Imagine a medicine cabinet filled with all the banned substances taken by the world’s top athletes in the past year. You would have at your fingertips clostebol, the steroid that led to the suspension of Jannik Sinner, the world number one-ranked tennis player; dehydroepiandrosterone, the hormonal supplement that Paul Pogba, the World Cup-winning footballer, tested positive for; and chlorthalidone, a diuretic used to mask the effects of other drugs, which was found in the urine sample of a Norwegian world trail running champion.
You would also have your pick of the endurance-enhancing drug erythropoietin, or EPO, which has plagued the Kenyan running scene. There would be 19-norsteroids, a type of anabolic agent, and trimetazidine, which helps the heart pump blood more efficiently, including through the bodies of several Chinese swimmers who competed in the Paris Olympics (they blamed contamination from a hotel kitchen). There’d definitely be some cocaine, particularly common among rugby players last year, and plenty of the growth hormone stimulator capromorelin, used to treat weight loss in cats and dogs.
The most recent list by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) includes around 400 prohibited substances, although new names are added regularly. Depending on your perspective, you may see that number as evidence of a robust international anti-doping regime — or of its enduring failure.
Aron D’Souza sees it as the reality of modern sport, proof that performance-enhancing drugs are involved in the setting and breaking of all manner of world records. He is planning to stage a kind of steroid Olympics at which performance-enhancing drugs are not only allowed, but encouraged. At the Enhanced Games, which D’Souza envisions as a televised stadium competition, there would be no national teams or four-year competition cycle. For the time being, the proposed events have been limited to swimming, track and field, and strength, and eventually combat sports such as mixed martial arts and boxing.
D’Souza describes the Enhanced Games as a bold new frontier for human advancement, helping to usher in radical new treatments, particularly when it comes to anti-ageing. The Games offers its participants — and ultimately its viewers — the chance to imagine themselves tweaked, tuned and optimised. Ultimately, the aim would be to promote the drugs taken by the athletes, who D’Souza says would be paid handsomely and required to undergo comprehensive health checks. The Games, he claims, would work alongside hospitals, research institutes and biotech companies to create an event that would resemble a scientific symposium as much as a Super Bowl.
The idea has financial backing from Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor with ties to the Trump administration, Balaji Srinivasan, an outspoken crypto investor formerly of Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz, and the biotech and psychedelics enthusiast Christian Angermayer. The most recent addition is Donald Trump Jr, who participated in a funding round through his venture capital fund in February. “This is about excellence, innovation and American dominance on the world stage — something the Maga movement is all about,” Trump Jr said in the accompanying press release.
D’Souza, however, is the frontman. He conceived of the Games, and has been their loudest cheerleader. When I first met him in early 2024, he said he was fielding more than 100 interview requests a week. There was talk of holding qualifiers in the summer, directly after the Paris Olympics concluded, and the inaugural Enhanced Games soon after. A year on, with just one athlete publicly signed on to the project and no concrete plans for either a venue or a date, the project looks increasingly like a weird thought experiment, despite its high-profile backers.
For D’Souza, the second Trump regime could be what the Enhanced Games needs to get off the ground. The president’s controversial new health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr may be a vaccine sceptic who has said he would eliminate fluoride from the water supply and sever links between the Food and Drug Administration and pharmaceutical industry lobbyists, but he has spoken openly about his own use of testosterone replacement as part of an “anti-ageing” protocol. The tech entrepreneurs, who now have the ear of the Trump White House, Thiel included, seem more receptive to D’Souza’s ideas.
“The world is beginning to see that we have a right, we may even have a duty, to become enhanced,” D’Souza told me. “And it’s not scary. It’s not cheating, it’s not breaking the rules, it’s just inventing a new set of rules.”
D’Souza might seem an unlikely face for the Enhanced Games. He has no background in sports ventures and, unlike many in his social and business circles, he claims never to have used performance-enhancing drugs himself. The boyish 39-year-old grew up in Australia. His grandmother was the head of the family’s sizeable property portfolio, in which D’Souza began to take a keen interest as a teenager.
