Inside the Enhanced Games: Doping, Money, and

Ben Proud won silver at the 2024 Paris Olympics. He is a world and European champion in the 50-meter freestyle. He is also, this weekend, competing in Las Vegas at an event where testosterone, anabolic steroids, growth hormones, and stimulants are not merely permitted but actively administered to participants.

That sentence takes a moment to land. Let it.

The Enhanced Games — dubbed by its critics the "steroid Olympics" — opened in Las Vegas on May 24th, the inaugural edition of what its founders describe as a new frontier for human performance. Athletes who break world records earn a million dollars. Event winners take home a quarter million. The organizers say this redefines sport. The International Olympic Committee, the World Anti-Doping Agency, the Biden White House, and the International Fair Play Committee say it does something rather different.

What it actually does depends entirely on which questions you think matter most.

The Origin Story Has a Particular Shape

The Enhanced Games was conceived by Aaron D'Souza, an Australian venture capitalist and lawyer, who says the idea came to him while working out at a gym, where he overheard two men casually discussing being "enhanced." He pitched it to Peter Thiel — the PayPal co-founder and billionaire, whom D'Souza had met as a student at Oxford when Thiel was a guest speaker. A German venture capitalist named Christian Angermayer joined as co-founder and investor.

This detail — that the concept traveled from a gym overheard conversation to Peter Thiel's desk — is not incidental. The investor class that has assembled around the Enhanced Games is not primarily interested in swimming. They are interested in longevity medicine, life-extension technology, and what one Saudi investor, Prince Khaled, called "the ultimate biohacking opportunity for elite athletes." The data produced by athletes taking supervised pharmacological regimens at the outer limits of human performance is, evidently, commercially interesting to people who are already betting on living longer.

In March, Enhanced formally launched its range of performance medicine products: hormone replacement therapy for men and women, supplements, and longevity protocols. Earlier this month, the company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange with a valuation exceeding one billion dollars — before a single race had been run. The pharmaceutical marketing engine underneath the spectacle is, by any measure, the more significant enterprise.

So when D'Souza talks about the games as a platform to explore human potential, he is telling the truth. He is also, simultaneously, producing premium marketing content for products his publicly traded company will sell to consumers who watched athletes break records using them.

Whether those two things are in tension is one of the more interesting open questions the Enhanced Games poses.

The Philosophical Case Deserves a Fair Hearing

The case for what Enhanced is doing rests on three distinct arguments, and they should not be collapsed into each other.

The first is an athlete compensation argument. Proud put it plainly when BBC sports editor Dan Roan spoke to him at the training camp in Abu Dhabi: "Even though I did all these things I rarely received any sort of compensation and you start to think especially as a 30, 31-year-old — what's the point of spending 15 years building a skill just to retire and forget about it for the rest of my life?" The IOC, when pressed, points to the money it distributes to national federations and grassroots programs. What it is considerably less forthcoming about is how much of that reaches the athletes generating the revenue. This debate predates the Enhanced Games and will outlast it.

The second is a harm-reduction argument. Emily Barkley, a British swimmer who competed at a decent national level and is participating in Las Vegas, said when Roan put the "bad example" challenge to her: "Doping is happening in sport. Especially in gym communities, you hear a lot about people buying it through the back door in unsafe ways, maybe even taking too much. I feel like what we're doing here is going to facilitate a better understanding of these drugs so that in the future people can do it in a medically safe way."

This argument has structural similarities to arguments for drug legalization more broadly: the practice exists regardless of prohibition, prohibition pushes it underground where harm multiplies, and regulation at least creates oversight. Whether one finds it persuasive in the context of sport is a separate question from whether it is logically coherent. It is.

The third is a libertarian self-sovereignty argument: adults should be able to make informed choices about their own bodies, especially when those choices affect only themselves. This is where the Enhanced Games philosophy gets slipperiest. An elite athlete in their thirties deciding to use testosterone under medical supervision is one thing. The downstream effects — on younger athletes wondering whether they need to start, on the cultural normalization of pharmaceutical enhancement in gyms and schools — are harder to contain within the frame of individual choice.

The Record Problem Is Real

There is a specific tension that Roan pressed directly, and it has not been convincingly resolved.

The Enhanced Games offers a million dollars for breaking a world record. Those records belong, by convention and by the meaning we have collectively assigned them, to athletes competing clean. Maximiliano Martin, co-founder and CEO of the Enhanced Games, offered this to Roan when challenged: "It doesn't [devalue the record] because it's set under a completely different set of rules and also the traditional federation is not accepting that record as a record."

That answer is technically true and practically unsatisfying. The world record exists as a benchmark. The Enhanced Games uses it as one. The financial structure of the event is built on the premise that beating the world record is meaningful enough to pay a million dollars for. You cannot simultaneously argue that the record is meaningful enough to reward and meaningless enough that surpassing it reflects nothing about the record holder who ran, swam, or lifted clean.

This is not an argument that the Enhanced Games should not exist. It is an observation that the intellectual framework offered for it contains a load-bearing contradiction.

The Political Texture

The money has particular coordinates. Thiel's existing ties to the Trump White House were reinforced when the 1789 Capital Fund, in which Donald Trump Jr. is a partner, became an investor. Trump Jr. characterized the games as being about "excellence, innovation, American dominance on the world stage" — language he explicitly connected to the MAGA movement.

Meanwhile, RFK Jr., as Health and Human Services Secretary, has spoken openly about his own testosterone replacement therapy and his Make America Healthy Again campaign has flagged the deregulation of peptides and other treatments as a priority — regulatory changes that would directly expand the market for companies like Enhanced.

None of this determines whether the Enhanced Games are a good idea. But it does establish that this is not a politically neutral experiment in athletic freedom. It is embedded in a specific political economy, with investors who have clear views about regulation, a government sympathetic to their commercial interests, and a cultural moment in which "optimization" and "biohacking" carry specific ideological weight.

What Las Vegas Actually Tells Us

About 40 athletes are competing this weekend. World Aquatics has already banned anyone involved in the Enhanced Games from its events — the first federation to do so, but possibly not the last. For athletes like Proud, who have already achieved what they were going to achieve and are approaching thirty, the calculation looks different than it does for someone with Olympic ambitions still ahead of them.

The small field is either a beginning or a ceiling. D'Souza would say beginning. The structure of what's been built — the NYSE listing, the supplement line, the longevity investor base — suggests the games themselves may ultimately be less important than the attention economy they generate for the pharmaceutical products sitting behind them.

There is a version of the Enhanced Games that is exactly what its critics say: a cynical vehicle for selling drugs to consumers, dressed up in the language of athletic liberation, with human beings absorbing pharmacological risk to serve as product demonstrations. There is another version in which it surfaces a genuine hypocrisy in elite sport, creates space for a harm-reduction conversation that the anti-doping establishment has refused to have, and fairly compensates athletes who have been systematically undervalued.

The honest position, right now, is that we do not yet know which version this is. What happens in Las Vegas this weekend is one data point. What Enhanced looks like in five years — whether the athletes are protected, whether the records mean anything, whether the medical supervision was real or theatrical — will be considerably more telling.

— Catherine "Kate" Brennan