's most elite racing division.

'When the engineers in a Formula One team develop the Formula One car that is at the forefront of scientific innovation, that Formula One car is never going to get mass-produced,' Martin argued.