This feature was originally published in December 2024 in Cycling Weekly. The Enhanced Games start this weekend in Las Vegas, USA.
"If Lance Armstrong, after defeating cancer and winning the Tour de France, had stood up and said openly that his comeback from the brink of death was made possible by EPO, then EPO would have been the hottest-selling product of the early 2000s,” Aron D’Souza tells me, a statement that perfectly illustrates his iconoclastic outlook. “Every middle-aged guy would be on EPO if it were available under safe, clinically approved FDA [the USA’s food and drug administration] regulations,” he adds. This is quite the way to start an interview – and there’s more bullishness to come. “It’s a classic misconception to say that performance-enhancing drugs are unsafe. It’s hysteria,” he states. In case you hadn’t guessed, D’Souza is a man on a quest to change sport. Or, as he puts it, “on a mission to build a new superhumanity” – that being, the Enhanced Games, a yearly Olympic style event where athletes would be encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs.
