James “The Missile” Magnussen was happily retired in February 2024 when he agreed to go on one of Australia’s most popular sporting podcasts.

Then the swimming legend issued an audacious challenge that led to him returning to the pool and helping usher the Enhanced Games into existence. 

When asked if gaining the ability to use performance-enhancing drugs could transform some second-tier sprinter or swimmer into the second coming of Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps, Magnussen told the Hello Sport podcast that was unrealistic. If organizers of the Enhanced Games were serious about shattering records, Magnussen insisted they would need to offer enough money to attract world-class athletes, athletes who had previously medaled at the Olympics and World Championships, athletes like himself.

“I’ve kept myself in reasonable shape in retirement,” said Magnussen, then 32 and five years removed from his last competitive race. “If they put up a million dollars for the 50 freestyle world record, I’ll come on board as their first athlete. I’ll juice to the gills and break the record within six months.”

Video of Magnussen’s remarks spread quickly on social media and caught the attention of Enhanced Games founder Aron D’Souza. Within 24 hours, D’Souza vowed to write Magnusson a $1 million check if he competed in the Enhanced Games and swam the 50-meter freestyle faster than any human in history. In response, Magnusson became the first athlete to open himself to criticism for agreeing to participate in a billionaire-backed event derisively christened the “Steroid Olympics” for encouraging PED use rather than punishing it. 

The 42 swimming, track and weightlifting athletes who will compete in the inaugural Enhanced Games on Sunday in Las Vegas were invited to push the limits of human potential by taking an array of performance-enhancing substances banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency. Doctors recommended individualized combinations, selecting substances from five categories including testosterone, anabolic steroids, growth factors, metabolic modulators and stimulants like Adderall.  

Organizers of the Enhanced Games are quick to bristle when their event is characterized as a doping free-for-all. When criticized, they point out that 36 of 42 Enhanced Games athletes are participating in a rigorous clinical trial during which health professionals have monitored the substances being used, the dosages and the health of the competitors. They argue that the science-driven approach and regulated environment will reduce harm compared with the underground, unsupervised PED use that exists in many sports.

As Enhanced Games chief communications officer Chris Jones told Yahoo Sports, “You may not like what we’re doing. You may think it’s morally bankrupt. But it’s not reckless and it’s not absent safety measures.”

A conga line of critics disagrees. Last year, outspoken U.S. Anti-Doping Agency CEO Travis Tygart condemned the Enhance Games as a “clown show that puts profit over principle.” The International Olympic Committee and anti-doping agencies around the world have issued similar statements, arguing that athletes who take banned substances put themselves at elevated risk of heart attacks and other longterm, potentially irreversible or fatal side effects. 

Sports medicine experts who spoke to Yahoo Sports are most concerned with the message that Enhanced Games organizers are sending to the public by claiming that athletes can safely take performance-enhancing drugs under medical supervision.

Said sports cardiologist Aaron Baggish: “It’s akin to me saying I’m going to make smoking safe by supervising you while you’re smoking.”

REUTERS / REUTERS

‘Biology was never the ceiling’

Last May, at a flashy launch event inside a resort on the Las Vegas Strip, Aron D’Souza framed the Enhanced Games in epic terms. The Oxford-educated lawyer and entrepreneur described the project as the start of a cultural and scientific revolution destigmatizing performance medicine and redefining what the human body can do.

“In 50 years, we’ll look back and realize that biology was never the ceiling,” D’Souza told the audience. “It was only the starting line. We’ll be faster. We’ll be stronger. We’ll be younger for longer. And we’ll wonder why it took so long for society to catch up with science.”

The idea for the Enhanced Games, D’Souza has said, came to him between sets at an upscale Miami gym. He overheard two gymgoers chatting about their use of performance-enhancing substances and began to question why athletes were still bound by rules preventing them from benefiting from modern science. 

“I imagined a new kind of competition,” D’Souza said at last May’s Las Vegas launch event, “one where science and sport and society could evolve together, where we stopped apologizing for progress and started to embrace it.”

To find an investor willing to back such a norm-breaking idea, D’Souza approached longtime friend and business associate Peter Thiel. D’Souza had earned the PayPal co-founder and tech billionaire’s trust years earlier by masterminding Thiel’s clandestine legal war to destroy Gawker Media. 

