The Enhanced Games—a kind of Olympics for athletes who are doping—today announced the date and venue for its first competition: May 21-24, 2026, at Resorts World Las Vegas.
Athletes competing in the event will be allowed to take performance-enhancing drugs like testosterone and anabolic steroids that are usually banned from elite competition, provided they are legal, prescribed by a doctor, and taken at safe levels.
The inaugural Enhanced Games will have three main sports: swimming (50m and 100m freestyle, and 50m and 100m butterfly), track (100m sprint, 110m/100m hurdles, and 60m dash), and weightlifting (snatch, clean and jerk). Rather than splitting men and women into different categories, athletes will be categorized based on their chromosomes: There will be an XX and an XY category for each event.
Gkolomeev swam the 50-meter freestyle in 20.89 seconds at a pool in North Carolina, breaking a 16-year-old record.
Courtesy of Paradigm
There will be up to $500,000 in prize money on offer for each event, with $250,000 for the winner, and a bonus of $1,000,000 for anyone who breaks the 100m sprint of the 50m freestyle world record. (Other world record breakers will get a bonus of $250,000.) At a glitzy press conference announcing the details of the first event, organizers also revealed that the Games had helped an “enhanced athlete” break two long-standing 50m freestyle world records in swimming.
Kristian Gkolomeev, a 31-year-old Greek-Bulgarian swimmer who came fifth in the 50m freestyle at the Olympic Games in Paris, started his enhancement program in early February. Toward the end of that month, at a pool in Greensboro, North Carolina, he broke César Cielo’s 50-meter freestyle world record of 20.91 seconds, which had stood for 16 years. Gkolomeev swam 0.02 seconds faster. In April, he broke Caeleb Dressel’s 2019 so-called textile world record—done without wearing a speed suit—of 21.04 seconds. He swam 0.01 seconds faster.
Courtesy of Paradigm
“This isn’t just about breaking records,” said Gkolomeev in a press release. “It’s about breaking limits. The Enhanced Games gave me the resources and the team to unlock a new level of performance—and now the whole world can see what’s possible.”
The Enhanced Games are the brainchild of Aron D’Souza, a lawyer and investor who has previously been linked to the billionaire Peter Thiel. Other high-profile investors include Balaji Srinivisan, German biotech billionaire Christian Angermayer (also a cofounder of the Games), and 1789 Capital, Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, which bought in during a multimillion-dollar Series B round in February.
Enhanced Games founder Aron D’Souza
Courtesy of Paradigm
D’Souza has garnered swaths of media attention for his controversial idea, which has been roundly criticized by sporting bodies like the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency. For his part, D’Souza has accused the IOC of mistreating athletes by not paying them fairly while raking in huge profits. He says the goal of the Enhanced Games is to disrupt the world of sport—if the Olympics is opera, the Enhanced Games are a Taylor Swift concert—and to open up research possibilities for banned substances which have been tainted by association with state-sponsored doping regimes in the 1980s and 1990s.
At the same event, the Enhanced Games also announced a direct-to-consumer business, Enhanced Performance Products, which will launch this summer and will give customers “guaranteed access to performance enhancement science similar to the same protocols trusted by the world’s fastest athletes like Kristian Gkolomeev.”
