So what are the Enhanced Games?

Picture the Olympics, but with the rulebook on performance enhancing drugs tossed out the window. That, more or less, is the Enhanced Games, held in Las Vegas from May 21 to 24, 2026. It is a new kind of athletic competition where athletes are allowed to use performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) and technologies that are banned in normal sports.

Anti doping authorities around the world have condemned it loudly, and the whole thing has kicked off a fierce debate. A team of scientists, working on a review of doping published by Inserm (a major French medical research organization), dug into the Enhanced Games: where the idea came from, what it actually involves, and the thorny ethical questions it raises.

Where did this idea come from?

The Enhanced Games draw on arguments made by Julian Savulescu, a professor of bioethics at the University of Oxford, who has argued that legalizing doping would make sports fairer and safer for athletes. The event itself is promoted by Aron D'Souza, an Australian lawyer and venture capitalist (someone who invests money in new business ventures).

D'Souza is no fan of the current system. He argues that organizations like the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) have failed to stop doping and that their rules actually harm athletes. His pitch: if you allow performance enhancing substances under medical supervision, sports become both safer and more thrilling.

Here is the clever rhetorical move. D'Souza borrows the language and values of the Olympic movement itself, especially the idea that sports should promote health. Rather than banning scientific progress, he says, athletes should get to benefit from it. He promises a "world class" medical and scientific committee to oversee everything. It sounds reasonable on the surface, which is exactly what makes it worth examining closely.

The science behind the claims, and where it falls apart

D'Souza's arguments are dressed up in scientific language, but experts have spotted serious holes.

For example, he claims that somewhere between 40% and 99% of athletes in traditional sports are already doping. (That is a suspiciously wide range, the statistical equivalent of saying "between a few and almost everyone.") To back it up, he leans on a controversial 2011 study conducted during a period of widespread state sponsored doping in Russia, when the athletics federation was run by a corrupt president. Using that study to make sweeping claims about all athletes everywhere is, to put it kindly, misleading.

D'Souza also relies on Savulescu's original arguments, which were built on theoretical economic models rather than real world data from actual athletes. In other words, the scientific foundation for the Enhanced Games is far shakier than the confident marketing suggests.

How performance enhancing drugs actually work, and what they cost you

To follow this debate, it helps to know what these drugs really do inside the body, and the risks that come with them.

Anabolic steroids (like testosterone) are synthetic versions of the male sex hormone. They boost protein synthesis inside muscle cells, so the body builds muscle faster and recovers more quickly from hard training. The price tag for long term use is steep: liver damage, heart disease, hormonal imbalances, mood disorders (the famous "roid rage"), and in teenagers, bones that stop growing too early.

Erythropoietin (EPO) is a hormone your kidneys normally make to tell your bone marrow to produce more red blood cells. More red blood cells means more oxygen delivered to muscles, which boosts endurance. The catch: artificially cranking up red blood cells thickens your blood, raising the risk of blood clots, stroke, and heart attack. Athletes have literally died in their sleep from blood that got too thick.

Human growth hormone (HGH) promotes muscle growth and fat breakdown. Side effects can include joint pain, insulin resistance, and a higher risk of certain cancers.

Stimulants (like amphetamines) increase alertness and crush fatigue by boosting brain chemicals called dopamine and norepinephrine. The downside: they can drive heart rate and blood pressure up to dangerous levels.

The organizers insist that medical supervision makes all of this safe. But the Inserm expert panel pointed out a glaring problem. The actual doping protocols used by Enhanced Games athletes are unknown and will probably never be made public. If nobody knows what doses athletes are taking, nobody can honestly evaluate the health consequences. And "we can't see the risks" is not the same as "there are no risks." A clinical study connected to the Enhanced Games claimed the drugs were safe, but journalists and scientists flagged major problems with the study's design, methods, and funding sources, all of which undermine its conclusions.

Follow the money (and the politics)

The Enhanced Games are not just a sports story. They are tangled up with a broader political and financial movement.

Among the early investors is Peter Thiel, one of the most prominent financial backers of the MAGA political movement and a close ally of former President Donald Trump. Other investors include Donald Trump Jr. The promoters have also highlighted ties to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who as Secretary of Health has supported programs like testosterone replacement therapy as part of anti aging initiatives.

The campaign to discredit WADA and the IOC lines up with a broader philosophy opposed to government regulation. Libertarian values (the belief that individuals should be free to make their own choices without interference) fit neatly with the idea that athletes should be allowed to take whatever they want, as long as they accept the risks.