Rather than sue Gawker for running a story that outed him as gay and for subsequent negative coverage, D’Souza suggested instead bankrolling the legal battle of someone else with a grudge against the snarky, no-holds-barred media outlet. Thiel gave D’Souza $10 million to lead Hulk Hogan’s litigation against Gawker for publishing a sex tape involving the wrestler without his permission. Hogan won a nine-figure jury verdict, forcing Gawker into bankruptcy. 

Thiel agreed to back the Enhanced Games. So did Christian Angermayer and Maximilian Martin, deep-pocketed investors with an interest in technology to improve health and life expectancy. By early 2025, D’Souza also secured much-needed political muscle when Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital announced it was investing in the project. 

“The Enhanced Games are going to be huge,” Trump Jr. said in a press release announcing 1789’s involvement, “and I couldn't be prouder to support this movement that is changing sports forever."

When he first unveiled his vision for the Enhanced Games, D’Souza foresaw a progressive alternative to the Olympics that would include track and field, swimming, weightlifting, gymnastics and combat sports. Athletes would receive undisclosed appearance fees and vie for a $500,000 prize pool in each event. An additional payout worth up to $1 million would go to any athlete who surpassed the world record in his or her event.

In February 2024, D’Souza told the BBC that dozens of Paris Olympians were eager to compete in the Enhanced Games and “make some real money.” Weeks later, D’Souza boasted to Running Magazine, “We’ve had 4,000 athletes come to us directly, and expect 10,000 athletes to apply when applications open.”

A source who worked closely with D’Souza admitted that the Enhanced Games founder exaggerated athlete interest but also defended the approach. 

“He had an amazing idea and he needed to excite people to attract capital,” the source said. “To a large degree it worked.”

Of course, the downside is an inaugural Enhanced Games that will inevitably fall short of D’Souza’s outsized predictions. There are no gymnasts or combat sports athletes scheduled to compete on Sunday. There will only be a men’s and women’s 100 meters contested on the track. More than half the men scheduled to run the 100 have never reached an Olympic or World Championships final. More than half the women slated to run the 100 have never qualified for a global championship meet. 

In the pool, the headliner is Great Britain’s Ben Proud, silver medalist in the men’s 50-meter freestyle in Paris and at the 2025 World Championships. The 31-year-old has told reporters that he views the Enhanced Games as a late-career pivot, a chance to pursue life-altering financial rewards while also enjoying the scientific freedom to test his body’s limits. 

The most accomplished track athletes who are participating in the Enhanced Games both chose this path in part because they’re ineligible to compete elsewhere. Two-time Olympic men’s 100 meters medalist Fred Kerley, 31, is serving a two-year suspension for missing three scheduled drug tests. Marvin Bracy-Williams, 32, is halfway through a 45-month suspension for testing positive for testosterone and then initially trying to tamper with the investigation. 

Of the 42 swimming, track and weightlifting athletes who will compete Sunday in Las Vegas, there are few rising stars and only three medalists from the 2024 Paris Olympics. Other big names got cold feet about jeopardizing their careers, especially after World Athletics president Sebastian Coe threatened track and field athletes who compete in the Enhanced Games with lengthy bans and World Aquatics ratified a new bylaw permanently banning Enhanced Games athletes and coaches.

When asked how the money available at the Enhanced Games compared to what elite sprinters can make competing on the pro circuit, one high-profile track and field agent gave a telling response. 

“I never really looked into that,” he told Yahoo Sports. “None of my clients were interested.”

Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images

Unlocking human potential or PED Olympics?

The athletes who did sign on to compete in the first Enhanced Games prepared for their events by gathering in January at a five-star beachfront resort in Abu Dhabi for an all-expenses-paid, 16-week training camp. 

They trained at state-of-the-art facilities. They worked with renowned coaches. And, besides a few athletes who intend to compete naturally on Sunday, they tried performance-enhancing drugs that they previously had been led to believe were dangerous or unethical.

