The inaugural Enhanced Games begin Sunday in Las Vegas, launching a competition built around a premise that upends mainstream sport: elite athletes will compete while using performance-enhancing drugs in track, weightlifting and swimming.
The event comes with $25 million in prize money, equal to about £18.6 million, and certain world records carry a $1 million bonus, or roughly £740,000. Organizers say the drugs used must be legal and approved by the Federal Drug Administration, and substances such as testosterone and human growth hormone are being encouraged and sold at the event.
The project was founded in 2023 by Aron D'Souza and Maximilian Martin and has drawn backing from Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr. Its first full schedule is intended to turn a long-running argument over doping in elite sport into a live competition, with the rules spelled out in advance rather than hidden behind testing protocols.
That transparency is part of how supporters defend the event. American sprinter Shania Collins said the athletes are being open from the outset, arguing, “We’re being up front and honest and transparent from the start,” and asking, “So how can you challenge our integrity when we’re forthright with the information?”
For critics, the problem is not honesty but the message. Travis Tygart, who has led some of the loudest opposition, said the answer is reforming the Olympic anti-doping system rather than normalizing drug use, saying, “You don’t have to be pressured or use drugs in order to be the best,” and warning, “We don’t want kids to have to say, ‘in order to win an Olympic medal, when I’m 18 or 20 years old, I have to inject myself every day in the rear end with a potentially dangerous drug.’”
The event has already drawn public rebukes from some sporting governing bodies, underscoring how sharply it sits outside the Olympic model it is trying to challenge. Health experts have also warned that anabolic steroids and growth hormones can cause strokes and cardiovascular damage, a risk that hangs over a competition where those substances are not a secret but part of the draw.
Hafthor Bjornsson, one of the best-known names entered, said he hopes to break his own deadlift record of 510 kg, or 1,124.4 pounds. That target captures the scale of the wager behind the Enhanced Games: if the event works, it could create a parallel market for spectacle, money and records. If it does not, Sunday’s debut may be remembered less for the lifting, sprinting and swimming than for the debate it forces back into the open.