He studied for an undergraduate degree in politics and competed in amateur velodrome cycling through his twenties. As an undergrad, he wrote a paper on the International Olympic Committee and anti-doping policy before getting a PhD in constitutional law, writing a book on Aboriginal iconography and setting off for another law degree at Oxford university. Above all, D’Souza was a striver and a man comfortable in elite institutions.
D’Souza said he first met Thiel at Oxford in 2009. During his first week there, he’d received a call from a friend who offered to introduce him to a tech entrepreneur who was visiting town to give a guest lecture. Thiel was still relatively unknown outside the tech world, despite having sold PayPal, the company he had built with a team that included Elon Musk and David O Sacks, for $1.5bn, and had driven down to Oxford on his own. He met up with D’Souza and their mutual friend for a day of sightseeing. Thiel’s introduction got straight to the point. “Hi, I’m Peter and I’m going to live for ever,” D’Souza recalled him saying when we retraced their steps through Oxford last summer. “I think I just replied: ‘Hi, I’m Aron. I’m studying law.’”
D’Souza remembered a rainy walk along the river, a visit to the rare books section of Blackwell’s, and a meal at The Eagle and Child pub, an old haunt of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. The pub, which was bought in 2023 by Larry Ellison’s institute of technology, has become a site of pilgrimage for Tolkien fans including Thiel, who named several of his companies for objects and places in the writer’s fantasy world.
As they walked through Christ Church Meadow, D’Souza asked Thiel whether, as a billionaire, he had any problems nagging at him. Plenty, Thiel replied. “What’s your biggest problem?” D’Souza asked. “And how can I help you solve it?” This was one of D’Souza’s go-to questions. In this case, he said, it led Thiel to reveal a long-standing grievance with the website Gawker and its founder, Nick Denton. In 2007, Gawker had published a story about Thiel that outed him as gay. D’Souza made a mental note.
Thiel told D’Souza that if he thought being a lawyer would be a meaningful, rewarding career, he was walking into a trap. “There are other avenues of being a philosopher-king, which is what [Thiel] is,” D’Souza said. More than a year later, he met Thiel at an upscale restaurant in Berlin, where he pitched a plan to sue Gawker using a proxy plaintiff. When Thiel asked how much it would cost, D’Souza suggested $10mn, although he admitted that number was more or less devised on the spot.
He finished his degree and travelled back to Australia, still planning to embark on a legal career. But before long he was on a flight over to New Zealand to meet Thiel and put the Gawker plan in motion. “I thought it was a virtuous cause. I thought it was, legally, very interesting,” D’Souza said. Over the next few years, D’Souza acted as Thiel’s go-between, channelling funds to a Florida law office that would represent the wrestler Hulk Hogan, who would bring a case against Gawker related to the website’s release of a sex tape in which he appeared. In 2016, Hogan won the suit, and Gawker was eventually closed. D’Souza had solved Thiel’s biggest problem. Thiel did not respond to requests from the FT for comment.
In his book on the Gawker case, Conspiracy, writer Ryan Holiday recounts how people in Silicon Valley described D’Souza as a sort of “professional son”. As we talked in Oxford, D’Souza certainly had the air of a younger man in thrall to his mentor. With his preppy blue sweatshirt, a watch with a bright orange strap and a messenger bag, he could still pass for an eager undergrad.
D’Souza had arranged for us to take a tour of his former college, Harris Manchester, where he was keen to showcase his role as a donor; he is funding a refurbishment of the chapel. With the college staff, he displayed a graciousness befitting a visiting politician. The chapel is non-denominational and one of the few to offer same-sex marriages (the guide who accompanied us recounted the progressive values on display). D’Souza, who is gay, said he was planning to get married there one day.
Between his first meeting with Thiel and the creation of the Enhanced Games, D’Souza founded a string of what he said were boring and unglamorous start-ups, with a “Thielian” strategy of focusing on uncompetitive fields. There was an ethical investing retirement fund, Good Super, the not-for-profit Chief of Staff Association and a pension-focused fintech company, Sargon Capital, also backed by Thiel. D’Souza left the company in 2019 and sued his co-founder. The company, and his co-founder, later went bankrupt. “That chapter of my career is closed,” D’Souza said.
