Olympics on steroids: the millionaire behind the Enhanced Games

Aron D’Souza likes to celebrate the new year with Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist billionaire who is good friends with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. ‘Before Peter had kids, we’d go on these holidays around the world. Small group of us. Gay, tech, venture capital, founder-types,’ says D’Souza, an Australian businessman. ‘It’s quite a close-knit little community.’ Lately, because of the kids, they’ve partied at Thiel’s place, an $18 million compound on a man-made island off Miami’s turquoise coast. In December 2022, days before Thiel’s annual party, D’Souza came up with the idea of an ‘Enhanced Games’. The Olympics – but all the athletes dope.

‘That’s what I do over Christmas, when no one else is working,’ D’Souza says. ‘I focus on building a new institution.’ He went to the party and told Thiel his idea. ‘He just said: “Oh, that’s very cool.”’ In March this year D’Souza announced that Thiel had invested millions in the project. ‘Peter loves it, right?’ D’Souza says. ‘He constantly sends me text messages and things.’

The first games will happen next year, D’Souza says at a bar at the Connaught hotel in London. There’ll be no Olympic park; no live audience. Instead, the event will be livestreamed from existing tracks and sport centres across the world because it’s cheaper. The roster of athletes is still to be announced, but James Magnussen, an Australian former Olympic swimmer, says he’ll be competing. ‘We’re going to announce the whole, basically, cast, at one time. So think of it like a media production,’ D’Souza says. Aside from swimming, there will be athletics, gymnastics, weightlifting and combat sports. A list of acceptable drugs still needs to be agreed. A total free-for-all might risk athletes taking it too far, and could prove fatal.