But critics argue this is not really a story about personal freedom. The Enhanced Games are bankrolled by wealthy investors who smell a business opportunity. The real goal, critics say, is to build a new market for human enhancement products, using record breaking athletes as living, breathing billboards for substances and treatments that promise to boost performance and slow aging. The athletes are the advertisement.

The "trickle down" worry

One major concern is that the Enhanced Games could push younger athletes toward doping. If kids watch Enhanced Games competitors win fame and money with no anti doping rules in their way, some might be tempted to dope too, health risks be damned.

There's a famous (and frequently misquoted) piece of evidence here. A 1984 study by Goldman and colleagues claimed that half of elite athletes would take a drug guaranteeing success even if it would kill them within five years. Spooky number. But when other researchers redid the study with better methods, they found that only about 1% of athletes would take that deal. So the "athletes will do anything to win" myth turned out to be wildly overblown. Still, the worry about influencing impressionable young athletes is real, and researchers plan to study whether the Enhanced Games actually have that effect.

The ethics are trickier than they look

You might assume it's easy to slam the Enhanced Games as flat out unethical. But the philosophy gets surprisingly complicated.

Ethicists (philosophers who study right and wrong) use three main frameworks to weigh actions:

Deontological ethics focuses on duties and rights. Do the Enhanced Games violate anyone's rights? The athletes sign up voluntarily and are responsible for their own choices, so this argument is hard to make stick.

Utilitarian ethics weighs costs against benefits. Enhanced Games athletes are betting that the benefits (fame, money, records) outweigh the risks (health damage). But here's the uncomfortable part: this same cost benefit gamble already happens in traditional elite sports, where athletes routinely push their bodies to brutal extremes.

Virtue ethics (also called perfectionist or aretaic ethics) focuses on the pursuit of excellence. Enhanced Games athletes could argue they are chasing the absolute ceiling of human performance, which is its own kind of excellence.

So the traditional ethical playbook does not cleanly disqualify the Enhanced Games. Annoying, but true.

Two stronger arguments push back, though:

The spirit of sport. Sport is supposed to stand for values like fairness, generosity, and fair play, serving as a positive example far beyond professional athletics. The Enhanced Games, open only to a small elite with access to expensive drugs and medical teams, paint a picture of sport driven by money and technology instead of those broader values. That clashes head on with what WADA calls the "spirit of sport."

Environmental responsibility. The Enhanced Games demand enormous material resources and dream of going global. In an era when environmental responsibility matters more and more, that level of consumption raises real ethical concerns.

Did the critics accidentally help?

Here is a counterintuitive twist. Some experts suggest that anti doping officials made a strategic blunder by condemning the Enhanced Games so loudly. By treating the event as a massive threat, they may have handed it far more attention and media coverage than it ever earned on its own.

Sociologists have a term for this: moral panic, a reaction that balloons way out of proportion to the actual threat. By framing the Enhanced Games as a grave danger to sport, anti doping authorities may have made the event seem far more important than it really is. Sometimes the loudest way to fight something is the surest way to make it famous.

Instead, critics argue, anti doping organizations could have used this moment to have honest conversations about hard questions that already exist in traditional sports. How far should athletes push their bodies? Are the current anti doping rules actually fair? How do you balance athletes' privacy and autonomy against the need for drug testing? And what about the environmental footprint of giant sporting events?

The bottom line: The Enhanced Games raise real and important questions, and not only about doping. They prod at the future of sports, the limits of human performance, the role of money in athletics, and how society should think about using science and technology to upgrade the human body. Those questions deserve serious, clear eyed discussion, not just outrage that risks turning a sideshow into the main event.

This article is for general education and isn't medical or sports-medicine advice. Anabolic steroid use carries real, documented health risks — cardiovascular events, liver damage, hormonal shutdown that can affect fertility for years, mood disorders, and (in adolescents) stunted growth. If you're using or considering using performance-enhancing substances, the cluster's addictions, fertility, gynecomastia, and how-you-see-yourself guides cover the harm-reduction and treatment territory in depth. If you've been using AAS and want to stop, working with a clinician matters — abrupt cessation can cause its own problems, and proper recovery protocols exist. The Enhanced Games debate is real, but the biology underneath isn't optional: doping carries health costs regardless of who's regulating it.