On a recent morning this fall, Aron D’Souza was at home in London awaiting a long-awaited delivery: a vintage set of the “Great Books of the Western World,” a collection of more than 50 volumes of philosophy, history and literature published in 1950s by Encyclopaedia Britannica, including “Faust”, Freud’s “On Narcissism”, and “The Hippocratic Oath”.
“It’s like 200 kilos of books,” D’Souza said in a video call. “This is now my task for the next decade, to read all these books.”
“The Hippocratic Oath”, which is a guide to ethical standards in medicine, should be interesting to D’Souza. In the summer of 2023, D’Souza shocked the sports world with an announcement that he was creating an event called the “Enhanced Games,” which he said would be a comprehensive athletic competition that seeks to challenge the Olympics, allowing participants to use a variety of banned substances, including drugs, to enhance performance.
Reactions following the announcement were overwhelmingly negative: critics, including representatives from anti-doping agencies and sports commissions, called the concept a “clown show” and said it was “dangerous and irresponsible”, while the IOC (International Olympic Committee) told several media outlets that Enhanced Games was “not worthy of any comment.”
Since then, the furore over the Games has largely calmed down, even if the central question of whether they should exist still remains. Now it’s up to D’Souza and his team to actually plan them.
The three pillars of planning
Much still needs to be done for Enhanced Games to become a reality. D’Souza, 39, said he was focused on “three main pillars” of planning: determining health protocols and working with relevant government regulators, finding an appropriate location (or locations) 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 said he has enormous confidence in his team because “literally the best people in the world are coming to work for us.”
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 Enhanced Games’ future success that borders on the smug. 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 will “capture the global imagination.”
He sees the Enhanced Games as a reflection of the world’s appetite for athletic excellence without the usual regulations. He believes people are so interested in what enhanced athletes are capable of that “a billion people would watch 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 United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee who is the senior vice president of the Enhanced Games, said D’Souza gave him “a blank canvas to show the sport in ways it had never been seen before — places where it never happened, formats that are non-traditional.”
D’Souza said he and his team had not yet decided on an initial host city for the Games — which he hopes will begin next year — but that it was going through “a multi-city bidding process.” As those plans are firmed up and athletes are recruited, he said, the company will plan an elaborate presentation for public viewing. “We want to say, ‘Here we are, and we change the world,'” he said.
A Wild West of doping?
Creating an event that tolerates any level of performance-enhancing drugs will face significant resistance. In a statement, WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) said it condemned the Enhanced Games on several counts.
First, he said that “clearly this event would endanger” 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 the sport is based on the ideal of clean and fair competition,” the organization said, meaning 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 caused it to lose track of hundreds of test results from athletes who had been accused of doping before competing in this summer’s Paris Olympics — a catastrophic error that critics suggested was a sign that the group was failing in its mission to police global sports. In a statement, WADA said the Times report “contains allegations that are simply wrong,” and that the organization’s database problems “had no negative impact” on the Paris Olympics.
D’Souza has repeatedly framed 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 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, however, maintain that this resistance to change is, in fact, a defense against recklessness. Brent J. Nowicki, executive director of World Aquatics and former managing counsel and head of the anti-doping division at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, said the Enhanced Games were “a sham, and an extremely dangerous one,” a hard-line attitude shared by many of the event’s detractors.
“My opinion is that anyone who participates in this event should never be allowed to engage in any sport again,” he said in an email. “This goes against everything 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. Anyone who dopes is taking a huge health risk.”
Kieren Perkins, a four-time Olympic medalist who now serves as CEO of the Australian Sports Commission, went further when speaking at a conference in March, saying: “Someone is going to die if we allow this kind of environment to continue to thrive and flourish.”
D’Souza argued that despite widespread belief among critics that the Games would be a Wild West of doping, there would be strict rules about what athletes could and could not consume. Dan Turner, the organization’s director for athlete safety and performance, said it was “absolutely not the case” that anything was acceptable, although the exact list of banned substances is still under development. He also said the drugs would only be used under medical supervision.
The aging Olympian
“I think people immediately associate it in their minds with a bodybuilding competition,” said James Magnussen, a former Olympic swimmer who signed up to compete in the inaugural Enhanced Games. “I’m looking to increase my recovery, allow myself to train more frequently and increase my bone, joint and ligament health. When I step up on the blocks for the 50 meter freestyle, I won’t look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
A three-time Olympic medalist who has not competed internationally since 2018, Magnussen, 33, said he agreed to participate in the Enhanced Games in part 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. (D’Souza lured him into the Games by offering a $1 million reward if he could do it.)
A three-time Olympic medalist who has not competed internationally since 2018, Magnussen, 33, said he agreed to participate in the Enhanced Games in part because he was no longer able to reach his physical peak naturally, but performance-enhancing drugs could theoretically change that — perhaps the enough to break a world record. D’Souza lured him to the Games by offering a reward of US$1 million (R$5.8 million) if he managed to do so.
But Magnussen, whose choice to sign up for the Enhanced Games led to him being banned from training in Australia’s major pools, sees the event as the future of the sport.
“I hope that over time I will be seen as something of a pioneer,” he said. “People will look back and say, ‘Remember how we were against Enhanced Games? It seemed dangerous, but now we know it’s a great opportunity for athletes to extend their careers and earn more.'”
It is D’Souza’s dream that if one of his athletes manages to break a world record, be it someone aged 40 or over, perhaps an athlete who “comes back after five or ten years of retirement, improves himself and breaks the record”, he said.
“That’s where the paradigm shift happens,” he added. “That’s where I think we’re going to make the biggest cultural change in this world. Could a fifty-year-old do that? A sixty-year-old? At some point during my management of this, I hope someone who’s 65 can run faster than the fastest natural human being.”
In this way, the Enhanced Games are about more than just athletics for D’Souza — they are about pushing the limits of human potential, about defying aging, about “what it means to be human in a world where there are superhumans among us.”
