A controversial new event backed by tech billionaires wants to drag elite sport into what’s being called the ‘Age of Enhancement’.
The Enhanced Games, due to take place in Las Vegas this Sunday (24 May), will allow athletes to compete while using performance-enhancing drugs under medical supervision.
In this edited extract from his new book, DOPE (published by BLINK/Bonnier Books), journalist and author James Witts speaks to the team behind the Enhanced Games, exploring how the project evolved from a challenge to anti-doping orthodoxy into something far bigger: a Silicon Valley-backed attempt to redefine what it means to be human.
“The goal has changed, James. When we started this project, we were about building a competition to challenge the Olympics. Now our goal is to bring in the next age of mankind. It is to build superhumanity. This is about changing the whole of society.”
Dr Aron D’Souza is not a man short of confidence. He’s Oxford-educated, ambitious and inhabits a world of tech billionaires. He’s also the brains behind, as its website proclaims, the Enhanced Games, “a global annual competition that celebrates human potential through safe, transparent enhancement, offering fair play, record pay and unmatched athlete care.” Or, as CNN called it, “A doping free-for-all.”
Competitors of the first Enhanced Games are allowed to take performance-enhancing drugs – banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency – under medical supervision. Male and female athletes will compete in swimming (50m and 100m freestyle; 50m and 100m butterfly); athletics (100m sprint; 100m/110m hurdles); and weight-lifting (snatch, clean and jerk).
While many of the entrants cite the desire to “test the limits of human potential with the tools and possibilities of our time” (swimmer Ben Proud on sign-up in September 2025), the biggest attraction is the ‘life-changing’ sums of money on offer, with prizes of $250,000 per event and $1 million for breaking a world record. Appearance money is thrown into the mix for the top draws. The headliners include American sprinter Fred Kerley, a two-time Olympic medallist and three-time world champion.
The Enhanced Games flies in the face of traditional ‘clean’ sport and its notions of ‘fairness’ with a host of Olympic legends lashing out. ”It’s bullshit . . . if anybody is moronic enough to feel they want to take part in that – and they are from the traditional, philosophical end of our sport – they will get banned. They will get banned for a long time,” said Lord Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics.
Reinventing the rules
Controversy has focused minds.
“Firstly, it’s not the ultra-libertarian vision that you can just show up to the Games after taking whatever drug you like,” says D’Souza. “That doesn’t sit with our thesis. Doesn’t sit with our vision that technology will enhance the human condition.”
D’Souza’s critics argue the project veers beyond sport and into transhumanist ideology. During an anti-doping conference debate with steroid historian and University of Texas professor John Hoberman, D’Souza dismissed opponents resistant to human enhancement.
“Some people aspire to remain Homo sapiens,” he said. “To live, suffer, age and die. I believe technology and science allow us to move beyond that. Others disagree – that’s their right. It’s Professor Hoberman’s right to age and die.”
Enhanced Games athletes are permitted to use substances approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These include steroids, testosterone, EPO and growth hormone.
The medical safety protocols are overseen by the Enhanced’s medical commission including the provocative recruitment of Dr Michael Ashenden. The Australian is one of the most influential figures in modern anti-doping. He was a driver of the athlete biological passport and worked on landmark cases, including Lance Armstrong’s.
In his Substack post ‘Not So Fast’, Ashenden “advocates for the concept of an Enhanced Games to co-exist with the Olympic Movement, provided their athletes do nothing illegal”.
One of his major arguments for the legal medicalisation of sport is that: “Elite sport is now a competition between engineers, strength and conditioning specialists, recovery scientists, movement analysis technicians and nutrition experts. And the enhancements they bestow.”
In a compelling post, Ashenden concludes, “Unfortunately the Olympic Movement no longer epitomises the athlete’s quest for excellence. It has morphed into a marketable commodity sold to the highest bidder. Its stewards must take their share of responsibility for transforming sport into a multi-billion dollar, multi-national entertainment business.”
The billionaires betting on enhancement
Where does the Enhanced funding come from? We’re not party to the finances but there’s a clear biotech-billionaire theme emerging.
You have co-founder Christian Angermayer, the brains behind Ribopharma who later founded investment firm Apeiron, which now manages more than $2.5 billion worth of assets. Notably for enhancing the human race, that includes longevity companies. On his website, Angermayer writes that ageing can be “prevented, cured and reversed“. Peter Thiel, who D’Souza helped bankrupt Gawker, is a financial backer. As is Balaji Srinivasan, former chief executive of cryptocurrency Coinbase.
Between my interviews with D’Souza in 2024 and 2025, the pitch evolved from liberating athletes from the manacles of the antiquated anti-doping system to becoming the figureheads of the Age of Enhancement. That their intention was to become the Amazon of Enhancement. It’s why a ‘Products’ tab popped up on the Enhanced Games website.
“There are hundreds of anti-aging clinics that’ll charge you up to $1,000 to access a cocktail of hormone therapies and peptides,“ says D’Souza. “We’re going to make that available to absolutely everyone at a much lower cost.
“The best business models in history are to take what’s available only to the wealthy and make them accessible to everyone. That’s what Uber did. They made a private chauffeur available to everyone.“
In late November 2025, the Enhanced Group announced their intention to float on the Nasdaq stock exchange, valuing the company at $1.2 billion – a staggering amount for a company that has yet to host its debut competition and sell its first vial.
“What’s the best business in the history of sport?“ says D’Souza. “In my eyes it’s Red Bull. They use stunt sports marketing to sell their drinks at an incredible margin and were originally banned in many countries because of regulatory concern over taurine.
“In the public eye, they invented the category of energy drinks. Well, we’re inventing the category of performance medicine. It’s taken the Olympics 120-plus years and huge capital expenditure to bring in annual revenue of around a billion dollars a year. I believe we can do that in a significantly shorter period.“
Superhumanity or superficial spectacle?
At the end of 2025, D’Souza stepped down from the Enhanced’s day-to-day operations with co-founder Maximilian Martin appointed as CEO. D’Souza, brash and bold, revelled in the limelight and is still involved in the background. But does this signal a more pragmatic move? That for their competition and products to be taken seriously, the PR needs to be cranked down a notch. That they are in it for the long haul.
“Long term, I fundamentally think that other sports leagues will follow our approach, changing from a punitive testing system to one that is focused on the athletes’ health and safety to compete,“ Martin told BBC Sport soon after taking up the post.
He hopes to stage a winter edition of the Enhanced Games, making it a biannual event, as well as hosting one-off time-trial attempts to better existing world records. He also plans to expand into triathlon. The business model, of promoting supervised performance-enhancing drugs, relies on the exposure.
Will it work? Is Enhanced the future? From weight loss to Botox, modifying bodies and minds with technology has become more normalised. Why not sport?
Or is it simply a freak show with billionaires preying on vulnerable athletes in the twilight of their careers who seek to secure their financial future? How can it grow if Olympic athletes aren’t permitted to compete? How much appeal will these one-off events hold for elites at the peak of their career? Who thrive on regular competition?
Will it transpire that the superhumans are the enhanced or non-enhanced?
This is an edited extract from DOPE by James Witts, published by BLINK/Bonnier Books
