I meet German biotech billionaire Christian Angermayer on the hottest day of the year so far and he orders a Coke Zero. When a Karma Cola arrives, he switches it for a double espresso because he doesn’t want the sugar. “Of all the drugs, sugar is the worst — sugar and alcohol. People underestimate it,” he says. He’s never had alcohol either, avoiding it in his younger years in the small village of Triebendorf, Germany for fear that inebriation would cause him to let slip that he was gay before he was ready to come out.
Angermayer knows a thing or two about challenging people’s preconceptions when it comes to drugs. From Triebendorf, he went on to study biochemistry at the University of Bayreuth, making his first millions by co-founding and selling the biotech firm Ribopharma with professors he had met there.
But it was the field of medicalising psychedelics in which he made his name, starting his own psychedelics firm, Atai Life Sciences, in 2018. In 2025, a strategic combination saw it become AtaiBeckley, which has just been sold to global pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly for $3.8 billion. Angermayer also founded Apeiron Investment Group, which manages more than $2.5 billion, and today has an estimated net worth of around $1.2 billion.
His boundary-pushing background led Australian entrepreneur Aron D’Souza to approach him in 2023 to come on board as a co-founder of the Enhanced Games, the controversial sporting event that allows competitors to use legal performance-enhancing drugs. Angermayer initially sunk a reported $2.5 million into the idea; other investors include tech billionaire and Trump donor Peter Thiel, Saudi prince Khaled bin Alwaleed Al Saud and Donald Trump Jr’s 1789 Capital.
The inaugural games took place this May, in a specially built events complex at Resorts World in Las Vegas, where 42 athletes from 24 countries competed in swimming, track, weightlifting and strongman events. British swimmer Ben Proud and US sprinter Fred Kerley were among the highest profile competitors. Sizeable cash prizes that are unprecedented in the world of mainstream athletics were up for grabs, including $250,000 for each event winner and $1 million bonuses for those who unofficially beat world records.
Controversy, what controversy?
For someone so caught up in controversy, Angermayer seems entirely at ease, even in the oppressive swelter of a London heatwave. But there are a few juiced-up elephants in the room. The Enhanced Games has received a considerable amount of what he refers to as “hate press”. Among vocal critics is World Athletics president Lord Coe, who, ahead of the Paris Olympics in 2024, said that athletes considering taking part in the Enhanced Games were “moronic” and that any who did would face a lengthy ban from traditional events. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), meanwhile, has called it “a dangerous and irresponsible concept” that could tempt young people into doping.
Angermayer is utterly convinced that they are wrong — and keen to persuade anyone who will listen of the same. In fact, he fizzes on the subject of naysayers. “I love the criticism,” he says. “One of the biggest thank yous goes out to the IOC [International Olympic Committee] and to Lord Coe, who I would really like to meet and invite round for dinner, because he was so insanely stupid with his quotes.
“We’re a media business and we want people to tune in. I don’t care why they tune in. They might already like us, or they might be like, ‘This is horrible but I’m going to watch it’.”
This attitude reportedly paid off. According to the organisers, the 2026 Enhanced Games “engaged” more than one billion people across platforms over a seven-day period, boosted by the presence of high-profile Twitch streamers and social media content creators. Beyond the thoroughly modern-day metric of engagement, the precise number of viewers who watched the event remains somewhat unclear.
As intended, widespread drug use was openly reported across the event: 91 per cent of athletes used testosterone or testosterone esters, while smaller numbers used anabolic steroid agents and stimulants. Critics have expressed concern about exposing athletes to what the BMJ recently called “substantial and poorly understood health risks”. But organisers, including Angermayer, argue that the Enhanced Games’ model of radical transparency offers a safe and controlled environment backed by “medical oversight”.
“Whatever is legally allowed and you can get, together with your doctor, is fair game”
“We have rules — it’s not anything goes. Whatever is legally allowed and you can get, together with your doctor, is fair game,” he says. “There is an arbiter already in the world that is super neutral and decides every single day what is safe and what is not, and that is the FDA [Food and Drug Administration]. I should not be the arbiter, but neither should WADA or the IOC. We have an arbiter — the FDA.” If a WADA representative had been present during this part of our conversation, they might have brought up the fact that many FDA-approved drugs are meant to be used in a medical setting. Outside that, there is potential to cause serious harm.
In tandem with the sporting event, the Enhanced Games has built a separate business stream selling the enhancements it promotes, including creatine (which retails from $59 a month), testosterone ($169 a month) and synthetic peptides ($119 a month), which have become popular with fitness communities in recent years. Angermayer argues that these can help normal people to train and recover better, just as they helped the athletes in the games.
Organisers claim that 37 of the 42 athletes who competed in May were involved in an International Review Board trial in Abu Dhabi in the months leading up to the competition, during which health professionals monitored their health and the substances they were using. The rest, reportedly, were either not enhancing or were using their own private doctors approved by the games.
“The athletes’ incentive is to work with our doctors to find the very best solution for them,” says Angermayer. “It needs to be very, very personalised. And the athletes are not bodybuilding and taking insane amounts because when you’re a runner or a swimmer and you take a lot, you can actually become too muscular and become slower.”
This brings us on to another elephant in the room. Viewers of the 2026 Enhanced Games were expecting jacked-up titans to smash world records and push the limits of what the human body is capable of. But three events (the men’s 50m and 100m backstroke and the women’s 100m dash) were won by athletes considered “unenhanced”. Only one world record was unofficially broken, by Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, who swam the men’s 50m freestyle in 20.81 seconds, 0.07 seconds quicker than the time set by the Australian Cameron McEvoy in March.
“I cried when he broke it, kind of for him but also for myself and all of us”
“I was dying and I cried when he broke it, kind of for him but also for myself and all of us,” says Angermayer. He concedes that they broke fewer records than expected, but puts this down to moderate enhancements, as well as athletes’ scepticism about joining the first ever Enhanced Games. “There was a lot of hesitation so we didn’t get the best athletes,” he says. “We got some of them. But in some categories, we didn’t get those people.”
In the hope to lure them in next year (for this will now be an annual event, Angermayer says), a $10 million bonus has been announced for any athlete who can break Usain Bolt’s 100-metre world record in the 2027 games. Before the 2026 games began, the organisation behind the event was valued at $1.2bn. But stock tanked after the underwhelming results. Undeterred, they announced a $50 million strategic equity financing agreement via private investment led by Apeiron, Angermayer’s investment group, on June 15. Stock, which had rebounded slightly since the games, fell again after the announcement.
‘Everyone wants to work with us’
Angermayer is nothing but assured when it comes to the future of the competition. “In the first year we were the ones who had to convince people,” he says. “Now everybody wants to work with us. We have many more athletes and more sponsors — and we already had a lot, by the way.” As for where future events will be hosted, they’ll stay in the US, which he calls “the home of entertainment”, for the foreseeable but there are hopes to take it international one day.
In the meantime, there will be “breakout events” to try to maintain interest allegedly generated by the first games. The first took place last month, featuring Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, the Icelandic strongman and actor known for playing Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane in Game of Thrones. He missed out on breaking his own deadlift record (510kg), but four-time Dominican Olympian Beatriz Pirón broke the women’s snatch world record by lifting 100kg — double her own weight. After this, Angermayer is characteristically confident that the world will continue watching.
