The Enhanced Games, big pharmaceutical and protecting sport

The Enhanced Games concedes one honest thing about elite sport… Performance enhancing substances have been gravitating in the grey zone for as long mere mortals aspire towards superhuman performance. The rest of this event is a pharmaceutical product launch, a political coalition, and a governance question that the existing custodians of global sport, for all the legitimate work they do, are not yet equipped to answer.

On 25 February 2025, in a pool in Greensboro, North Carolina, a 31-year-old Greek sprinter named Kristian Gkolomeev pushed off the wall and swam fifty meters of freestyle in 20.89 seconds. That is faster than any human being has ever officially swum the distance. World Aquatics, the global governing body for competitive swimming, will not put his name in the record book. Partly because he was on performance-enhancing drugs, and partly because he wore a full-body polyurethane suit, banned in regulated competition since 2010. He was paid one million US dollars for the swim by a private company, on the explicit understanding that he was pharmacologically enhanced at the time.

The company is Enhanced. The event is the Enhanced Games. Between 21 and 24 May 2026, at Resorts World in Las Vegas, it will hold its first competition: swimming, sprints, hurdles, and weightlifting. There is no drug testing. There is, in fact, the opposite of drug testing. It is a stated requirement that athletes be supervised on a program of pharmacological assistance. The prize purse is US$250,000 per event, with US$1 million bonuses for headline world records.

A lot of critical debate has already been had calling this dangerous, unethical, a circus. Travis Tygart, chief executive of the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), has called it “a dangerous clown show that puts profit over principle”. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have lined up to denounce it. World Aquatics has gone further: it has adopted a bylaw threatening lifetime bans from its events for anyone who participates in or supports the Enhanced Games.

All of that is defensible. None of it is wrong on its own terms. But almost all of it is fighting the wrong battle, because the Enhanced Games is not set up to be a sport story. It is a product launch, a political coalition, and a governance question, in that order. To make sense of it you have to read the funders and the corporate structure, not the swimmers… and to respond to it, sport’s existing governance bodies have to do something harder than denounce it. Let’s start with the part the Enhanced Games gets right, because there is one, and pretending otherwise concedes the ground before it has been argued.

Clean sport was never clean. Anyone who has spent ten minutes inside elite athletics, cycling, weightlifting, swimming or the major North American leagues knows this. East German state doping. The Russian state program. The cycling generations from Festina to Armstrong. Baseball’s steroid era. The NFL’s permanent shrug. Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUEs) that turn asthma medication into a competitive advantage. Hypoxic tents. Caffeine, ketones, hormone-tuned recovery. The endless creep of carbon-plate super-shoes that took minutes off the marathon record without anyone calling it excessive performance enhancement. The line between “training” and “doping” is regulatory, not biological. It always has been.

This is not, by the way, a failure unique to the IOC or to WADA. It is the underlying condition of an industry that has grown faster than any of its referees. WADA was set up in 1999 to fix a problem that the IOC could not solve alone, and to its credit it has built a global testing infrastructure that did not exist a generation ago, exposed the Russian state program, and tried to harmonise rules across more than 200 jurisdictions and dozens of sports. That is real work. The problem is not that WADA does nothing… the problem is that the line it is asked to police is moving every year, and the resources, governance independence and political backing required to keep that line credible have not kept pace. The Enhanced Games’ contribution is to remove the pretending. If the line is regulatory, draw a different line and admit the drugs are the point. That is the single honest move in the project. But most of what follows is a product launch.

In November 2025, Enhanced announced a SPAC merger with A Paradise Acquisition Corp, valuing the combined entity, Enhanced Group Inc., at roughly US$1.2 billion. A SPAC is a shell company that lists publicly with no business of its own, then merges with a private operating company to take it public faster than a traditional initial public offering. Shareholders approved the merger on 1 May 2026; the combined entity began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ENHA on 8 May 2026, alongside a US$40 million cash infusion and a wider funding push. In April 2026, before a single official race had been swum, Forbes ran the headline: “Pro-Doping Enhanced Games Raise $1.2 Billion Before A Single Race”. Sport does not normally raise that kind of capital before it has produced anything. Pharma does.

