On a recent morning this fall, Aron D’Souza was at home in London expecting a long-anticipated delivery: a vintage set of the “Great Books of the Western World,” a collection with over 50 volumes of philosophy, history and literature published in the 1950s by Encyclopaedia Britannica, including “Faust,” Freud’s “On Narcissism” and “The Hippocratic Oath.”
“It’s like 200 kilos’ worth of books,” Mr. D’Souza said in a video call. “This is now my task over the next decade, to read all of these books.”
“The Hippocratic Oath,” which is a guide to ethical standards in medicine, should be an interesting one for Mr. D’Souza. In the summer of 2023, Mr. D’Souza shocked the sports world with an announcement that he was creating a new event called the Enhanced Games, which he said would be a far-ranging athletic competition seeking to challenge the Olympics by allowing participants to use a variety of banned substances, including performance-enhancing drugs.
Reactions after the announcement were overwhelmingly negative: Critics, including representatives from antidoping agencies and sports commissions, called the concept a “clown show” and said it was “dangerous and irresponsible,” while the International Olympic Committee told multiple news outlets that the Enhanced Games did not “merit any comment.”
Since then, the furor over the Games has largely settled down, even if the core question about whether they should exist still remains. It’s now up to Mr. D’Souza and his team to actually plan them.
The Three Pillars of Planning
Much remains to be done for the Enhanced Games to become a reality. Mr. D’Souza, 39, said that he was focused on “three major pillars” of planning: determining health protocols and working with pertinent government regulators, finding an appropriate venue (or venues) for the events and recruiting athletes to participate. To that end, he has been busy hiring experts in the fields of sports medicine and event planning, and he said that he had a tremendous amount of faith in his team because “literally the best people in the world are coming to work for us.”
Mr. D’Souza, a longtime venture capitalist previously known for playing a critical role alongside Peter Thiel in Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, displays a level of confidence in the future success of the Enhanced Games that verges on presumptuous. Although the events are still in the early stages of planning, he had “no doubt that the Enhanced Games will be one of the most-watched sporting events in history” and that they would “capture the global imagination.”
He sees the Enhanced Games as a reflection of the world’s appetite for athletic excellence unfettered by the usual regulations. He believes people are so interested in what enhanced athletes are capable of that “a billion people would watch it even if it was just eight guys running around a track.”
Of course, his plans are much grander than that.
Rick Adams, a former member of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and the senior vice president for games delivery at the Enhanced Games, said that Mr. D’Souza had given him “a blank slate to show sport in ways that it’s never been seen — places that it’s never happened, formats that are nontraditional.”
Although nothing has been set in stone, Mr. Adams said that he was expecting the Games to begin with track-and-field and swimming events, followed by “a strength event that will be a version of weight lifting,” and that these events would have distinctive styles and spectacular settings. He also suggested that, unlike the Olympics, the Enhanced Games would not be quadrennial, but instead offer a steady schedule of new contests — a track event in March, say, and then a swimming event in August.
Mr. Adams did not join the Enhanced team until this summer, but he is already all in on the event’s future: “I’m confident that there will be a moment when people forget that there was a time before the Enhanced Games,” he said.
Mr. D’Souza said that he and his team had not yet settled on an initial host city for the Games — which he hopes will kick off next year — but that he was undergoing “a bidding process with several cities.” As these plans are firmed up and as athletes are recruited, he said, the company will plan an elaborate presentation for public viewing. “We want to say, ‘Here we are, and we’ve changed the world,’” he said.
A Doping Wild West?
Creating an event that tolerates any level of performance-enhancing drugs will have to come in the face of significant pushback. In a statement, the World Anti-Doping Agency said that it condemned the Enhanced Games on several fronts. First, it said that “clearly this event would jeopardize” the health and well-being of athletes “by promoting the use of powerful substances and methods that should only be prescribed, if at all, for specific therapeutic needs and under the supervision of medical professionals.” Second, “the beauty and popularity of sport is based on the ideal of clean and fair competition,” the organization said, which means the Enhanced Games would threaten to compromise “the integrity of legitimate sport.”
But WADA’s position as the arbiter of athletic integrity has never been more tenuous. A recent investigation by The New York Times revealed that problems with the organization’s databases had caused it to lose track of hundreds of test results from athletes who had been accused of doping before competing in the Paris Olympics this summer — a catastrophic error that critics suggested was a sign that the group was failing in its mission of policing global sports. In a statement, WADA said that the Times report “contains allegations that are simply wrong,” and that the organization’s database problems “did not have any negative impact” on the Paris Olympics.
Mr. D’Souza has repeatedly framed the Enhanced Games as a righteous force disrupting a corrupt and archaic industry. He described the International Olympic Committee during a video interview as a “corrupt bureaucracy” and WADA’s regulations as outdated and “highly subjective.”
