Shania Collins, a 29-year-old American sprinter, was initially nervous about competing in the Enhanced Games.
The competition debuting this weekend would upend a seemingly inviolable sport doctrine: the ban on performance-enhancing drugs. Substances such as steroids, amphetamines and growth hormone would not only be allowed, but encouraged.
The International Olympic Committee and World Anti-Doping Agency called it a dangerous “betrayal” of sports integrity. Critics dubbed it the “doping Olympics.”
But it also came with training stipends and prizes of up to $1 million that were rare in her sport – along with medical guidance for using the kinds of drugs Collins believed some competitors had long secretly taken anyway.
Still, when she sought an agent’s advice, Collins said she was asking “for a friend.” The response? It would ruin the person’s reputation and ability to participate in sporting competitions. Complicating matters – her parents worked in federal drug enforcement. She said she was asking for a friend with them, too.
“Their first question was, ‘Is it legal?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, it’s legal,’” Collins said.
Collins ultimately took the plunge and, on May 24, will be among more than 40 athletes from around the world participating in the Enhanced Games, a one-day series of professional competitions in track and field, swimming and weightlifting to be held at Resorts World Las Vegas.
Funded by investors including billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel and the firm 1789 Capital, run in part by Donald Trump Jr., the games aim to challenge sporting norms by allowing athletes to push their potential with legal drugs under strict medical oversight, according to event organizers.
Too often, they argue, athletes use such drugs or try dangerous, untested alternatives to evade anti-doping efforts that have failed to stop athletes from seeking an edge.
“The approach is, let’s not be naive and pretend it’s not happening,” Enhanced CEO Max Martin told USA TODAY. “Let’s just take what’s happening in the shadows, put it out in the open, put the right medical and clinical framework around it.”
The games will also promote the company’s longevity medicine business, selling products such as testosterone and peptides, a class of drugs that includes the blockbuster GLP-1 weight-loss medications. It’s a model Martin equates to Red Bull sponsoring extreme sports to sell energy drinks.
While athletes’ names may be familiar, this isn’t a sporting event led by typical backers but by people with backgrounds in fields such as biotech, crypto and sports betting. Its supercharged take on sports is reflected in a website that touts “the future of human performance” and “a new era of elite competition.” And their debut has brought fresh debate to longstanding concerns about the fairness and safety of allowing performance-enhancing drugs in sports.
Critics said the long-term use of drugs like steroids can raise health risks. And they argued that competition should be based on talent, skill and dedication – not the ability to obtain drugs.
Travis Tygart, who heads the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and sought to out cyclist Lance Armstrong for long denied drug use that he ultimately admitted to in 2013, called the games a “dangerous clown show that puts profit over principle.”
Some sports bodies, such as World Aquatics, the international swimming federation, have said Enhanced Games participants won’t be welcome at their events. Others worry it will normalize drug use in sports or undermine anti-doping efforts that have derailed the careers of athletes from baseball slugger Barry Bonds to Olympic track star Ben Johnson.
Nonetheless, the upcoming Enhanced Games have drawn elite athletes, including Olympic swimmers Ben Proud, James Magnussen and Cody Miller; sprinters Fred Kerley and NFL player Marvin Bracy-Williams; and Icelandic strongman weightlifter Hafþór Björnsson, who played the Ser Gregor “the Mountain” Clegane character on HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”
No competitor is required to take performance drugs. And at least one athlete, U.S. gold medalist swimmer Hunter Armstrong, 25, is participating without using any performance-enhancing drugs. He is still hoping to reach the 2028 Olympics.
The big draw for the bulk of athletes is the millions being offered in prize money, including $1 million for anyone who breaks the world record in swimming’s 50-meter freestyle or track’s 100-meter sprint – a rare financial windfall for athletes in Olympic sports who earn far less in professional pay or sponsorships than athletes in professional sports such as football or basketball.
Miller, a freestyler who medaled in the relay in Rio in 2016, isn’t worried about losing eligibility since he, like Collins, the sprinter, is retired from regular competitions. The financial support and medical oversight baked into the Enhanced Games made joining “a no-brainer” for him at a time when more people are using substances like hormones to boost their health.
“To me, it’s just the future, dude,” he said. “It’s the way the world’s going.”
The idea was born in Miami.
It was just before Christmas in 2022, and Aron D’Souza, an Australian-born entrepreneur and venture capitalist, was in town for an annual tradition: using the typically slow Christmas-to-New Year’s stretch to concoct plans for new businesses.