The consumer arm makes the point plainly. It is called Live Enhanced. It is a direct-to-consumer telehealth platform currently selling the peptide Sermorelin and a prescription-dose topical GHK-Cu copper-peptide cream. The publicly announced pipeline, keyed to anticipated US regulatory shifts on peptide compounding, includes Tesamorelin, CJC-1295, Ipamorelin, Thymosin Alpha-1, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for men and women, and what the marketing describes as “longevity compounds”. In April 2026, Enhanced’s co-founder and CEO Maximilian Martin told Benzinga that the company’s business model rests on a platform stack the swim meet is only one part of: “The brand attracts attention, the athletes provide real-world proof, the Games generate cultural relevance, and the IRB-approved dataset creates defensible clinical intelligence over time… the Enhanced Games makes this philosophy visible, while our DTC platform makes it accessible.” Benzinga framed it more bluntly in its headline: the performance-medicine platform, not the Games themselves, is the real prize. That is not a critic’s reading… it is the operator describing the business.

Read that way, the athletes are not, strictly athletes. They are credentialled endorsers of a pharmaceutical product: televised proof-of-concept for what the consumer arm intends to sell. A world record functions, in this economy, as an advertisement. It converts viewer attention into telehealth sign-ups. Ben Proud, the British 50-metre freestyle silver medallist from Paris 2024, is signed up. So is Fred Kerley, 2022 World Championship 100-metre gold medallist. These are serious athletes with serious careers, and the offer to them is also serious. The Olympic system pays most elite athletes very little, often nothing, and Enhanced is paying six-figure prizes to push off a wall or out of the blocks, while supervised on a stack. It therefore has to be noted that it is not a moral failure of the athletes. It is what happens when a sector has been underpaying its workforce for a century and somebody arrives with a chequebook. The Las Vegas weekend in May, in that frame, is closer to a televised launch event for a deregulated personalised-pharma platform than to a swim meet. The IPO is the cash-out; the subscriptions are the recurring revenue; the Games are the marketing channel.

Now look at who is paying for it. The interesting move is to read the list together. Peter Thiel is an early backer and has a long personal connection to the founder. Christian Angermayer, the German biotech investor behind Apeiron Investment Group, is co-founder; his other major bet is the psychedelics platform Atai Life Sciences. Balaji Srinivasan is also in. A former Coinbase chief technology officer and author of The Network State, an explicit project to build governance structures outside the nation-state. So are Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the Gemini founders, whose public record is consistently anti-gatekeeper in financial regulation. Khaled bin Alwaleed Al Saud, the Saudi prince, is in too, but unlike most recent Gulf sport investment this is private capitalattached to a private platform rather than nation-state branding. And in February 2025, Donald Trump Jr’s 1789 Capital co-led the Series B, importing the Make America Great Again (MAGA) cultural frame… WADA as woke gatekeeper, IOC as globalist, doping as bodily freedom. Bloomberg Law, not a publication that overheats, has called it “the ultimate MAGA event”.

Set aside the political aesthetics. Read together, the investors share three traits that matter. First, they are anti-institutional, by stated philosophy and revealed preference. Thiel has spent two decades arguing the major American institutions are decadent. Srinivasan has written a book arguing for exit from them. The Winklevosses treat regulators as the obstacle rather than the referee. 1789 Capital exists to fund the cultural rollback of the post-war institutional order. Second, they tend to treat regulation as gatekeeping rather than legitimate function. Not bad regulation in need of reform but regulation as such. WADA, in that frame, is not a flawed agency to be fixed but a category error. Third, they are repeatedly drawn to investments where bodies, longevity and enhancement are positioned as a deregulated market. Thiel funds the longevity foundations. Angermayer’s portfolio is biotech with a deliberately anti-establishment posture. Live Enhanced is the most overt expression of this. Whether one welcomes that worldview is a separate question. That it is the operative one. But it is worth noting that the IOC and WADA, as currently configured, were not designed to respond to it.

The operator running the vehicle is Aron D’Souza, an Australian-born, Oxford-trained lawyer. To understand the Enhanced Games it helps to understand what he did before it. In 2016, the wrestler Hulk Hogan (real name Terry Bollea) won a US$140 million judgment against the website Gawker in a Florida courtroom. The verdict drove Gawker Media into bankruptcy within months. What became public only later was that the suit had been bankrolled in secret by Peter Thiel as revenge for Gawker outing him a decade earlier, and that the strategist quietly running the legal-financial campaign on Thiel’s behalf, referred to in internal correspondence only as “Mr A”, was D’Souza. Gawker was not a sport story either. It was a governance story. A media institution was unwound not by being out-argued but by being out-litigated, with patient capital, by an operator who understood that you do not need to debate an institution if you can put pressure on its legal and financial foundations. D’Souza’s subsequent venture, an AI-driven media-accountability platform called Objection, he has described as designed to do at scale, with software, what Gawker took a decade and millions of dollars to do in court… to industrialise the playbook. The pattern is consistent. D’Souza does not present as a reformer of incumbent institutions. He builds parallel structures and lets the incumbents respond. The Enhanced Games is the same operating logic applied to a softer target.

