The Enhanced Games wants to take on the Olympics by embracing steroids and athlete pay. Meet the founder.
iStock; Rebecca Zisser/BI
Sometime in 2022, while working out at an Equinox gym in Miami, Aron D'Souza, a tech founder, overheard gymgoers shamelessly talking about juicing and taking "tren," short for trenbolone, an anabolic steroid.
Using steroids — Schedule 3 drugs in the US — without a prescription is illegal but not uncommon. One study estimated that 3 million to 4 million Americans used anabolic-androgenic steroids for athletic or cosmetic purposes.
So when people told D'Souza they were indeed on steroids, he had an idea: Why don't I put all these juiced-up folks under one roof and start my own Olympics-style event?
D'Souza knew people on social media often described those who took performance-enhancing drugs as "enhanced." He named his event accordingly: the Enhanced Games.
The competition, introduced last June as the "first international sporting event without drug testing," brings up legal quandaries around the drugs and is likely to face pushback from the public and athletes who believe that doping compromises the integrity of sports.
In the Enhanced Games, D'Souza said, athletes would be able to use performance-enhancing drugs under "clinical supervision" as they compete and would be paid for their participation with a base salary and a prize pool ranging from seven to potentially nine figures.
While the Olympics brought in almost $8 billion in revenue from 2017 to 2021, the International Olympic Committee doesn't pay participating athletes. Several countries pay bonuses to medal winners, and high-profile athletes may get brand deals and sponsorships, but many Olympic athletes live quiet lives. Some medalists have said they're homeless.
D'Souza told Business Insider he believes this gives him the moral high ground.
He described the Olympics as "corrupt," run by a cabal of "blood-sucking bureaucrats who earn millions of dollars a year" and "fly around the world in private jets." He specifically called out Thomas Bach, the president of the IOC.
"The IOC president literally lives in a palace, and the athletes earn nothing," D'Souza said. "So if you want an Olympic gold medal, sure, go and do it, but get financially exploited while you're at it."
While Bach, a former foil fencer for West Germany's Olympic team, is considered a volunteer for the nonprofit IOC, the organization said in its 2022 annual report that the IOC president received an annual "indemnity" payment of 275,000 euros. He also receives free accommodation at the Lausanne Palace, a luxury hotel in Switzerland.
Bach's role is to maintain the Olympics' relevancy in the world, but his 11-year tenure as president has not been without controversy. His critics have described him as an autocrat because of his singular influence on the games and condemned his relationships with dictators. In 2021, The New York Times called him "one of the most powerful people in global sports."
When reached for comment regarding D'Souza's statements, an IOC spokesperson said in an email to Business Insider, "The idea does not merit any comment."
D'Souza dismissed the IOC's statement. "I'm sure when Uber launched, the taxi monopoly said the same thing," he said.
Courtesy Enhanced Games
The Enhanced Games announced on January 31, eight months after its unveiling, that the project had received financial backing from venture capitalists including Christian Angermayer, the founder of Apeiron Investment Group; Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase's former chief technology officer; and, notably, the former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, a close associate of D'Souza's.
Angermayer, whom D'Souza described as deeply committed to the project, told Business Insider that his investment in and cofounding of the Enhanced Games was a "natural extension" of his work in the "field of human enhancement." Apeiron's investments heavily focus on biopharma, psychedelics, and human longevity.
"I expect to see the Enhanced Games grow into an unmissable event series, with world records regularly broken, athletes performing at new peaks, and a huge community of devoted fans around the world," he wrote in an email to BI.
Srinivasan did not respond to a request for comment.
An Oxford alum with a doctorate in jurisprudence from the University of Melbourne, D'Souza describes himself as an "academic lawyer" and venture capitalist who manages his own capital "into a variety of portfolio companies."
But D'Souza gained notoriety for quietly spearheading the takedown of Gawker Media in 2016, sparking what would become a fruitful relationship with Thiel.
Thiel bankrolled Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the media organization alleging invasion of privacy — but behind the scenes, D'Souza provided the blueprint for the billionaire's plans, BuzzFeed News reported in 2018.
"I developed the whole strategy for the Gawker lawsuit," D'Souza told BI.
The BuzzFeed News report said D'Souza approached the billionaire VC around 2011 with the idea to either "pay someone or create a company to hire lawyers to go after Gawker."
He enlisted the help of an entertainment lawyer named Charles Harder, who would file the lawsuit on Hogan's behalf and then represent the wrestler under a law firm he founded in 2013, Harder Mirell & Abrams, which now operates as Harder Stonerock.
A source told BuzzFeed News that Hogan's lawyers didn't know that Thiel funded the wrestler's lawsuit. The report described sources as saying Thiel kept his role under wraps by using D'Souza as a middleman who'd take the money and meet with Hogan's attorneys.
The lawsuit was settled for about $31 million, and Gawker went bankrupt. The lawsuit's success may have proved financially beneficial for D'Souza.
In 2015, D'Souza founded Sargon Capital, a financial-services company his website says is "for the pensions and superannuation industry." Two years later, the Australian Financial Review reported that Sargon claimed in a pitch deck for investors that it had secured millions of dollars in backing from none other than Thiel.
"Peter and I are good friends, and we have worked together on many projects," D'Souza said.
