The Enhanced Games: How a Steroid-Friendly Rival to the Olympics Became a Billionaire-Backed Bet on the "Enhanced Age"
On February 25, 2025, retired Australian swimming star James Magnussen stepped onto the starting blocks at a North Carolina aquatic center, with $1 million and his professional reputation hanging in the balance. A three-time Olympic medalist and former 100-meter freestyle world champion, Magnussen had walked away from elite competition six years earlier, building a quiet, comfortable life back home as a commentator and daily Bondi Beach swimmer. But he came out of retirement for a wild new project: the Enhanced Games, a self-described "steroid Olympics" where performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) are not just allowed, but explicitly encouraged. The first full Games are scheduled to launch in Las Vegas in May 2026.
The event’s founder, Aron D’Souza, a smooth-talking protégé of billionaire Peter Thiel, argues that ditching anti-doping testing will push human physical potential to its next frontier. The company behind the Games has already raised millions from Thiel, Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital, and other high-profile backers, earning praise from public figures like podcaster Joe Rogan. Mainstream sports leaders, however, are split: many decry the event’s reckless disregard for athlete health, while others simply doubt it will ever actually happen.
At the time of that February 2025 time trial, Magnussen stood alone as the only athlete willing to publicly commit to competing. He traveled to Greensboro Aquatics Center for a closed-door test with a clear deal: if he beat the long-standing 50-meter freestyle world record, he would walk away with a $1 million prize from Enhanced. A win would also prove D’Souza’s core thesis: that a cocktail of normally banned PEDs can turn a retired, out-of-competition athlete into the fastest swimmer on Earth, silencing his army of critics.
For four months leading up to the trial, Magnussen followed what Enhanced calls "the protocol": a strict routine of daily injections in his abdomen and glutes. Enhanced organizers declined to disclose the exact substances Magnussen used, arguing they don’t want to encourage copycat use, but Magnussen slipped the details to the Sydney Morning Herald: testosterone to build muscle mass and boost bone density, peptides BPC-157 and thymosin to speed up injury recovery, and ipamorelin plus CJC-1295 to increase natural growth hormone release.
Standing on the starting block, Magnussen looked almost unrecognizable from his Olympic days. His already elite swimmer’s build had been pushed to an extreme: veins bulged across his forearms, his shoulders were unnaturally broad, and his back muscles jutted so far out from the sides of his swim suit they were visible from the front. Paired with reflective goggles and a black cap, he looked less like a superhuman athlete and more like an alien interloper.
The record he chased was 20.91 seconds, set by Brazilian Cesar Cielo back in 2009. But the second Magnussen hit the water, it was clear something was off. He sat too low in the water, creating far more drag than normal. His powerful arms pulled him through quickly enough, but the extra 30 pounds of muscle he’d packed on was working against him: the more he strained, the more resistance his oversized frame created. In that moment, the entire premise of the Enhanced Games hung in the balance. If the only elite athlete willing to go public couldn’t get close to the world record after five months of PED use, what was the point of the entire project?
How the Enhanced Games went from a fringe idea to a billion-dollar bet
The story of the Enhanced Games starts back in 2009, when a chance phone call changed D’Souza’s life forever. The Australian was just one week into his first term as a law student at the University of Oxford, when a mutual friend connected him to Peter Thiel, who was visiting the city and wanted a local guide.
That connection opened D’Souza’s eyes to what he calls the "extraordinary opportunities" the world has to offer, opportunities he was determined to seize. As his friend OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once put it, D’Souza is "obsessed with status and power." The pair hit it off immediately, and just a year later D’Souza approached Thiel with a plan: give him 3-5 years and $10 million, and he would help Thiel get revenge on Gawker Media, which had outed Thiel as gay. The plan relied on covertly funding wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, which published Hogan’s private sex tape without consent. Despite D’Souza also being gay, author Ryan Holiday wrote in Conspiracy (his book about the case) that taking down Gawker was never a righteous crusade for D’Souza—it was just "a way for him to make his mark." Gawker ultimately collapsed after a $140 million jury verdict in Hogan’s favor.
After the Gawker case, D’Souza bounced between a string of careers: diplomat, venture capitalist, philanthropist, fintech founder. But in late 2022, he stumbled on the idea that would become the Enhanced Games. Every holiday season, D’Souza makes a habit of sketching out new business ideas, from a subscription social network to a project funding an Australian poet laureate, but none had ever stuck. That year, he was inspired by the hyper-muscled physiques he saw at his gym and across Instagram, and began refining an idea for an event that would showcase just how far human potential can be pushed with PEDs. He sensed public attitudes toward steroids were starting to shift, after decades of stigma following widespread athlete misuse and state-sponsored doping programs in the 1980s and 1990s.
The idea had actually been floating around his head for decades: back in 2004, he read a WIRED article titled "Steroids for Everyone!" that made the exact same argument for a drug-friendly enhanced Olympics that he uses today. Other inspirations followed: he left a dinner with International Olympic Committee members convinced their intellect was "unimpressive," and he latched onto a World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) anonymous athlete survey that found 44% of respondents admitted to using PEDs. D’Souza cites that number constantly in interviews, but one of the study’s authors confirmed it is likely an overestimate, and the study was only ever meant to be a small pilot test for new measurement methods.
