It’s summer 2025. A large athletics stadium somewhere in Europe buzzes with crowds of people. Down on the track, eight men line up for the 100m final. Eight men pumped full of performance-enhancing drugs. One of these men is about to obliterate Usain Bolt’s 100m world record, which has stood for over 15 years. Perhaps they all are. It’s certainly possible: just the day before, a host of men ran the marathon in under two hours. The world record for the mile, which has stood for over a quarter of a century, has just been beaten by a guy with bionic implants in his legs. Out in the centre field, a javelin thrower wearing AI glasses with real-time decision support has secured another world record. The feats of the previous year’s Paris Olympics are long forgotten amid this celebration of human achievement.
“It promises to be one of the most compelling television events of all time,” says Aron D’Souza, the man behind the Enhanced Games. His idea is an alternative to the Olympics where performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), and even technological enhancements, are not banned but actively encouraged. It will be a battle of the biohacked.
It may sound like a crazy idea that will never get off the ground, but D’Souza has signed a deal with Ridley Scott’s production company, RSA, to make a 10-part series about the first Enhanced Games. He has the full backing of billionaire investors Peter Thiel and Christian Angermayer. He has former world champion swimmer James Magnussen signed up and, he assures me, interest from at least six world record holders. “The Enhanced Games are inevitable,” he says.
I’ve come to meet D’Souza and talk through his vision at his offices in a private members’ club in Kensington, London. While I wait, his assistant orders me a coffee from the in-house barista and a green tea for D’Souza. When he appears – short, smiling, in a neat, open-neck pink shirt – D’Souza says he’s going to record our conversation, just in case my recording doesn’t work. I guess he’s used to being careful. After all, his plan hasn’t exactly been welcomed by the world. Writing in this newspaper, Barney Ronay called it “grotesque”. The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) described it as “dangerous and irresponsible”, while the head of WorldAthletics, Sebastian Coe, was even more succinct: “It’s bollocks.”
Do these criticisms get him down? He smiles calmly. He has well-polished answers ready to go. “If we woke up tomorrow and there was a mountain just one foot taller than Everest,” he says, “many would say it’s impossible to climb; some would say it’s too dangerous. The people who sell tickets on the old Everest would say it’s unethical. But every mountaineer would look up. And when it was achieved, we would have been taught something new about our humanity.”
D’Souza has reams of this lofty stuff. “In 1896, Baron Pierre de Coubertin reinvented the ancient Olympics for his era, an era of nationalism,” he says. “Now we’re reinventing the Olympics again … to create a whole new formula, not of sports, but of humanity.”
The Enhanced Games will focus initially on five key sports: track and field, swimming, weightlifting, combat and gymnastics. But D’Souza sees the games not merely as a sporting event, but as a “scientific journey”.
“Why should we accept the limits of our humanity?” he says. “The quest of the human project has always been to overcome those.” He goes on to compare the games with the moon landing, with Christopher Columbus discovering the new world. “These were powerful scientific explorations that helped unify all of humanity.”
I ask how athletes taking drugs is supposed to unify humanity, when so far it has seems to have caused only rifts and divisions. “The journey of discovery is a hard one,” he says. “I think about when the radio was first invented, even the printed book, the upheaval that Gutenberg brought to the world. Without Gutenberg there would be no Martin Luther, without Luther there’d be no Protestantism.”
The spiel continues: “The traditional media loves to lambast social media as being dangerous; it’s also because traditional media fears loss of its revenue streams. And this is always the challenge of technological transition. For example, the factories and the move to industrial economies was very scary, and we’re seeing it with AI now. In our case, performance enhancements hold great promise for our society. The same compounds that allow athletes to be faster and stronger will also make our population younger.
“Imagine if a 60-year-old was breaking Usain Bolt’s world record. That would force us to think about what it means to retire at 65. It would be one of the most powerful social signifiers in history.”
If the Enhanced Games are even half as impactful as he envisages, there is going to be a lot of money to be made. Indeed, streamers have already been making multimillion-dollar offers for the rights, D’Souza says. “Every major broadcaster in the world has approached us. If I went to the streamers today, they would give me $20m or $30m a year for where the idea is at now, but in a few months, when we announce the athletes and confirm we really will break world records, it’s probably worth $100m a year. But the Olympic rights are worth $4bn, so why would I undersell it?”
D’Souza is a lawyer and successful entrepreneur who helped mastermind a lawsuit, secretly funded by PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, against news media organisation Gawker, which led to its bankruptcy in 2016. Thiel is himself a divisive figure who has supported rightwing groups and donated huge amounts to Republican presidential candidates in the US, including Donald Trump. He also has a big interest, and a lot of investment, in anti-ageing technologies.
“There’s $4bn of revenue that comes into the Olympics per cycle,” says D’Souza, who envisages the games taking place in an existing stadium. “And all of that is wasted on stadium building. What if it went into scientific research and development? Because when we break the 100m world record in the first Enhanced Games, everyone is going to say, what is he on and how do I get it?”