D'Souza suggested he received funding for the Enhanced Games in the "single-digit millions" but declined to specify the amount. He added that other VCs had floated term sheets — nonbinding agreements that express serious interest in investment — for more backing. He declined to share which VCs had shared term sheets, saying they're "confidential."
Thiel hasn't publicly said why he's interested in the Enhanced Games. D'Souza described all the investors as "willing to go against the grain." Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.
D'Souza told BI that none of the athletes would be expected to take performance-enhancing drugs. The competition, he said, is coming from a "very freedom-first libertarian attitude" in which "everyone is entitled to healthcare privacy."
D'Souza contrasted his games with countries that mandated COVID-19 vaccination for certain groups, suggesting that people who declined to get vaccinated were wrongly "excluded from society." And he likened the games to the abortion-rights movement and its mantra "My body, my choice."
"No one, no government, no sports federation should be telling individuals what they have to do with their own bodies," he said.
So far, it's unclear what kind of talent Enhanced Games will attract. D'Souza said his team was in talks with "several Olympic medalists whom we're going to guarantee minimums to come and compete on our side."
James Magnussen, an Australian swimmer and Olympic gold medalist, recently said on a podcast that he'd come out of retirement and "juice to the gills" if the Enhanced Games put up a $1 million prize for the 50-meter freestyle.
D'Souza told BI his team was "very excited to have James involved" and later said he'd write Magnussen a million-dollar check if he broke the race's world record.
The monetization plans he described were broad but vague; he told BI the games would monetize through "traditional sports rights: broadcasting, sponsorship, and ticket sales."
Angermayer told BI in an email that he expected the Enhanced Games to become a "significant and profitable revenue generator that pays those who compete fairly, and, possibly most importantly, act as a catalyst for extending the evident benefits of human enhancement science to the wider population."
D'Souza also said he'd been approached in commercial negotiations to host the games at several professional-team stadiums, removing the need to spend billions of dollars to build elaborate stadiums as some Olympic host cities have done. He didn't specify which stadiums had been considered.
The founder envisions hosting popular sports that are already featured at the Olympics — such as aquatics, athletics, gymnastics, and weightlifting — as well as some that aren't, such as mixed martial arts.
"The UFC has done an amazing job of pushing boundaries about performance enhancements," D'Souza said, pointing to the MMA promoter's split last year with the US Anti-Doping Agency.
The UFC still conducts drug tests through its own program, but D'Souza said he felt the breakup was a "very public condemnation" of the broader World Anti-Doping Agency.
The UFC has said its new anti-doping program enlists Drug Free Sport International to obtain "no-notice sample collections" from athletes. That organization's partnerships include the NFL, the NBA, and MLB.
D'Souza said Enhanced Games would closely examine its athletes, but for entirely different purposes.
He described drug testing at the Olympics as about fairness of competition, not athlete safety. He said that at the Enhanced Games, athletes would get comprehensive health checkups to monitor the effects of "whatever enhancement protocols" they're on and ensure they're fit to compete.
The International Testing Agency, an IOC affiliate that administers anti-doping programs, pushed back on some of D'Souza's claims and his proposal.
In an email to BI, Marta Nawrocka, a spokesperson for the ITA, listed risks that could come with an event that promotes drug enhancements.
"It encourages risky behavior and ignores the clear scientific evidence that doping is clearly harmful to the athlete's body," she wrote. "It ignores the impact that such an event could have on young people and children, encouraging them to prioritize results over their health, potentially leading to a culture of doping that goes beyond professional sport. It also ignores that athletes with greater financial resources or access to better doping techniques would have an unfair advantage over those who cannot afford or do not have access to such improvements."
She added, "There are many more arguments against an event that allows and encourages doping."
Health experts told BI's Gabby Landsverk in 2022 that using performance-enhancing drugs like steroids could come with a litany of health risks — including hair loss, erectile dysfunction, liver damage, and heart disease — that can increase as an athlete ages.
The Enhanced Games could also face legal hurdles, especially if the games are based in the US, where anabolic steroids are classified as Schedule 3 drugs and illegal to use without a prescription.
Jim Walden, the lawyer for Grigory Rodchenkov, the whistleblower who led the state-sponsored doping program in Russia, told CNN last year that the Enhanced Games seemed to be "advertising their disregard of the law" on its website.
"They wrap themselves up in what I will call the cloak of legitimacy by using phrases like body autonomy and coming out as an enhanced athlete," he told the outlet. "I hope they're thinking hard about how they're going to pull this off in the world in which the FBI has a specific unit that is called the Sports and Gaming Initiative that's focusing on these very issues."
An FBI spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
When asked about legal issues, D'Souza said his team was looking at the "many opportunities and challenges in numerous jurisdictions."
He also suggested that some performance-enhancing drugs were "available under clinical supervision," pointing to synthetic testosterone, part of some gender-affirming hormone therapies. He added that anabolic steroids are legal in several countries.
In D'Souza's view, the challenge for getting the Enhanced Games off the ground isn't the critics; he insisted that most were just "bureaucrats who are earning big salaries" and are on the "gravy train." Instead, it's been funding.
With the recent round of VC investments, though, D'Souza said some investors who'd previously ignored him were circling back. The buzz on social media, he added, has been nonstop.
D'Souza said he planned to announce more details about the Enhanced Games this summer — right around the Paris Olympics.
"We see that as a major platform for us to highlight the moral superiority of our event," he said.
from Business Insider https://ift.tt/VbOFgiL
No comments