In May, the Enhanced Games held their first event in Las Vegas. If you missed it, here is the premise: every performance-enhancing drug is allowed, banned equipment is welcome, there is no testing, and there are no restrictions. Forty-two athletes, many of them former Olympians, were given every shortcut modern science can offer.The world expected records to tumble; they didn’t.Out of 23 events, exactly one performance beat a world record. Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev broke the 50m freestyle record by just seven-hundredths of a second. Fred Kerley ran the 100m slower than his own personal best, and strongman Thor Björnsson deadlifted 475kg against a world record of 510kg.Every advantage available, and almost nothing to show for it.I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this, because I watch the same experiment play out in investing all the time. Investors are often obsessed with enhancement, the hot fund, the offshore structure someone mentioned at a braai, the crypto allocation, the tactical switch, the clever product with the clever name. We are surrounded by an industry selling performance-enhancing substances for portfolios, and the promise is always the same: this is the edge that changes everything.Las Vegas just showed us what that edge is worth — seven-hundredths of a second … maybe.Here is what the Enhanced Games accidentally proved. The athletes who showed up were already the product of decades of fundamentals: genetics, coaching, training, consistency and technique refined over thousands of hours. The drugs sat on top of that foundation, and even then, stacked on top of world-class fundamentals, the enhancements barely moved the needle.Now imagine the enhancement without the foundation; that is not an athlete, that is a liability with good marketing.Investment fundamentalsInvesting works the same way; the fundamentals are not glamorous. They include spending less than you earn, starting early and staying invested through the moments your stomach tells you to run. They mean holding assets in the right vehicles so growth is not leaking tax, keeping enough liquidity so you are never a forced seller, diversifying on purpose rather than by accident, and reviewing the plan as your life changes.None of this trends on social media; no-one corners you at a dinner party to tell you about their emergency fund. But this is the equivalent of the 10,000 in the pool, and it is responsible for almost all the results.The enhancements, meaning the product selection, the tactical brilliance and the clever structuring, matter at the margin. Genuinely. I spend a good portion of my working life on exactly these things, and they add real value. But they are the final seven-hundredths of a second. They only count when the foundation is already in place.The problem is that most investors have the order reversed; they chase the enhancement and neglect the foundation. They will spend hours researching a fund’s three-year performance and not one hour asking whether their estate plan still reflects their life. They want the super suit before they have learnt to swim.And the industry, frankly, encourages this. Shortcuts sell and fundamentals don’t. Very few ever built a marketing campaign around being patient for 30 years.But Las Vegas gave us the data: when you remove every restriction and allow every shortcut, the people who win are still the ones who did the boring work for decades. The fundamentals were not displaced by the enhancements. The fundamentals were the reason the enhancements had anything to work with.So, before you reach for whatever the financial equivalent of a banned super suit is this year, ask yourself an honest question: is my foundation actually in place? If it isn’t, no enhancement on earth is going to save your race.It turns out, fundamentals are still fundamentals — in the pool and in your portfolio.• Marrian is director at independent wealth management firm InvestSense.