When I ask if he’ll have some kind of investment in these “enhancements”, he doesn’t flinch. “Absolutely,” he says. “I love these products, I use them myself. I want to compete at the first games, at 38 years old.”
Money, glory, eternal youth … I can see more than a few reasons why a self-made millionaire entrepreneur may be pushing this project, besides the unity of all humanity. But doping in sport is banned for one key reason: it’s a health risk. Drug testing was introduced at the Olympics in response to the death of Danish cyclist Knud Jensen who collapsed during the Rome Games in 1960 (the exact cause was contested, but years later it was revealed there were amphetamines in his system).
Head of the Australian Sports Commission and former Olympic swimming champion Kieren Perkins has been forthright on this, saying, “The idea of an Enhanced Games is laughable. Someone will die if we allow that sort of environment to continue to flourish.”
D’Souza is unmoved. “Kieren Perkins earns as much money as the prime minister of Australia,” he says. “He’s the ticket seller on the old Everest.”
He pulls out a folder with lists of charts and research showing that the most dangerous drug in the world is alcohol, while right at the bottom of the list, he says, are anabolic steroids. He also references anonymous polling on athletes at the World Athletics Championships 2011 in which 44% of competitors said they had used PEDs. This adds weight to the argument that they won’t kill anyone, but it also suggests that world records won’t be broken that easily if so many athletes are already doping. It also raises another question: if secret doping is rife, would the Enhanced Games more honestly level the playing field?
The concern is that, with all restrictions removed, people might dope in much higher quantities. And that’s when it could become really dangerous. D’Souza insists this won’t happen, saying everything will be administered by doctors and the athletes will be regularly tested to check they are healthy. He also says that doping is self-limiting, as it will help your performance only if you are already in good shape.
“If you took steroids today, you’d feel a bit different, but if you don’t exercise, you’ll just get fat,” he says. “Think about bodybuilding. Arnold Schwarzenegger took copious amounts of steroids, but he always made it clear they were only the cherry on top. There was grit, determination, hard work, then a bit of enhancement.”
In an interview with Men’s Health last year, Schwarzenegger was more reticent about his past use of PEDs. “Don’t go there,” he said. “I want young people to know I have seen people getting kidney transplants and suffering tremendously from [steroid use].”
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So far, despite the offer of $100,000 each for the 10 athletes picked to be the “faces” of the games, and the potential to star in the documentary series, the Enhanced Games still has only one confirmed competitor: Magnussen. At his peak, Magnussen was one of the best swimmers in the world, winning the 100m freestyle world title in 2011 and 2013. He achieved the fastest swim in history in the 2011 100m freestyle wearing the controversial polyurethane suits that were common at the time but which have since been banned. Magnussen retired from competitive swimming in 2019.
I speak to him over Zoom from his home in Sydney, Australia. He seems a little bored at first, a little weary, as though he has done too many interviews on this subject and he already knows what I’m going to ask.
I start with the health risks. Does he have any concerns about embarking on a course of PEDs? “I’m not worried,” he says. “That’s fearmongering. It’ll all be prescribed by doctors.” He will be “super stringent, methodical, retesting my biomarkers from start to finish to make sure there are no ill-effects, changing things if anything is reacting poorly with my health, organs, fertility.”
That doesn’t make it sound completely risk free. I ask why he signed up. As the only declared athlete in the Enhanced Games, his reputation is on the line, too. Is it just the money? As well as the $100,000 to appear in the documentary series, he will earn $1m if he can break a world record, which he is convinced he will.
“Money is part of it,” he says. “But there’s more to it. Every athlete has regrets, things they could have done differently, moments of poor preparation or performance, and with hindsight we all wish we could put this head, all the wisdom, knowledge, calmness that comes with age, on a younger body. I’m essentially doing that: my head on my 20-year-old body, the two combined for the ultimate performance.”
Does the negativity around the Enhanced Games make him wish he hadn’t signed up? “There are going to be agendas from different parts of the media,” he says, weighing his words carefully. “I work in the media and I understand why they’re coming after me. It doesn’t faze me.”
What agendas does he mean? “Certain organisations are going to feel directly threatened by this event. And those organisations are directly aligned with broadcast and media partners. It’s one plus one.”
Unlike the media, he says, people in the street, friends and especially other athletes, including former teammates, have all been “very positive”. He says they understand, like he does, that sport is really just entertainment and that whatever people think about all this, everyone is going to want to watch the Enhanced Games. “Even the haters,” he says with a wry smile.
Despite an announcement recently that between 50 and 100 athletes competing in the Paris Olympics were in the process of registering to compete in the Enhanced Games in 2025, not a single other athlete has made any public show of interest, let alone a public commitment to the event. Even with the promise of anonymity, no other athlete was willing to talk to me.