In December of 2022, D’Souza was lifting weights at an upscale gym in Miami when he saw what he described as a “chiselled Adonis” across the room. Never one to shirk a networking opportunity, D’Souza went up to the man, complimented him and asked how he had achieved such symmetry and muscular tone. The secret, the man replied, was steroids. He offered to give D’Souza the name of his doctor. D’Souza said he politely declined.
The interaction was brief but soon D’Souza’s Instagram feed was full of bodybuilders and powerlifters speaking about their complicated relationship to the idea of a natural physique. He was renting an apartment that winter in a luxury skyscraper overlooking Miami’s Biscayne Bay. His annual ritual was to take the days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve to develop a new business plan. “No one else works in that period,” he said. “I just have to do something.” The ideas could come from anywhere. One year, he devised a scheme to reduce lines at airport security. But in the final days of 2022, D’Souza landed on a more interesting question: could he bring all those chiselled Adonises together for a celebration of physical prowess?
He drafted a pitch deck and headed to a lavish New Year’s party hosted by Thiel in Miami, where he explained the idea. “That’s cool,” Thiel said. It was enough for D’Souza, who spent the next six months working on the Enhanced Games with his 18-year-old executive assistant and godson, Thomas Dolan. They pitched the idea to hundreds of investors and athletes. Everyone, including Lance Armstrong, turned them down.
But one meeting changed their strategy, Dolan told me. An investment fund backed by a sports personality was agonising over whether to support the Games. “We want to invest, but we just can’t,” the firm said, worried that the association would tarnish its principal investor’s reputation. It was then, said Dolan, “We decided we had to win the culture battle first.”
In June 2023, still without any investors, the Enhanced Games put out a promotional video on social media. Whipped up for less than £200, the ad shows stock footage of a single, faceless sprinter. He starts running. We see a stop-clock: the faceless athlete has beaten Usain Bolt’s 100-metre record time. “I am a proud Enhanced athlete,” a voiceover intones. “The Olympics hate me. I need your help to come out. I need your help to stop hate.”
The response was tepid, Dolan told me. “Aron looks at me and says: ‘I think I’ve just torched my personal reputation.’ I said: ‘Well, let’s double down. Let’s put four grand’s worth of ad spend into it.’” The boost helped get their first media attention, a radio station in New Zealand, which turned into international media slots for D’Souza.
A few weeks later, D’Souza said, Thiel paid a visit to London and D’Souza organised a Sunday roast at his house, with a group of his friends, including Angermayer, the biotech investor. Dolan spent most of the day running around Kensington buying ingredients. Over homemade Yorkshire puddings, D’Souza held court. Thiel signed up soon afterwards.
The ad had been D’Souza’s first successful move into the culture wars. He was poking holes in a code of ethics that no longer seemed to apply to a young generation intent on self-optimisation. D’Souza bristles at the term “transhumanist”, the movement that advocates using tech to evolve and perfect the human body, but he readily identifies with the “effective accelerationism” movement, a social media-driven brand of technocratic, libertarian thought.
Despite his assault on the ideas cherished by mainstream institutions of sport, D’Souza seemed remarkably keen to collaborate with them. By February 2024, when I met him in London, the project had escalated significantly and he was ebullient. His team was in the process of hiring several staff members who had worked at blue-chip sports companies, including Red Bull and Nike, he said, and a major documentary with Ridley Scott’s production company was being discussed.
D’Souza had also convened a one-day symposium at the House of Lords, where the gathering of interested parties included: Zoltan Istvan, founder of the Transhumanist party; Carl Hart, a professor of psychology at Columbia and a drug legalisation advocate; a number of crypto enthusiasts; a pioneering Paralympic wheelchair engineer; and a gruff Birmingham powerlifter and trainer who remarked repeatedly on the ease with which he could get steroids delivered directly to the Palace of Westminster. There were cucumber sandwiches and cakes laid out on three-tiered silver serving trays.
D’Souza wanted to make one thing clear: what he was doing wasn’t so far-fetched. “Forty-four per cent of athletes are doping,” he told me, citing a lie-detector study commissioned by Wada. (That study is controversial. Wada’s own blood testing of athletes finds only about 1 to 2 per cent positive doping results a year.) But, for D’Souza, the evidence was incontrovertible. Performance-enhancing drugs were an open secret and “natural” athletics was a hypocritical idea peddled by men’s magazines. “They showed these enhanced humans but lied about them: ‘Just eat chicken and broccoli and do six-minute abs at the gym and you’ll look like Adonis,’” D’Souza said. “No. He’s using anabolic steroids. Just be open and honest about it.”
