Readers may claim to despise the Enhanced Games, but the surge in clicks, comments and debate suggests athletics still cannot resist the lure of controversy.

Readers of AW enjoy reading about athletes breaking records, winning medals or major competitions. But you are also a morbid bunch and modern metrics such as page views and engagement stats tell us you particularly like clicking into articles about drugs or deaths and obituaries.

Given this, it is no surprise that our short and deliberately non-celebratory article on the Enhanced Games drew in more page views than anything else in the past week.

More page views than our coverage of the Diamond League in Xiamen, with Yan Ziyi and Masai Russell going No.2 all-time in the women's javelin and 100m hurdles. More than our piece on Elise Thorner’s big 3000m steeplechase win in Los Angeles, including news of Josh Kerr and Jake Wightman breaking 1:45 for 800m. More than our comprehensive round-up from the National Athletics League.

The performances at the Enhanced Games weren’t even good. It was not so much enhanced as underwhelming.

There were just two events – men’s and women’s 100m races – with Fred Kerley winning the men’s race in 9.97 and Tristan Evelyn taking the women’s in 11.25.

Full of self-delusion and hype, the Enhanced Games posted on social media: “Fred Kerley almost breaks the WORLD RECORD and wins $250,000.”

Key word: almost.

Britain’s Reece Prescod, meanwhile, rumbled home in 10.48 – a time that more than 50 Brits beat last year.

Kerley and Evelyn claimed they did not take drugs. The former is, however, currently serving an anti-doping ban for whereabouts failures.

Evelyn said of her performance: “This proves that winning takes more than chemistry.”

AW wasn’t the only publication to cover the event either, although at least we didn’t spend money travelling to Las Vegas to watch it live.

The Times was particularly damning, saying: “Daft, delusional and ‘high school’ level — Enhanced Games is leap backwards.”

Online coverage of the Enhanced Games is often met with pleas from fans to simply ignore it. “Do not give the event any oxygen” is a regular cry.

The media struggles to do this, though. The Enhanced Games oozes with controversy and gets people talking. Even fans who dislike the coverage clearly feel compelled to fan the flames of the discussion by telling various media outlets what they think.

We published a report on the Enhanced Games and coverage of the National Athletics League at roughly the same time on Monday, but the ‘steroid Olympics’ have attracted at the time of writing more than 300 comments on our Facebook post whereas our very worthy article about ‘proper athletics’ in the NAL (an event that used to be televised in the 1980s) has zero.

Like all good sporting scandals, the Enhanced Games sit somewhere between farce and fascination — and athletics cannot stop staring. Everyone says the Enhanced Games should be ignored, but almost nobody actually ignores them.

About 25 years ago we briefly had a policy of not writing about athletes who had failed drugs tests in our weekly magazine. Our view was that we didn’t want to give cheats any attention.

We now realise, though, that this was a noble but flawed strategy. When it comes to drugs stories, the athletics world laps them up.

Everyone knows our time would be better spent basking in the Corinthian purity of Chariots of Fire, or keeping up to speed with results from the National Athletics League. Yet instead we click on the Enhanced Games, revel in the absurdity and then blame the media for covering it.

It is a love-hate relationship that no one likes to admit.