The "Enhanced Games"
A fraudulent publicity stunt that failed
The Enhanced Games, a would-be “steroid Olympics” that permits and even encourages the use of performance-enhancing drugs, is slated to take place at the end of this month in Las Vegas. Ahead of the starting gun, sports historian John Hoberman weighs in on the dangers of doping and the false promises of Enhanced Games founder Aron D’Souza.
By John Hoberman
The use of performance-enhancing drugs in elite sports over the past 70 years has been massive, unknowable in its scope, and beyond effective regulation. The doping control system managed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has been spectacularly ineffective. Since drug testing began in 1968 at the Mexico City Olympic Games, far less than one percent of the athletes tested at the Olympic Games have tested positive for a banned doping drug. Informed estimates of doping prevalence are much higher, depending on the sports discipline.
The concept of athletic “doping” has existed for the past century. It arose in Germany during the 1920s to enforce a distinction between “natural” athletic effort and the ethically illegitimate boosting of human performance by means of performance-enhancing drugs.
Given the well-known failures of the drug-testing regime, some have argued that doping drugs should not be banned at all. Advocates for legalized doping have long argued that doping athletes under medical supervision is a safe and fair arrangement that creates a level playing field for all competitors. In fact, as we will see below, medically supervised doping has never been safe.
The American sporting public may remember the most recent American doping scandals that prompted, not an acceptance of doping, but widespread condemnation. The BALCO steroid doping scandal in 2003 compromised the reputations of the baseball superstar Barry Bonds and star sprinter Marion Jones. In 2013 the American super-cyclist Lance Armstrong finally admitted to having doped throughout his spectacular career. Also in 2013, Biogenesis, a Florida-based rejuvenation clinic, was exposed for supplying doping drugs to Major League Baseball players.
The doping epidemic that has developed for most of the past century has proven to be intractable. At the same time, major sports organizations and sports fans have accepted the status quo so that our sports culture can continue to provide its enormously popular entertainments.
So the question arises: How might this stalemate between the irresistible pressures to dope and the official mandate to offer the public “clean” sport be broken? Who might have a formula to resolve this dilemma?
In June 2023, an Australian lawyer and entrepreneur named Aron D’Souza told the world that, along with the American billionaire Peter Thiel and other hyper-wealthy investors, he was going to stage “Enhanced Games,” a drug-fueled athletic competition to challenge the International Olympic Committee’s ban on the use of performance-enhancing drugs by Olympic athletes.
Over the next two years, D’Souza fed the gullible global media a series of sensational and misleading claims that inspired headlines such as “Enhanced Games: “Event for doped athletes backed by group who want to ‘cheat death’” and “A doping free-for-all Enhanced Games calls itself the answer to doping in sports.” “‘I want to see 60-year-olds breaking world records,” D’Souza exclaimed, and the overwhelming media response was to take him at his word.
After the first sensationalistic phase of publicity, the Games leadership has implemented an anticlimactic shift from the initial fantasies of a debauched pharmacological carnival where anything goes to a tamer version of conducting doping experiments on human athletes. “It’s not a complete free-for-all,” D’Souza said in 2024. “We don’t want to do anything that’s like really pushing the boundaries – insurance won’t let me do that.”
During most of two years of media-generated publicity, D’Souza had been happy to watch credulous reporters spread the idea that these Games were going to be a no-holds-barred doping bacchanalia of taboo-breaking that would set the venerable IOC back on its heels. This was the swashbuckling ethos that had kept the Games in the public eye. But now the goal was to portray the Games as a benign medical operation that cared only for the medical safety of the athletes and that would generate medical data that would advance human health. At this point there were promises of comprehensive medical supervision of the athletes and a guarantee that this doping experiment would be the “safest” elite sports event ever staged for the sporting public.
The Enhanced Game’s leadership’s claims about medical care for their doped athletes has been as opaque and unreliable as their claims about the recruitment of their experimental subjects. There is no indication that any of the members of their “Independent Medical Commission” have treated the athletes. All the doctors purportedly treating the athletes remain anonymous. The only doctor named is Dr. Ravi Trehan, an orthopedic surgeon at the Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City in Abu Dhabi, where the athletes are being doped before leaving for Las Vegas in May.