“I rent a house on the beach somewhere – and this time it was in Miami – and I just sit, and I spent five days thinking about what my next company would be,” he said in an interview.
D’Souza was working out at a gym when he heard an endocrinologist using medical language – talking about getting “enhanced.” His ears perked up. The notion reminded him of posts he’d seen on Instagram, featuring people pursuing substances to boost their health or strength.
Getting that boost also tapped into D’Souza’s longstanding interest in the work of Oxford bioethicist Julian Savulescu, who has argued that performance enhancers should be allowed in sports under medical supervision.
Savulescu, in one paper, cited musicians using beta blockers to control stage fright and perform better, arguing that what constitutes allowable performance enhancement is malleable and isn’t antithetical to sport. “To choose to be better is to be human,” he wrote.
D’Souza wasn’t an obsessive sports fan himself, but he saw the financial value in it.
“I was like, ‘Oh, there’s an idea here,’” he recalled.
Days later, D’Souza, whose LinkedIn profile says he has a doctorate in legal philosophy, attended a small New Year’s party at billionaire Peter Thiel’s Miami house, where guests were served Dom Perignon champagne as they arrived.
D’Souza and Thiel were friends. D’Souza became known as the figure who convinced Thiel to fund Hulk Hogan’s 2013 privacy lawsuit against Gawker, which ultimately bankrupted the gossip website. (Gawker had previously outed Thiel, a Silicon Valley tech investor who also co-founded Palantir Technologies, as gay.)
At his party, D’Souza shared his new idea.
“It’s an Olympics, but you can use performance-enhancing drugs,” he recalled telling Thiel.
The aim was to test the limits of human potential, give athletes autonomy and dispense with anti-doping testing, which had not seemed to stop a steady stream of scandals across various sports.
The company that sprouted from this germ, which came to include Christian Angermayer, a German biotech investor, and Enhanced CEO Martin, who formerly ran a bitcoin mining company, drew investors after D’Souza’s idea spread as both a controversy and a curiosity.
Thiel invested, and others joined, including 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. The president’s eldest son said at the time, in a statement reported by the Associated Press, that the games represented “excellence, innovation and American dominance on the world stage – something the MAGA movement is all about.”
Chris Jones, Enhanced’s spokesman, emphasized that the company had many different investors.
But if some were intrigued by the idea, others were dismayed.
Sebastian Coe, a British Olympian who heads World Athletics, the international governing body for track and field, called the idea “bollocks.” The World Anti-Doping Agency argued that it presented health risks and undermined the ideal of “clean and fair competition.”
Thomas Murray, bioethicist and author of “Good Sport: Why Our Games Matter and How Doping Undermines Them,” told USA TODAY that he worries about normalizing performance drugs.
He said the games could lead people to seek out substances without access to sports doctors, or encourage youth to view performance drugs as a necessity, which he said would be “a hard path to walk back.”
“When we admire athletic performances, we’re admiring natural talents brought to their highest levels by means that we mostly admire,” such as dedication, hard work and skill, he said. In his view, the Enhanced Games do “a big end run around that.”
Amid resistance from the sporting world to the idea, Enhanced filed an $800 million antitrust suit against World Aquatics, the World Anti-Doping Agency and USA Swimming, alleging they were illegally trying to block athletes from participation by vowing to exclude them from their own competitions if they did.
A federal judge dismissed the case in November 2025, ruling the company did not show the groups held monopoly power over the competition.
Six months later, D’Souza announced the games’ debut to strobe lights and music, on a club stage in Las Vegas, according to an ESPN report, framing it as an opening move to create “superhumanity” – without the rules that were holding back athletes, and everyone else.
“We are here to move humanity forward,” he said.
One of the first big names to join was retired Australian swimmer James Magnussen, who competed in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics.
Magnussen declared on the podcast Hello Sport in 2024 that he’d be willing to “juice to the gills” to break a record.
Then Greek Olympic swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, in February 2025, drew attention when he earned $1 million for breaking the 50-meter freestyle world record as an “openly enhanced” athlete.
But the decision to join up wasn’t easy, some athletes said, as they weighed reputations, careers and health.
Collins, who competed professionally after college, ran for Adidas and Puma before she ruptured her Achilles tendon in 2023. She worked to recuperate but was only earning about $20,000 from a sponsorship, a common financial struggle for athletes in her sport. She babysat and waitressed to cover the cost of coaching and travel to competitions, but it was difficult to make ends meet.