Now why do I care to write about this? For context, I am what might be called a “sport purist”. I participate as an amateur for the pure joy of it, and admire as a spectator, the amazing ability of the human body and spirit to perform little miracles. Naïve..? Sure. But within that naivety I feel that sport is, structurally, a soft target. That is the part the existing custodians have not really reckoned with, and reckoning with it is hard. Begin with the workforce. Most elite athletes in Olympic disciplines are paid badly or not at all, have careers measured in single-digit years, and live with chronic injury. Offer them six figures and supervised pharmacology and a meaningful share of them will say yes. They are not villains for doing so.

Let’s move on to the regulator. WADA is, as I said earlier, doing real work… but it is also unloved by athletes, opaque to most of the public, repeatedly embarrassed by state-level cases it failed to catch in time, and structurally compromised by its funding model, which depends on the IOC and on national governments whose interests it is sometimes supposed to push back against. It is not, as institutions go, universally considered to be effective and legitimate. Defending it on principle, in front of athletes who feel under-paid and over-tested, is a hard sell. This extends to the wider public. Two decades of doping scandals have produced a cynicism in which “everyone is on something anyway” is the default in most pubs and most podcasts. The Enhanced Games does not need the public to agree with it. It needs the public to shrug.

And this is where it becomes political. “Body freedom” is one of the few constructs that fits in both the left and right side of political wiring of the brain. The right hears deregulation and personal liberty, the left hears bodily autonomy. The IOC, by contrast, is what it has long been since inception. It is a Swiss-registered, predominantly European-led custodian of a 19th-century model, with a governance structure that still reflects the aristocratic and old-world power-broking it was founded in. The IOC has modernised at the edges. For example, there are more women on the executive board, more athletes on commissions, more transparency reports than there used to be.  However, at the centre of gravity remains a small, self-co-opting body of insiders, and the host-city economics have bankrupted enough cities to make most of the public sceptical. It is hard to identify the constituency that loves it.

So, what is the real prize that Maximilian Martin openly boasts about? Sport remains one of the last institutions that produces global, broadly legitimate, broadly trusted public spectacle. Sport itself is a language universally understood crossing cultural boundaries that no other language can cross as easily. The opening ceremony of the Olympics is one of the few moments in the calendar when much of the planet is briefly looking at the same thing and broadly agreeing it means something. Erode the legitimacy of that institution and you have shifted the legitimacy of the institutional order it sits within. That is the wider political stake. Not the swim meet.

The obvious comparison is LIV Golf, and it is worth being precise about why the comparison both does and does not hold. LIV was, and largely still is, a single-state project: a Saudi sovereign-wealth bet on disrupting the PGA Tour. Most recently it seems that this project is going to fail as the Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF is ceasing its investment in LIV Golf. A single state, however rich, can be outwaited by an incumbent that knows how to play time and politics. But as I have argued elsewhere, LIV showed that disruption was possible. It also showed how hard it is to finish the job from one direction alone.

Enhanced is a different animal. It is a coalition vehicle. It is funded by a mix of private venture capital, ideologically committed individual investors, public-market shareholder capital after the NYSE listing, and a consumer-pharma business that lives off recurring revenue independent of whether the swim meet is a hit. That stack gives it many more options than LIV ever had. It can lose money on the Games for years and still pay its bills. It can pivot the consumer arm if regulation tightens in one jurisdiction. It can run the spectacle as a marketing line-item rather than as a profit centre. And it can do all of that while its lead investors play a much longer political game than any single sovereign can sustain through electoral or autocratic rule cycles. In other words: where LIV had one player at the table, Enhanced has a syndicate, and the syndicate is patient. That is what makes this more serious for the IOC, World Aquatics and World Athletics than the golf precedent would suggest.

Read in that light, that the Enhanced project has three nested layers. In the short term, it is an IPO and a pharmaceutical platform. ENHA on the NYSE, mobile telehealth platform Live Enhanced, a viable direct-to-consumer hormone and peptide business with celebrity endorsements in the form of world records. That is the cash-out.