D’Souza spent his annual New Year’s Eve with Thiel, pitched the idea, and Thiel was intrigued. D’Souza spent the next six months building out the concept, but when he and his executive assistant Thomas Dolan pitched investors (including disgraced cycling star Lance Armstrong, per the Financial Times), almost no one bit. "Everyone was like, you can’t even talk about this stuff," D’Souza recalled. "It was outside the Overton window."
In June 2023, D’Souza launched the Enhanced Games website and posted a 34-second clip of a sprinter on the starting blocks, with a voiceover introducing the sprinter as the fastest man in the world and "a proud enhanced athlete." The event was framed as a libertarian dream: no drug testing, no rules limiting what athletes can take.
D’Souza and Dolan spent just £4,000 ($5,400) on paid social promotion, and the clip racked up 9 million views in 24 hours. That viral moment earned the project its first media coverage and its first investor: prominent venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan, who slid into D’Souza’s Twitter DMs, and sent a full investment term sheet over the same platform just a few hours later.
A few weeks later, D’Souza hosted a Sunday lunch at his London home for Thiel (who was visiting the city) and a small group of friends from the gay venture capital community. "We’ve all holidayed together for years," D’Souza said. "It’s an extraordinarily tight group." One guest was German biotech billionaire Christian Angermayer, who Thiel had introduced to D’Souza on vacation back in 2013. Angermayer had read a German news article about the Enhanced Games, and wanted to join as a co-founder.
None of the three co-founders are big sports fans, D’Souza jokes: "We’re three gay guys." But over roast lamb, Yorkshire pudding, and fine wine, the group talked through human enhancement, longevity science, and the project’s potential, and by the end of the meal, both Angermayer and Thiel had agreed to invest. D’Souza has proven to be a skilled fundraiser: one doping expert described talking to him as "like talking to a bar of soap"—he can keep a straight face while making even the most outlandish claims.
When their investment was announced in late January 2024, it sparked a new wave of media coverage and fierce pushback from health experts. The experts I spoke with raised alarms about long-term damage from steroid use, including heart problems, premature aging, and dangerous side effects when athletes stop using PEDs. Others worry the Enhanced Games will normalize PED use, first in sports, then across the general public, leading more people to use higher doses or counterfeit versions of the drugs athletes take. "There’s going to be enormous ripple effects that will certainly have destructive implications in people," says Thomas Murray, a bioethicist and author of Good Sport: Why Our Games Matter—and How Doping Undermines Them.
For me, D’Souza fundamentally misunderstands what sports are. At their core, sports are about competing within shared limits: it’s not just who can cross 100 meters the fastest, it’s who can do it while following a shared set of rules (no drugs, no rocket boosters, no tailwind giant fans). Even in speed-focused sports like swimming and sprinting, success isn’t just about adding more power. Humans aren’t cars. Swimming fast requires skill that goes far beyond raw muscle strength. And PEDs aren’t magic: even if steroids can shave half a second off a 100-meter sprint time (a generous estimate), breaking Usain Bolt’s record requires finding one of the handful of humans who can already run 100 meters in under 10 seconds, then convincing them to risk their reputation, their income, and their long-term health.
The record attempt that changed everything
Which brings us back to the original question: why would any athlete agree to this? For Magnussen, the answer came in February 2024, when he was driving home from a pickleball game and got a call from the Hello Sport podcast, asking him what he thought about the Enhanced Games. At that point, he had a comfortable life in Australia, but he missed the rush of competition. "I love the simplicity of being an athlete," he says. He made an offhand comment that changed his life and helped launch the Enhanced Games into the public eye: "If they put up a million dollars for the 50-freestyle world record, I’ll come on board as their first athlete," he told the hosts. "I’ll juice to the gills and break the record within six months."
A month later, when I met D’Souza at a luxury coworking space in West London where Enhanced had set up its small first office, the project still felt like a joke. The website co-opted LGBTQ language, talking about "coming out" as enhanced. It had a section encouraging users to secretly edit Wikipedia articles to change phrases like "cheated" (for athletes caught doping) to "fought for science and bodily sovereignty." On the official Enhanced Games Discord, mostly populated by bodybuilders sharing before-and-after photos, I found a zip file called "The Arsenal" full of memes attacking the IOC that were too cringeworthy to describe.
But behind the scenes, the project was growing. Angermayer installed his own team in senior roles: bringing in Mike Oakes from his Apeiron Investment Group to lead communications, and Max Martin, an enthusiastic 20-something open about his own PED use, to oversee Games operations. More seasoned hires followed: sports scientist Dan Turner to lead a scientific advisory board for athletes, former Team USA chief Rick Adams to handle event logistics, and Nike’s Tim Phelan to lead athlete relations. Magnussen officially signed on as Enhanced’s first athlete, on a monthly salary. The mission also shifted, from a one-off event to a broader push to normalize PEDs and usher in what they call "the Enhanced Age" of superhuman potential for everyone.