She decided to retire in 2025. Then the Enhanced Games came calling. She ultimately joined not just for money or the stipend, she said, but because she’d grown frustrated about her belief that many runners were secretly using performance-enhancing drugs, anyway.
“I was like, you know what, if you can’t beat them, kind of join them,” she said. “I want to see what I could have done had the playing field been fair, had I had the advantages, the training, the resources, the enhancements.”
In Ohio, Armstrong, the 25-year-old Olympic swimmer who has held a world record in the 50-meter backstroke, faced a tough decision of his own.
Armstrong had earned gold medals as part of relay teams in the Tokyo and Paris Olympics. After a good showing in Paris in 2016, he said his sponsor expressed that he wanted to extend Armstrong’s contract. He soon bought a home.
“I wanted to take the step into adulthood and buy a house, get dogs and sort of have adult responsibilities. And I don’t even think a month after the games, I get a call from my agent saying that they are not going to extend my contract, and they’re pretty much dropping everybody,” he said.
He got a new sponsor a few months later, who, within a short time, also had sharply tapered back its athletics sponsorship budget, leaving him without sufficient funds to support himself and train.
He still wanted to reach the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, but it would require more money and time than he could manage.
“I was working a ton of odd jobs, substitute teaching, because I was still trying to hold on to swimming, thinking that if I could just wait a little longer, something else would show up that would allow me to continue,” he said. “And funny enough, that thing ended up being the Enhanced Games.”
But World Aquatics had indicated those who joined could be ineligible for the competitions he’d need to enter to qualify for the 2028 Olympics. In a release, the group said that “those who enable doped sport are not welcome at World Aquatics or our events.”
He decided to participate, but without using performance-enhancing drugs, in hopes it would let him maintain his eligibility. He’s asked but said he hasn’t received a definitive answer about whether he’ll be welcomed back.
“If I don’t do Enhanced, I’m forced to retire,” he said. “And if I do Enhanced, at least I have a chance at staying in.”
Even though he plans to compete as a “non-enhanced” athlete, participating initially alienated him from some of his coaches and led them to cancel some youth swimming clinics. For a while, he said, he had to train at a YMCA pool where 80-year-olds were doing water aerobics two lanes over.
“There’s definitely been a little bit of excommunication within the swimming world,” he said.
During her first week of taking her “protocol,” Collins, the sprinter, who lives in Florida, worried the drugs weren’t working.
It was March, and Collins was in the United Arab Emirates with dozens of other runners, swimmers and weightlifters who had signed up for the May 24 competition to train together at the Erth Abu Dhabi hotel, a former recreational space for UAE military officers that has an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a track and gym facilities.
The Enhanced Games chose the location for athletes to gather for training in part because Abu Dhabi hospital is known for longevity medicine research, which would participate in a clinical study of the athletes as they trained and competed, said Jones, the spokesman for Enhanced.
Before being approved to start enhancing, each athlete got a battery of tests: MRIs; brain, kidney and liver scans; musculoskeletal tests; blood and urine samples and panels; and mental health exams.
But using what they call “the protocols” was delayed due to the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran that began Feb. 28, across the Strait of Hormuz from where they were training. “The whole thing almost fell apart,” Jones said.
At one point, Collins isn’t sure of the exact date, but she saw a drone intercepted in the distance. Phone alarms would go off at times. Athletes had to learn where the bunkers were located.
By early March, it was determined that it was safe enough to begin. Each athlete worked with health advisors to fine-tune their personal mix of substances, which could include anabolic steroids, amphetamines, human growth hormones and metabolic modulators that boost aerobic endurance.
Collins declined to share with USA TODAY what exactly she takes. But the protocols of performance-enhancing drugs are tailored to each person’s body, how it reacts and what is best for their sport. At first, she noticed no difference.
“In the beginning, I was like, you know, ‘I want to do more and more,’” she said.
But her medical advisors suggested caution. She’d seen some male athletes get too bulked up in ways that slowed them down. And she didn’t want her voice deepening or other unwanted body changes.
By the third week, as she slowly increased her doses, she noticed the boost. And she went on to run her fastest time in three years, though not her personal best.
“I feel stronger at the track, not just in the weight room. I’m recovering more. I’m sleeping more,” she said. “I was like, ‘You know what? This is working. I feel the difference.’”
She noticed some side effects she described as minor, including feeling more emotional at times and having oily skin. Doctors were regularly checking her with tests.