An early version of the Enhanced Games website, since edited, featured an extensive section on “enhanced inclusive language” and tongue-in-cheek alternatives to the “slurs” used against athletes who used banned substances. It featured a section about the “Colonialist Origins of Doping” and a guide on how to “come out as Enhanced”.
D’Souza was optimistic that he could turn the issue of performance-enhancing drugs into an ideological big tent, bringing together an alliance of anti-woke sports bros, scientists eager to study the athletes and a faction who were genuinely convinced by the philosophical argument against drug testing.
He was also hoping to capitalise on the sometimes outlandish male wellness culture driven by figures like Bryan Johnson, a 47-year-old entrepreneur who is trying to return his body’s biomarkers to those of an 18-year-old by spending millions of dollars on targeted treatments. Johnson was a co-author of “The Declaration on Human Enhancement”, a statement published after an event D’Souza organised in December, to enshrine the authors’ belief in athletes’ “innate right to elevate their physical and mental capacities”.
Even for those not going to the same lengths as Johnson, public opinion seems to be shifting. The prospect of injecting ourselves with weight-loss drugs, cosmetic treatments and, for a growing group of young men, steroids, no longer carries the stigma it once did. Supplements, vitamin drips and self-administered diagnostic tests have become normal.
D’Souza’s media strategy culminated with an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in June 2024. A former MMA commentator and avid Trump supporter who spreads far-fetched theories around aliens and alternative medicine, Rogan has cultivated an audience that is primed for D’Souza’s ideas. D’Souza beamed whenever he spoke about being on the podcast. It pushed public acceptance of performance-enhancing drugs even further, he said. Combat sports such as UFC and some professional ju-jitsu leagues had relaxed their policies. As far as he was concerned, the Enhanced Games had already won the argument.
Of course, there would still be resistance. For one thing, the whole concept of the Enhanced Games sounds incredibly dangerous. For another, how much difference could these drugs really make to elite athletes’ records? D’Souza referred to the prospect of an Enhanced athlete breaking Bolt’s 100-metre world record as “a paradigmatic shift in the history of humanity”. But if performance-enhancing drugs are already as prevalent as he suggested, the chance of shaving off even a fraction of a second anywhere looks slim.
Several experts in sports medicine said that even at high doses, which quickly become dangerous, performance-enhancing drugs are, for the most part, training drugs. In other words, they cannot override an athlete’s natural abilities. In order to sign up to break records in the first place, elite athletes would have to be willing to make a massive, likely irreversible, change in their careers. Going back to mainstream sport afterwards would essentially be impossible.
In early 2024, D’Souza asked Christina Smith, a Canadian Olympian who had competed in bobsleigh during the 2002 Games, to help recruit athletes. Smith has a warm, earthy vibe. She described bobsledding as a particularly messy sport, and said her Olympic experience was defined by an intense anxiety around tainted supplements. She had introduced a number of naturopathic medicines into her training regime, which raised eyebrows among Olympic officials, although there was never any evidence of wrongdoing. She said she’d found the anti-doping testing intrusive and punitive. “I was beating myself up over it because I was so emotional,” she told me on a tearful video call. “We want to give athletes the freedom to explore themselves, their bodies. My body, my choice.”
Smith is part of the odd coalition forming in support of the Enhanced Games. Another supporter was Dr Michael Sagner, who had been part of the project since its early days as a member of the Enhanced Games’ “Medical and Scientific Commission”. He was a personal doctor for one of the investors, he told me, though he would not say which. Along with a posting at King’s College London, Sagner runs the Sarena Clinic on Harley Street in London and travels frequently to treat his ultra-wealthy patients with sports medicine interventions geared towards longevity. With his faint German accent and classically tailored suit, he invokes the old-world image of a private doctor as confidant and adviser.