Enhanced chose not to publicly reveal what substances individual athletes took leading up to the Games, but the company did release aggregate data on Wednesday evening: 91% of athletes used testosterone; 79% used human growth hormone; and 62% used stimulants like Adderall. By contrast, only 41% of athletes used EPO and only 29% used anabolic steroids, presumably the weightlifters seeking to add muscle and power. 

Enhanced Games administrators have emphasized that all PEDs were administered as part of a clinical trial with oversight from the Abu Dhabi Department of Health, that competitors undergo ongoing health monitoring and that medical and scientific commissions are available to provide guidance and answer questions. And yet several medical experts said it’s “100% misleading” to claim that PEDs can be made safe if taken under medical supervision. 

Baggish, previously the team cardiologist for the New England Patriots, Boston Bruins and New England Revolution, remembers Enhanced Games organizers reaching out to gauge his interest in being part of their scientific commission. Baggish turned down the opportunity immediately, he said, because he doesn’t believe in healthy subjects boosting their athletic performance by taking pharmaceuticals designed to treat medical conditions. 

“When we talk about performance-enhancing drugs, people only focus on half the reason that they’re banned — that they create an unfair playing field,” Baggish said. “That’s true, and that’s important, but the other reason many of these substances are banned is they carry health risks that we don’t understand well enough to negate. You cannot use these drugs to get bigger, faster, stronger without taking a serious risk.”

Athletes who have listened to the claims of Enhanced Games organizers have then reached out to Baggish for his perspective on whether the medical community now considers PEDs safer than they once were thought to be. Baggish quickly shoots down that notion, warning athletes that testosterone use has been linked to heart disease and infertility, that EPO can cause blood clots and put an unnecessary strain on the cardiovascular system and that other substances on the WADA banned list also carry an elevated risk.

To Baggish, the primary concern isn’t necessarily the health of the 40-plus swimmers, sprinters and weightlifters who will compete in the Enhanced Games on Sunday. What bothers Baggish more is the message the event sends to the public that “using these substances in the context of sports is in any way, shape or form OK.”

“That’s the really scary thing,” Baggish said. “I worry this is going to lead to people using these things on a much broader level, which would be a real disaster.” 

Why would Enhanced be willing to withstand so much criticism to put on a sporting event that will likely cost more than it earns, at least for this year? Perhaps because running a sports event is only a small part of the company’s business model. 

Enhanced has also begun selling a range of consumer health products, from peptides, to hormonal and testosterone replacement therapies, to anti-aging creams and supplements. Its hope is that hundreds of thousands of TV viewers will watch 42 athletes — nearly all of them openly taking performance-enhancing substances — glide through the pool, dart down the track and perform superhuman feats of strength. Then maybe those viewers will want to buy some of those same treatments for themselves. 

“The core strategic question is simple: which brand will consumers trust when it comes to human enhancement?” Angermayer wrote last month in a Substack post. “I believe consumers will trust the company that can show them — credibly, scientifically, and transparently — how elite athletes are using these protocols to safely unlock new levels of performance.

“I believe consumers will observe the tangible results our athletes achieve and seek to apply those enhancements to their own lives. Enhancements are not only relevant to breaking world records — (in my honest opinion) they can help anyone reach new heights: whether running a marathon faster, performing better as a business executive, or simply having more energy to spend time with family and friends.”

Enhanced executives argue that the two elements of their business are complementary to one-another. Cynics counter that the Enhanced Games have primarily become a marketing tool with the athletes being paid handsomely in return for selling products to consumers and taking outsized risks with their long-term health. 

“I think we've got a situation where an organization is using elite sport as a vehicle to sell substances that are more targeted towards the exercise community,” said University of Birmingham professor Ian Boardley, co-author of the study  “Harm reduction in the Enhanced Games: Can performance enhancing drugs be ‘safe’?’” 

“This isn’t about elite sport, as has been argued at times. This isn’t about athletes not being properly compensated. It’s about selling telehealth protocols to the general population and the exercise population. It’s using elite sport as a vehicle to do that.” 

Enhanced organizers don’t entirely disagree. In fact, D’Souza acknowledged as much last May at the launch event for Sunday’s games.

“This isn’t just a sporting event,” D’Souza told the audience. “We’re not just organizing a competition. We’re unlocking human potential.”