In the medium term, it is a parallel sport ecosystem outside the jurisdiction of the IOC and WADA. The template, read structurally, is LIV versus the PGA Tour, except the contested asset is not a golf calendar but the human body, and as I just argued, the structure underneath is more durable than LIV’s was. If the Enhanced Games establishes itself as a credible second tier of elite sport, what it does to Olympic governance is not destruction but fragmentation. Two systems, neither in charge, both bidding for athletes.

In the long term, and this is the larger play, it normalises “human enhancement” as a mass consumer category. The middle-class HRT-and-longevity market is enormous and currently regulated by medical gatekeeping. Visibly enhanced, visibly rich, visibly successful elite athletes are the marketing wedge. The Las Vegas weekend, read this way, is a Trojan horse for a deregulated longevity-and-enhancement consumer industry that intends to be the next phase of personalised pharma. Sport gets the conversation in the door. The conversation, in the end, is about everyone else.

From an argumentation point of view, the standard objection to the Enhanced Games is that athletes will get hurt or die. That objection is the wrong ground to fight on, and choosing it helps the project. It is the wrong ground because clean sport already injures and kills. Cyclists drop dead in their thirties. Boxers leave with brains they cannot use. Swimmers wreck shoulders by 22, runners wreck knees by 28. The Enhanced Games will have its share of medical disasters, and they will be defensible by gesturing at every other elite system and asking what the difference is. Health-and-safety is the terrain where the Enhanced players are content to fight on, because the data is messy and the argument is winnable on points.

The stronger objection is governance. The serious question is not whether bodies will be damaged because bodies are already damaged, but who decides what a body is allowed to do in public, in competition, for money, and who profits from the answer. The IOC’s answer to that question is imperfect. It is more transparent than it used to be, and it is staffed by many people who genuinely believe in the project, but it is still an opaque, self-co-opting body with a 19th-century structure presiding over a 21st-century industry. Anyone honest about sport governance has to concede this. Defending the IOC on its current record is not the same as defending the values the Olympic movement claims to stand for. That distinction matters.

The Enhanced Games’ answer is worse, for a specific structural reason. The IOC is, at least nominally, a non-profit with a public mandate, however poorly executed. Enhanced Group Inc. is a publicly listed corporation with shareholders. In the Enhanced model, the human body that plays sport is a regulated product of a private company whose binding obligation is to its quarterly numbers. That is not deregulation. It is a transfer of regulatory authority from an ageing public-interest body to a private-interest one. The drugs are the same drugs. The governance is materially worse.

Defending WADA and the IOC on their present records is a losing move and choosing to solely stick with them plays into Enhanced’s hands. Most of the public will not turn out for it. Most athletes will not march for it. And the funders behind Enhanced are content to fight that battle every day for the next decade, because they expect to win it on points. The more useful response which is the one I want to argue for here, is to refuse the either/or and to put a third option on the table.

What sport actually needs, and has needed for twenty years, is a governance model that is neither the Enhanced Games nor the IOC as currently configured. Transparent in its testing and its finances. Publicly accountable in a way that does not rely on the goodwill of a small, co-opted board. Athlete-controlled at the level that matters in regard to pay, conditions, medical autonomy, retirement. Honest about the regulatory line it draws around enhancement, and why. Some interventions in, some out, declared and explained. Not ‘it depends’ and not a denial, and certainly not a pharmacy for young people who have come to believe that chemically enhancing the body is normal. To create such a governance structure is harder than running an Enhanced Games and harder than defending an IOC. It requires governments, athlete unions and the broadcasters who actually pay the bills to do something they have so far avoided… to treat sport as public infrastructure rather than as content they happen to rent.

It also requires the existing custodians to do something they have not been willing to do… to take the legitimate parts of the Enhanced critique seriously. The doping grey zone is real. The pay gap is real. The performance-arms-race that runs through shoes, altitude, tents, supplements and TUEs is real. A WADA and an IOC acknowledging those things and lead the reform rather than waiting to be disrupted into it, would be a much harder target than the one currently on the field. If they do not do that, the choice in front of us in five years’ time will be one between the Olympics or Enhanced. That is not a choice between integrity and corruption. It is a choice between two forms of institutional control of something that belongs to all of us. Between a 19th-century cartel modernising too slowly on one side, and an NYSE-listed pharmaceutical platform optimising for quarterly returns on the other. The least we owe the next generation of athletes and billions of us who just like to play, is to fight for, (yes… I know I am an idealist!) the spirit and purity of sport. This requires working towards structures and governance that protects, nurtures and cultivates what sport contributes to being human.