The tastes of the ultra-wealthy have changed over the years, Sagner told me, when we met in the opulent lobby of The Landmark hotel in London. “Fifteen years ago, being obese with a cigar and a Negroni was the thing.” Since then, performance-enhancing drugs have become wildly popular among his clientele, he said. “ We suddenly saw a high-net-worth individual who wanted to look good.”
The drugs at Sagner’s disposal now are mainly hormone replacement therapies. That was where the Enhanced Games could prove beneficial. While conventional hormone therapies benefit ageing patients, Sagner said that stigma and legal constraints have prevented reliable research that would make more cutting-edge drugs safe to prescribe. In fact, he said, he often comes across those types of drugs in the blood-work and biomarkers of wealthy patients who have made use of underground labs. These clinics, he explained, exist in legal grey areas and have become more professional in recent years.
Whereas Sagner has a few dozen drugs at his disposal, underground clinics may have access to a hundred kinds of synthetic hormones and peptides, a short chain of amino acids used in some anti-ageing medications. There’s no way of knowing how harmful, or effective, they may be. “We don’t have any data,” Sagner said. “Athletes say ‘I drink this and I feel this,’ ‘I take that and I grow muscle.’ It’s all a big black box.”
The Enhanced Games, he thought, could accelerate scientific and medical knowledge around these more powerful treatments. The ability to study athletes taking them in a controlled setting is a tantalising prospect. New, experimental treatments could find their way to market. “This could be a serious breakthrough,” Sagner said. Several scientists I spoke to agreed with Sagner’s general premise, but expressed doubt about whether studying top athletes using performance-enhancing drugs would lead to useful scientific advancements.
Sagner’s initial enthusiasm for the Games quickly ran into reality. It started with the promotional text on the website, which Sagner said seemed to have been dialled up to be as inflammatory as possible. “It felt like somebody was completely drunk and writing this copy,” he told me. “Anybody with two brain cells knows that even if you want to provoke, this doesn’t make any sense.”
For Sagner, all this mattered because it put at risk the prospect of collaboration with the only people who could bring these drugs to the masses. The pharmaceutical industry would be vital for development of new, cutting-edge drugs. “I’m not anti-establishment,” he said. “My reputation is at stake.” Sagner had arranged a meeting between D’Souza and Kim Wolff, a colleague at King’s College London who runs the only UK laboratory accredited for sports testing by the Wada. Despite his confrontational attitude towards the anti-doping community, D’Souza had in fact approached Wada as a potential collaborator. “It took me forever to convince the anti-doping people [to meet],” Sagner said. “And then he made some outrageous claims online and they cancelled the meeting.”
D’Souza said he didn’t know which claims Sagner was referring to. “When legacy institutions feel threatened, they often respond with dismissal and avoidance rather than engaging in constructive dialogue,” he added. Sagner remains involved with the Enhanced Games.
Sagner was not the only critical voice. David Gems, a professor at University College London and a renowned expert in the science of ageing, had attended the House of Lords event and was not impressed. “It had a second-hand car salesman quality,” he said. Gems confessed that his views on ageing research were at odds with many in the worlds of tech and investment. “I’m puzzled by this great optimism in the private sector.”
In February 2024, the International Olympic Committee and Wada released a joint statement condemning the Enhanced Games, the Biden White House followed with its own shortly after. As the months rolled by, D’Souza’s project seemed to be spinning its wheels. The plan for a documentary had been quietly shelved. The Paris Olympics came and went. Large-scale athlete announcements never materialised. All D’Souza had was his sabre-rattling.
Donald Trump’s return could well be the Games’ saving grace. Rogan, who has repeatedly mentioned the Games on his podcast, is said to have the president’s ear. D’Souza considers the new health secretary, RFK Jr, an ally: “He made it very clear about what his priorities are, and human enhancement is on that list,” he said. Thiel, who has invested in a number of longevity start-ups, has a sizeable influence in the White House. “It’s the Thiel administration in some ways,” D’Souza said when I spoke to him in early December. “We’re very proud of that. We’re pleased that our team is in power.”