In fact, medically supervised doping has never been safe. The expert doping doctors of the former East Germany caused hundreds of female athletes to suffer terrible medical injuries to their reproductive and other organs. Doping doctors have never achieved medical legitimacy, in part because it is unethical to administer non-therapeutic drugs to patients, and because they recklessly disregard the medical dangers that lurk everywhere. In short, the Enhanced Games project has promoted the subversion of standard medical care.
The medical dangers of athletic doping have been thoroughly documented. Anabolic steroids can cause liver damage and depression, blood doping can cause strokes and heart attacks, human growth hormone can cause high blood pressure and diabetes. The Enhanced policy has been to avoid the subject of doping side-effects or to discount them.
The recruitment of athletes to compete in the Games has turned out to be an abject failure, following a long series of false or simply fanciful claims and assurances D’Souza has fed to the media. Having devoted his adult life to making money, he assumed that throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at athletes would convince them to sign up. He apparently did not realize that his “Olympics on steroids” would prompt the International Olympic Committee (IOC), as well as the major international sports federations, to expel any athletes who took D’Souza up on his offer. Nor did he understand that wealthy Olympic champions do not need “life-changing” money from a rogue operator sponsoring an allegedly revolutionary type of athletic competition.
Below is a narrative of some of the false or simply fanciful claims and assurances D’Souza has fed to the media over a period of almost two years.
In July 2023 a member of the Enhanced Games Athletes Advisory Committee claimed that “over five hundred athletes had contacted him asking him for more information.” In August 2023 D’Souza claimed that there were over 500 “sleeper athletes” who were “breaking world records in their basements and sending us videos of it.” In early 2024 D’Souza said that he was getting more than 100 requests for interviews every day. In March 2024 he stated that “On our peak day, we’ve had 4000 inbound requests.” In May 2024 D’Souza claimed that 1500 athletes had made formal applications to compete in the Games. In February 2025 he estimated the number of athletes who would participate to be “maybe a couple of thousand.”
As of April 26, 2026, the Enhanced Games website listed exactly 39 athletes as participants in the Enhanced Games that are scheduled to take place in Las Vegas on May 24, 2026.
D’Souza’s claim that the Enhanced Games represent a novel “scientific” methodology for using drugs to stimulate record-breaking athletic performances has always been pure hyperbole. For one thing, there is nothing less original than doping athletes for the purpose of setting world records. Doped world records have been set on countless occasions throughout the doping epidemic in elite sport that dates from the 1960s. In fact, two steroid-fueled world records set by Czech and East German women in 1983 and 1985 are still standing today and are acknowledged as valid records on the website of World Athletics. It is, therefore, remarkable that D’Souza’s bravado and the falsehoods he has trafficked in over this long campaign have induced so many journalists to accept his claims at face value.
The grand irony of the Enhanced Games operation is that its investors’ ultimate ambition to sell performance-enhancing drugs to a global market has long escaped public attention. Today the Enhanced Games website is selling allegedly performance-enhancing substances to anyone looking for a way to promote a feeling of well-being or lift a flagging libido. Testosterone and the newly fashionable peptides are the prime attractions. In 2024 D’Souza said, “if there’s a magic pill that makes us younger, the fountain of youth, there’ll be infinite revenue there.”
In a word, the Enhanced Games entrepreneurs have joined a long list of shills selling supposedly life-enhancing substances to a public that is too uninformed to judge what these substances may or may not do for their energy levels or to their bodies.
The prospects for breaking records at these Games are not good. When I heard Aron D’Souza speak at a conference in August 2024, he assured us that his enhanced athletes would break multiple world records at the Games. Given the past athletic achievements of the 39 competitors, this prediction borders on the impossible. The Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev may shave a few hundredths of a second off the 50-meter record, but it is also the case that swimming records fall more often than in other sports.
Short of using thick rubber slingshots to launch the sprinters and spring-loaded prosthetics to catapult the weightlifters upwards, the chances we will see world records set are slim.
In summary, the Enhanced Games have been a massive publicity stunt based on fraudulent claims about recruitment, pseudoscientific claims about boosting human performance, and unsubstantiated claims about providing “world-class” medical expertise to athletes currently working with doping doctors in Abu Dhabi, where lenient drug laws permit them to do so.
John Hoberman is a doping historian at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an internationally recognized expert on doping and has published three books on doping and anabolic steroids.