About twice a week on average, she’d go to a clinic for blood draws, urine samples or scans to measure things like body composition or bone density for both the study and to monitor athlete safety.
Jones said it was an example of how the athletes were under close medical and clinical supervision.
Swimmer Cody Miller left Abu Dhabi two weeks after the Iran war began for a planned break to visit his family and stayed home to train in Las Vegas.
Amid pool swims, weight training, stretches and physical therapy, he was also taking low-dose testosterone, a steroid and growth hormone that he injected or swallowed five days a week. He said it helped add lean muscle, reduce knee pain, improve sleep and recovery.
“Now I can kick breaststroke every day. I can snap my kick. I can squat heavy in the gym. And there’s just no pain,” he said. “It’s kind of awesome.”
The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency says on its website that performance-enhancing drugs can raise the risk of developing a range of health problems such as hypertension, strokes, kidney damage or depression.
Such drugs can be “extremely dangerous and, in certain situations, deadly,” the group says.
Miller said the long-term risks associated with some of the substances don’t worry him because he plans to stop taking them after the competition.
Martin Chandler and Ian David Boardley of the University of Birmingham’s School of Sport, Exercise & Rehabilitation Sciences wrote in a paper last year that there is limited research available on the health impacts of such drugs in sports. But that, in turn, could also limit health care professionals’ ability to predict and manage potential harms, they said
Hirofumi Tanaka, an exercise physiologist at the University of Texas, Austin, said the games’ arrival struck a chord because he starts one of his classes by showing a 1998 video clip of Saturday Night Live’s skit of the “All-Drug Olympics,” in which a weightlifter pulls off his own arms. “I think tomorrow, he’s really gonna feel that,” actor Kevin Nealon says, playing the announcer.
But Tanaka noted that, unlike the anything-goes parody, some of the drugs cited as among those being used in the Enhanced Games are commonly prescribed for medical conditions.
Still, he said, it’s also important to remember that there are no drugs that have zero side effects.
This weekend, the athletes will gather at Resorts World Las Vegas, where red carpets and media interviews will precede the competition in a custom-built complex.
Weightlifting and swimming start at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on May 24, with 100-meter track sprints for both men and women, and men’s and women’s 50-meter freestyle races start at 9 p.m.
Some will be eyeing how Armstrong, the U.S. Swimmer not taking substances, fares against enhanced competitors, and organizers said many others will be aiming for personal bests, including some returning from retirement to compete.
The events will be livestreamed on YouTube and Roku and distributed through a partnership with the social media platform ZOOP, run by a founding executive of the adult creator site OnlyFans.
It remains to be seen how popular the Enhanced Games become with athletes or fans, or whether records broken with the help of drugs prove meaningful to the wider public.
Jones said the company could become a sports league, but the games do not seek to replace the Olympics.
In the meantime, Enhanced is hoping the attention helps attract customers to its online telehealth products such as hormone therapy, GLP-1s for weight loss, GHK-CU copper peptide for skin health and NAD+, or nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, which, according to ads, helps with cellular repair and energy.
Earlier this month, Enhanced began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
“The original idea was just about sports,” said Martin, the CEO of the company that last fall was valued at $1.2 billion. “But if I look at just my social media, right? I have tons of people talking about peptides, about how peptides are helping them.”
Martin sees the link between Enhanced Games and its products as akin to Formula 1 racing, where the science that goes into cutting-edge race cars fuels lessons that make their way into road car production a few years down the line.
The business could see a boost with regulatory change. On a Feb. 27 episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called himself a “big fan of peptides” and said that the FDA would announce “some kind of new action” around injectable peptides.
“They’re still looking at the science,” Kennedy said. ”My hope is that they’re going to get moved to a place where people have access from ethical suppliers.”
The Health secretary pointed to 14 peptides banned by the FDA in 2023, saying he wanted to make them “more accessible” and accused the Biden administration of illegally putting them on a “do not produce” list. Kennedy said Biden’s move had created a black market to fill the void.
But earlier this month, Collins was less focused on the related business of the games than simply getting there.
She was still in Abu Dhabi, hurriedly packing and juggling film crew requests. Her return had been moved up amid worries that the Iran war might reignite and strand the athletes in the Middle East.
As she headed home, she said she had noticed that the negative online criticism of the event had ebbed as more details of the games became public.
Perhaps people were coming around to the idea, she said. But what mattered most was that her parents, whom she wanted to make proud, had already come around.
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