Silicon Valley’s rightward turn, as well as the masculinist, anti-PC agenda of figures like Rogan and Trump Jr, are all good signs for the Games. But there are still tensions. “RFK has said that he wants to ban pharma advertising,” D’Souza said. “What’s concerning for us is that might be a major driver of our television revenues.” (D’Souza said that nevertheless he supported Kennedy’s proposals to curtail the pharma industry. The department of health did not respond to a request for comment.) A month after Trump’s re-election, the Enhanced Games announced cocaine and heroin would no longer be allowed during competition. (“I was disappointed. I realised this wasn’t what I thought it was,” Carl Hart, the drug use expert, said.) And despite the Enhanced Games’ early enthusiasm on the topic of transgender athletes, D’Souza said the Games would abide by the Trump administration’s ban on transgender athletes competing in female sporting events.
The most coherent part of the Enhanced Games agenda remains its emphasis on the potential profits to be reaped from commercialised doping. Christian Angermayer, the biotech investor who also runs an events company in Germany, is more involved in the Games than any of the other investors, and has taken on the title of co-founder. Angermayer is a muscular, perfectly coiffed, disarmingly sweet man, who is ecstatic about the second Trump administration. He helped D’Souza with the first round of fundraising and began conversations with streaming services and advertisers.
Angermayer sees the Games as serving a similar function to Saudi Arabia’s $1bn-per-year project to combat ageing, the Hevolution Foundation, and the United Arab Emirates’ well-funded public push for longevity research. He envisioned spectators tracking athletes through wearable tech, in a venue like the Las Vegas Sphere, to a score by Hans Zimmer.
The spectacle, he said, would spur a free market race to deregulate, with countries changing their restrictive laws in order to attract athletes. “This is happening already today. For example, Thailand and India are the most loose countries . . . so athletes will travel there.”
He expects drug use will trickle down to the average viewers of the Games, who will be more inclined to demand radical treatments from their doctors. Fundamentally, he sees his role as pushing a more “positive vision”. That includes what the Games could offer to young people, namely a more open and transparent approach to bodily enhancement.
According to Angermayer, D’Souza was the right flag-bearer for this quixotic movement. Referring to The Velvet Rage, a mid-2000s pop psychology book about gay men growing up in a straight world, Angermayer described D’Souza as someone whose drive and willingness to challenge the status quo was fuelled by his status as an outsider. “I think that’s what Aron has,” he said, “this desire to be an overachiever.” For his part, D’Souza said he identified more closely with another pop psychology book about ambition and homosexuality: The Best Little Boy in the World by Andrew Tobias.
In August 2024, D’Souza travelled to Aarhus in Denmark for an anti-doping conference, the kind of dull, academic event he hoped would win him favour with serious scientists. The event was co-founded by Verner Møller, a sports scientist and a critic of the current anti-doping regime, who said the idea of an international Olympic-style competition where performance-enhancing drugs were openly permitted had long been a running joke in the field. It was a joke made manifest by the plan for the Enhanced Games.
D’Souza delivered one of two keynote speeches. The other was given by Ines Geipel, a survivor of the doping programme used by East Germany to ensure Olympic success in the 1970s and ’80s, with devastating health effects for many. On stage, D’Souza attempted to charm the audience, but when the time came for questions, a University of Texas at Austin professor named John Hoberman plunged into a searing critique. A senior figure in the world of doping research, Hoberman is the author of several books about the history of steroids. He described D’Souza’s idea that drugs would lead to better performance as “very simplistic” and said that D’Souza was “very shallow on the scientific end”. Hoberman was most exercised by D’Souza’s links to Thiel and Trump. He finished with a personal appeal to D’Souza. “I think you would be wise to call this off now so that you don’t experience the embarrassment of having this thing fall apart on you.”
D’Souza disputed Hoberman’s claims and accused him of having an “ideological bias”. “ There are some people out there who aspire to be Homo sapiens,” he said. “They aspire to live, suffer, age and die. But I believe that through technology and science, we can overcome this . . . And I know some people disagree with that. It’s their right. It’s Professor Hoberman’s right to age and die.”
At that moment, the day might have looked like becoming an unmitigated disaster for the Enhanced Games. But the old guard of doping research weren’t the only people in the room. And when D’Souza stepped offstage, said Møller, he was “swarmed” by students, all asking questions about his brash, well-funded approach to a reform of the anti-doping system. “They couldn’t help themselves.”
Josh Gabert-Doyon is an audio producer at the FT
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