There was also early friction: when Angermayer first joined, he brought in longevity physician Michael Sagner, who runs a high-end clinic on London’s Harley Street, to lead an independent medical commission focused on athlete safety. Sagner became furious with D’Souza’s unregulated public statements. "Without asking anybody, he was just going bananas with these press releases," Sagner says. "And then it became even more outrageous when there was something else added to the website—that it's even better without testing, and anything goes." Sagner has stayed on for now, but tensions remain.
The 2024 Paris Olympics came and went with barely a peep from Enhanced. The first Games were originally scheduled for late 2024, but the open trials D’Souza promised never materialized, and Magnussen, still the only public athlete, grew restless.
In October 2024, Magnussen flew from Sydney to Los Angeles, with a plan: give him eight weeks of doping and training, and he would attempt to break the world record to prove the concept of the Games ahead of the first official event. His first challenge was sourcing the drugs: it’s not the kind of thing you can easily get clear, public medical advice for, even with Enhanced’s connections.
Next, he needed a place to train. Elite Australian pools and coaches can only work with drug-tested athletes, so Magnussen reached out to Brett Hawke, a former Australian Olympic swimmer turned coach who spent decades coaching at Auburn University in Alabama and now ran a club team in Irvine, California.
Hawke had coached the two previous fastest 50-meter freestylers in history: Frédérick Bousquet, who swam 21.04 seconds in 2004, and Cesar Cielo, who hit 20.91 in 2009—the record Magnussen was chasing. Both swims came during the "supersuit era," when full-body polyurethane suits made swimmers more buoyant, before the suits were banned in 2010. (Both swimmers also failed drug tests during their careers.) Magnussen had talked about the Enhanced Games on Hawke’s podcast a few weeks earlier, and figured California would let him train in anonymity.
At the peak of his Olympic career, Magnussen had a full support team: biomechanics experts, sports scientists, strength coaches, physiotherapists, assistants, underwater cameras to analyze his form, and perfectly temperature-controlled pools. Irvine was nothing like that. The manager of Hawke’s usual club pool refused to let Magnussen train there, so most of his preparation happened in the 25-yard community pool at Hawke’s apartment complex, open to all residents. There were no lane lines, no starting blocks, no overflow lanes to absorb splash, so Magnussen constantly fought his own wake. "We would get a crowd sometimes. People would walk past and stare in amazement and sit and watch," Hawke says. The only upside was the unseasonably cold, wet California winter: no other residents used the pool, though they occasionally had to shoo away ducks that wandered in. "The whole process was bizarre to me," Magnussen says.
He started his daily injection regimen in mid-October, and his body changed fast. In hindsight, he calls himself a "super responder" to PEDs. "My strength was through the roof," he says. "I was squatting 250 kilos, which I would say is at least 20 percent stronger than any other swimmer in history. It was insane." Every few weeks, he drove to a Los Angeles clinic for blood work and heart screenings. Most days were just training: twice a day, every day, for seven weeks straight. While PEDs helped his muscles recover faster, the intense workload left his central nervous system with no time to recover, and he started burning out.
In December, just as he was supposed to peak for the record attempt, he got a severe toothache, and his face "swelled up like a balloon." He spent Christmas Day in the hospital, getting an abscess drained and a root canal. The attempt was pushed back from December to February, and what was supposed to be an eight-week trip away from his family turned into five months. He spent New Year’s alone in an Airbnb, thousands of miles from home.
While Magnussen and Hawke trained around the ducks in California, the Enhanced Games inched closer to reality. D’Souza said more athletes were interested, though none were willing to go public like Magnussen. Estimates vary: some Enhanced staff said hundreds of athletes were interested, while Sagner put the number at 35.
D’Souza says Enhanced was in talks with "every major sports broadcaster" to air the event, but he was focused on viral social media growth. Angermayer courted new investors, while Martin and Adams traveled the world scouting host cities. By mid-2024, they decided to wait for the outcome of the U.S. presidential election: the Biden administration was openly hostile to the Enhanced Games, and a Trump win would open up new opportunities.
Right after the 2024 election, they finalized a deal to host the first Games in Las Vegas. "A hundred percent the reason they’re happening in the US is because Trump won," says Angermayer. A few months later, they secured investment from 1789 Capital, Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, and aligned themselves with RFK Jr.’s "Make America Healthy Again" movement. ("He takes enhancements himself," D’Souza says of Kennedy. "He is very pro–human enhancement.") Enhanced also began plans to move its headquarters from London to New York.
In December 2024, D’Souza hosted a human enhancement conference at Oxford. Speakers included geneticist George Church, famous for his work to revive the woolly mammoth, and Bryan Johnson, who has spent millions of dollars on anti-aging treatments to make himself younger. At the end of the conference, attendees signed the "First Declaration on Human Enhancement," a document laying out the core principles the group agrees to follow. The 39 signatories are a bizarre mix: age-obsessed millionaires, longevity doctors, Enhanced staff, college students, and a bodybuilding influencer
