An ‘enhanced’ version of the Olympics may happen. Should it?

NEW YORK – On a recent morning this fall, Aron D’Souza was at home in London expecting a long-anticipated delivery – a vintage set of the “Great Books of the Western World”, a collection with over 50 volumes of philosophy, history and literature published in the 1950s by Encyclopaedia Britannica, including “Faust”, Freud’s “On Narcissism” and “The Hippocratic Oath”.

“It’s like 200 kilos’ worth of books,” D’Souza said in a video call. “This is now my task over the next decade, to read all of these books.”

“The Hippocratic Oath”, which is a guide to ethical standards in medicine, should be an interesting one for D’Souza.

In the summer of 2023, D’Souza shocked the sports world with an announcement that he was creating an event called the Enhanced Games, which he said would be a far-ranging athletic competition seeking to challenge the Olympics by allowing participants to use a variety of banned substances, including performance-enhancing drugs.

Reactions after the announcement were overwhelmingly negative.

Critics, including representatives from anti-doping agencies and sports commissions, called the concept a “clown show” and said it was “dangerous and irresponsible”, while the International Olympic Committee (IOC) told multiple news outlets that the Enhanced Games did not “merit any comment”.

Since then, the furore over the Games has largely settled down, even if the core question about whether they should exist still remains. It is now up to D’Souza and his team to actually plan them.

The Three Pillars of Planning

Much remains to be done for the Enhanced Games to become a reality.

D’Souza, 39, said that he was focused on “three major pillars” of planning – determining health protocols and working with pertinent government regulators, finding an appropriate venue (or venues) for the events and recruiting athletes.

To that end, he has been busy hiring experts in sports medicine and event planning, and he said that he had a tremendous amount of faith in his team because “literally the best people in the world are coming to work for us”.

D’Souza displays a level of confidence in the success of the Enhanced Games that verges on presumptuous. Although the events are still in the early stages of planning, he had “no doubt that the Enhanced Games will be one of the most-watched sporting events in history” and that they would “capture the global imagination”.

He sees the Games as a reflection of the world’s appetite for athletic excellence unfettered by the usual regulations. He believes people are so interested in what enhanced athletes are capable of that “a billion people would watch it even if it was just eight guys running around a track”.

Of course, his plans are much grander than that.

Rick Adams, a former member of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee who is the senior vice-president for games delivery at the Enhanced Games, said that D’Souza had given him “a blank slate to show sport in ways that it’s never been seen – places that it’s never happened, formats that are non-traditional”.

D’Souza said that he and his team had not yet settled on an initial host city for the Games – which he hopes will kick off in 2025 – but that he was undergoing “a bidding process with several cities”.

As these plans are firmed up and as athletes are recruited, he said, the company will plan an elaborate presentation for public viewing. “We want to say, ‘Here we are, and we’ve changed the world’,” he said.

A Doping Wild West?

Creating an event that tolerates any level of performance-enhancing drugs will have to come in the face of significant pushback. The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) had said that it condemned the Enhanced Games on several fronts.

First, it said that “clearly this event would jeopardise” the health and well-being of athletes “by promoting the use of powerful substances and methods that should only be prescribed, if at all, for specific therapeutic needs and under the supervision of medical professionals”.

Second, “the beauty and popularity of sport is based on the ideal of clean and fair competition”, which means the Enhanced Games would threaten to compromise “the integrity of legitimate sport”.

But Wada’s position as the arbiter of athletic integrity has never been more tenuous.

A recent investigation by The New York Times revealed that problems with the organisation’s databases had caused it to lose track of hundreds of test results from athletes who had been accused of doping before competing in the Paris Olympics this summer.

Meanwhile, D’Souza has repeatedly framed the Enhanced Games as a righteous force disrupting a corrupt and archaic industry. He described the IOC during a video interview as a “corrupt bureaucracy” and Wada’s regulations as outdated and “highly subjective”.

“It’s not about safety, and it’s not about science,” he said. “The Olympics are very resistant to cultural and technological change.”

Critics maintain, however, that this resistance to change is in fact a bulwark against recklessness.

Brent J. Nowicki, the executive director of World Aquatics and a former managing counsel and head of the anti-doping division at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, said that the Enhanced Games was “a farce, and an extremely dangerous one”, a hardline attitude shared by many of the event’s detractors.

“My view is that anybody who takes part in this event should never be allowed to be involved in any sport ever again,” he said in an e-mail. “It cuts against everything that we are trying to prevent. I am uncomfortable giving the event any publicity, as our young athletes need role models who are clean from doping.”

Kieren Perkins, a four-time Olympic medallist who now serves as CEO of the Australian Sports Commission, went further when speaking at a conference in March, saying: “Someone will die if we allow that sort of environment to continue to prosper and flourish.”

D’Souza contended that despite the widespread belief among critics that the Games would be a doping Wild West, there would be stringent rules around what athletes could and could not consume.

Dan Turner, the organisation’s director for athlete safety and performance, said that it was “absolutely not the case” that anything was acceptable, though the exact list of banned substances is still in development. He also said that drugs would be used only with medical supervision.

The Ageing Olympian

“I think people straight away link this in their minds to a bodybuilding competition,” said James Magnussen, a former Olympic swimmer who has signed on to compete at the inaugural edition of the Enhanced Games.

“I’m looking to increase my recovery, allow me to train more frequently and increase my bone, joint and ligament health. When I get on the blocks for the 50-metre freestyle, I’m not going to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

A three-time Olympic medallist who has not competed internationally since 2018, Magnussen, 33, said that he agreed to participate in the Enhanced Games partly because he was no longer able to perform at his physical peak naturally, but performance-enhancing drugs could theoretically change that – perhaps enough to break a world record.

He sees the event as the future of athletics.

“I hope in the fullness of time that I’m seen as somewhat of a pioneer for sport,” he said. “People will look back on this and say: ‘Remember how opposed we were to the Enhanced Games? It sounded dangerous, but now we know it’s a great opportunity for athletes to extend their careers and get paid more’.”

It is D’Souza’s dream that if one of his athletes is able to break a world record, it is someone age 40 or older, perhaps an athlete who “comes back after five or 10 years of retirement, gets enhanced and breaks the record”, he said.

“That is where the paradigm shift happens,” he added. “That’s where I think we’ll make the biggest cultural change in this world. Could a 50-year-old do it? Could a 60-year-old? At some point during my stewardship of this, I hope that a 65-year-old can run faster than the fastest natural human.”

In this way, the Enhanced Games are about pushing the boundaries of human potential, about defying ageing, about “what it means to be human in a world where there are superhumans among us”. NYTIMES