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Aside from the lack of competitors, the Enhanced Games is an untested concept that could fall short in other ways. For a start, will anyone, let alone a 60-year-old, as D’Souza suggested, really be able to run as fast as Bolt, even loaded up on PEDs? One track and field agent (who didn’t want to be named) with at least three current British Olympic athletes on his books says the idea is laughable. “From what I’ve seen, this whole Enhanced Games is so non-credible as to beggar belief,” he says. “Anyone with any understanding of sport knows you can’t just chuck PEDs at someone and make them into a world-class athlete.”
The Enhanced Games put forward Dr Michael Sagner from King’s College London to answer my technical questions and I’m fully expecting him to toe the party line. But when I ask him if a 60-year-old could ever run faster than Bolt, he splutters. “His tendons would snap,” he says, as though the suggestion is preposterous.
“The Enhanced Games won’t be as crazy as people assume,” he says. “You can’t just inject yourself and turn into Superman.” As for Magnussen’s vision of having his experienced, older head on his younger body, Sagner says it is a misguided notion. “It’s very sad that someone has told him that,” Sagner says. “Because you can’t go back to your 20-year-old body. No drugs can do that.”
On the issue of safety and the monitoring of athletes’ doping regimes, sports science writer and author Alex Hutchinson says the Enhanced Games organisers are being “stunningly naive” if they think athletes won’t push the limits of what is safe. “People dope because they want to get an edge over their competitors,” he says. “Now move the starting blocks so that everyone is doping. How do you get an edge? By doping more.”
In a statement, Wada expressed concern about the idea of safe doping: “It would be difficult, if not impossible, to monitor athletes for all possible acute and chronic medical problems from taking PEDs. There is also the issue of young, unmonitored athletes who will be incited to abuse PEDs as they aspire to make the Enhanced Games. The whole thing is a dreadful idea.” The list of possible ill-effects from common PEDs is long, from acne to depression, liver damage, high blood pressure and heart failure.
Hutchinson is particularly worried about the wider implications of the Enhanced Games for grassroots sports. “There are those who view sport purely as a spectacle undertaken by others,” he says. “And there are those who view sport as something for as many people as possible to enjoy and participate in. As a parent, I hate the idea that my kids will sooner or later have to consider their drugs regimen if they want to have a shot at moving on to the next level. Sport is a continuum. Don’t kid yourself that you can normalise drug use at the top levels without it trickling down.”
Unsurprisingly, D’Souza doesn’t see any problem with PEDs in amateur sport, but rather sees the ban on them as antiquated. “I’ve learned that so many of the products I use as just an everyday weekend warrior athlete are banned,” he says. “So in cycling, my favourite sport, if you get an intravenous IV drip of more than 100ml in 12 hours, you get banned. And every time I get off an international flight, I go to Harrods, I get an IV drip, it’s fabulous, it’s the best way to get over jet lag.”
When I push him, it turns out he’s not actually a big user of PEDs himself. “I haven’t used anabolic steroids yet,” he says. “I use some pre-workout stimulants that are banned. I’m interested in going on testosterone, but I haven’t tried EPO [a blood-boosting drug]. It’s really just a time limitation thing.”
Coe may have dismissed the Enhanced Games out of hand, but he recently announced $50,000 prize money for each gold medal winner in the athletics at the Paris Olympics. He denies the move has anything to do with the huge sums being waved around by the Enhanced Games, yet D’Souza is offering more just to compete. The British Olympic champion swimmer Matt Richards said he believed the money being offered by the Enhanced Games could “sway” many athletes.
“Even if we quit now,” D’Souza says, “the business plan is out there. Someone else will pick this up and say, I’ll make this a reality if you don’t.”
If the Enhanced Games turns out to be even half as popular as D’Souza hopes – and even if people are watching only for the novelty value – you have to wonder where that will leave the rest of sport. D’Souza loves to talk about unifying humanity, but won’t he be splitting the sporting world in two if his vision comes to pass?
“I think the two [the Enhanced Games and the Olympics] can coexist peacefully,” he says. “It’s like on Friday night I can go to a concert, I can go to Covent Garden to the opera, just like Queen Victoria did. It’s exactly the same and people like that tradition, that guardianship of the past. Or I can use that same money and go to a rock concert, go to Wembley Stadium and see Taylor Swift. It’s a concert, but it’s a totally different experience. It’s like boxing to UFC, college wrestling to WWE, and the Olympics to the Enhanced Games.”
The British sports agent I spoke to agreed with this distinction, but in rather less glowing terms: “The Enhanced Games feels like a massive PR stunt to sell a TV show, like Gladiators or something; pantomime masquerading as serious sport.”
Whichever way you look at it, the Enhanced Games is coming. If nothing else, we may finally learn how much of a difference PEDs make to an athlete’s performance. And perhaps the best hope for those of us who cling to the ideals of “natural sport” is that the drugs don’t work after all.
• This article was amended on 30 June 2024. Based on information provided to the Guardian by Aron D’Souza, an earlier version said that Ridley Scott would be personally involved in the proposed documentary series about the Enhanced Games. These references should have been to Scott’s production company, RSA, not to Scott personally, and have been changed. Also, the £100,000 being offered to 10 athletes is for them to promote the games, not for their participation in the documentary series.