“It’s not about safety, and it’s not about science,” he said. “The Olympics are very resistant to cultural and technological change.”
Critics maintain, however, that this resistance to change is in fact a bulwark against recklessness. Brent J. Nowicki, the executive director of World Aquatics and a former managing counsel and head of the antidoping division at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, said that the Enhanced Games was “a farce, and an extremely dangerous one,” a hard-line attitude shared by many of the event’s detractors.
“My view is that anybody who takes part in this event should never be allowed to be involved in any sport ever again,” he said in an email. “It cuts against everything that we are trying to prevent. I am uncomfortable giving the event any publicity, as our young athletes need role models who are clean from doping. Any person who dopes is taking enormous risk with their health.”
Kieren Perkins, a four-time Olympic medalist who now serves as chief executive of the Australian Sports Commission, went further when speaking at a conference in March, saying, “Someone will die if we allow that sort of environment to continue to prosper and flourish.”
The issues, experts say, come in various forms.
The riskiest drugs are amphetamines, said Dr. Michael Joyner, a Mayo Clinic doctor and exercise researcher. Athletes using them on a hot day can’t judge how hot they are and can exert themselves so much they die of heat stroke, he said.
And high doses of performance enhancers can lead to horrendous outcomes.
Drugs like testosterone, used to spur muscle growth, can lead to muscles that grow larger than tendons, said Edward F. Coyle, an exercise physiologist and emeritus professor at the University of Texas, Austin. At that point, muscles can be ripped from the bone. One professional bodybuilder, Ronald Coleman, took such high doses of anabolic steroids and grew so large that “his spine wasn’t able to support his outsize muscular strength and he crushed vertebrae,” Dr. Coyle said.
Dr. Joyner also scoffed at the “idea that they will take some person off the street and dope them to become the world’s best.” He said that elite athletes who doped gained, at best, a percentage point or two in performance.
Athletes gain much more from biomechanical aids, like slippery swimsuits or supershoes for running, said Hirofumi Tanaka, an exercise physiologist the University of Texas, Austin.
Mr. D’Souza contended that despite the widespread belief among critics that the Games would be a doping Wild West, there would be stringent rules around what athletes could and couldn’t consume. Dan Turner, the organization’s director for athlete safety and performance, said that it was “absolutely not the case” that anything was acceptable, though the exact list of banned substances is still in development. He also said that drugs would only be used with medical supervision.
Mr. D’Souza likened attitudes toward some of the milder performance-enhancing drugs, like beta blockers, to how recreational drug use was perceived more than a decade ago.
“When I was a kid, they had DARE, and they said if you smoke one joint, you’re going to be a junkie out on the street,” he said. “Now I go to dinner parties on Park Avenue, and edible gummies come around on a silver salver.”
The Aging Olympian
“I think people straight away link this in their mind to a bodybuilding competition,” said James Magnussen, a former Olympic swimmer who has signed on to compete at the inaugural edition of the Enhanced Games. “I’m looking to increase my recovery, allow me to train more frequently and increase my bone, joint and ligament health. When I get on the blocks for the 50-meter freestyle, I’m not going to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
A three-time Olympic medalist who has not competed internationally since 2018, Mr. Magnussen, 33, said that he agreed to participate in the Enhanced Games partly because he was no longer able to perform at his physical peak naturally, but performance-enhancing drugs could theoretically change that — perhaps enough to break a world record. (Mr. D’Souza enticed him to join the Games by offering a $1 million reward if he managed to do so.)
But Mr. Magnussen, whose choice to sign on for the Enhanced Games led to his being banned from training in the major pools in Australia, sees the event as the future of athletics.
“I hope in the fullness of time that I’m seen as somewhat of a pioneer for sport,” he said. “People will look back on this and say: ‘Remember how opposed we were to the Enhanced Games? It sounded dangerous, but now we know it’s a great opportunity for athletes to extend their careers and get paid more.’”
It is Mr. D’Souza’s dream that if one of his athletes is able to break a world record, it’s someone age 40 or older, perhaps an athlete who “comes back after five or 10 years of retirement, gets enhanced and breaks the record,” he said.
“That is where the paradigm shift happens,” he added. “That’s where I think we’ll make the biggest cultural change in this world. Could a 50-year-old do it? Could a 60-year-old? At some point during my stewardship of this, I hope that a 65-year-old can run faster than the fastest natural human.”
In this way, the Enhanced Games are about more than just athletics to Mr. D’Souza — they’re about pushing the boundaries of human potential, about defying aging, about “what it means to be human in a world where there are superhumans among us.”
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