During a Zoom call on the 26th January 2024, Aron D’Souza, founder of the Enhanced Games, revealed something to me that he asked me to keep to myself.
The Enhanced Games, which takes place in Las Vegas on Sunday, is the world’s first sporting competition in which athletes are permitted to use performance-enhancing substances banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency. What D’Souza confided was where he believed the project’s true commercial potential lay.
At the time, I never imagined I’d end up in Vegas as one of a small number of journalists granted full behind-the-scenes access to the most controversial sporting event of my lifetime. Yet tomorrow afternoon at 2.30pm I fly from London to Sin City to complete a story I’ve been developing, enriched by candid conversations with the people building it, for two and a half years.
A story that began in June 2023, when D’Souza unveiled the idea for a competition WADA labelled a “dangerous and irresponsible concept”.
Media coverage of the Games, which head of the US Anti-Doping Agency Travis Tygart dismissed as a “clown show”, was instantly and overwhelmingly hostile. CNN described it as a “doping free-for-all”, the Spectator said it wouldn’t work and the Daily Mail called it “depressing”.
In the rush to moralise and condemn, they all attacked the wrong target. Whipping up fears about safety. Pearl-clutching over ethics. Telling world-class athletes that their efforts wouldn’t count.
For two and a half years, they missed the point.
The Enhanced Games, as D’Souza sensed from the start, is not a sporting event. It is a consumer health business hosting a sporting event as part of an audacious marketing strategy.
The races are the demo. The peptide protocols are the product. The hostile press, the WADA condemnation and the Biden White House press release from March 2024 expressing “deep concern” – every column inch of vitriol and opposition has provided reach and awareness the company never had to pay for.
I have been carrying this story for two and a half years. This is the first time I’m telling it.
Against all odds
The man who succeeded D’Souza as CEO of the Enhanced Games in August 2025 is already in Vegas, overlooking a newly-built swimming pool, four days from finding out whether the most creative customer acquisition gamble of all time pays off.
Maximilian Martin is the CEO of Enhanced Group Inc, and he is at Resorts World, just off the Las Vegas Strip, where on 24th May the first ever Enhanced Games will take place.
Around him, hundreds of contractors are working in shifts, twenty-four seven, to complete in days what most stadium operators build in weeks.
Just last month the site was a patch of dirt. Now the pool is filled and the running track is being laid. On Sunday afternoon, over forty elite sprinters, swimmers and weightlifters, including British swimmer Ben Proud, who won silver at the 2024 Paris Olympics and two-time US Olympic medal-winning 100m sprinter Fred Kerley, will take to the starting blocks.
Martin is no longer just under global media scrutiny. The market is watching too. After the company floated on the New York Stock Exchange on the 8th May shares peaked at just over eleven dollars. Six days ago it closed at $3.96, with half the company’s market value wiped out inside a week.
On Tuesday 19th May it closed on $5.26 a share. That recovery is not yet redemption. It’s what happens when a market that has spent a fortnight selling notices that the event it has been pricing against, and the establishment has been briefing against, is now just four days away.
Martin has invested every dollar he ever made, a fortune earned after founding crypto mining firm Bitfield, which he sold to Northern Data, into this company. “I have invested, by the time we did our Series A, all the capital that I’ve ever made into this company. So for me, this was never not going to happen. It was only a question of how much time is going to lapse and how quickly can we make this happen. Because otherwise I wouldn’t have done that.
“And so for me this was clear, because it’s a combination of sport, which people love. We’re changing something for athletes. We’re improving everything for them. That’s going to fly. And with the trends that you observe in society with longevity, that’s going to work too.”
He cannot force the market to believe. He cannot make the venue go up any faster. He cannot make the athletes perform.
For the next four days, he can only watch.
Born with a target on their back
The media vitriol towards the Enhanced Games has not been random. D’Souza, the company’s founder and president, is the Australian lawyer who, in 2016, finished a multi-year operation, financed by billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel, that ended an entertainment news organisation called Gawker.
The lawsuit was litigated through a proxy plaintiff, the wrestler Hulk Hogan. The judgment closed the publication and D’Souza became known among hacks as the man who buried a journalism brand.
When, in 2023, the same man announced he was going to host a sporting competition in which athletes would be allowed to use substances the Olympic movement bans, the press pack smelled blood.
The Guardian led a sneering 2023 piece by describing D’Souza as “the type of character for whom LinkedIn was invented”, while scoffing at “his bid to become the sports world’s Victor Frankenstein”. The story characterised the Games as a drugs Olympics where anything goes.
Three years later, at a training camp in Abu Dhabi, Enhanced has been spending more than twenty-five thousand dollars per athlete per month on medical care. The protocols are administered by a commission chaired by respected cardiologist Professor Guido Pieles. The clinical study is registered with the United Arab Emirates Department of Health. The scientific commission includes George Church, a Harvard genetics pioneer who helped invent synthetic biology and who occupies number six in the Unfiltered Longevity 100 global power list.
Contrary to the hysterical headlines, anything does not go.
The reckoning at Resorts World
The field competing on Sunday is blended on purpose. Some athletes are enhanced. Some are not. At the start line, spectators will be able to see, for the first time in sport, who is on a protocol and who isn’t.
The man overseeing the athletes, Enhanced’s Chief Sporting Officer, Rick Adams, spent fourteen years inside Team USA. He ran the United States’ performance operation through multiple Olympic Games, joined Enhanced two years ago and lost some friends in the process. “I have people who I traveled the world with and felt very close to, and not all of them have embraced this decision that I’ve made,” he told me a few weeks ago. “The people that care about you authentically and love you for who you are will stand by you, and some relationships are situational. But I’m a big believer that over time, the story of Enhanced will be about the positive things that it can do for generations of people, and I’m proud to be involved in it.”
He also did the opposite of what the press has suggested the organisation would do. Instead of tempting athletes to use Enhancements, he intervened to ensure that they were making an informed choice. “I had a particular athlete that took a long time to sign and the athlete was wanting to sign. And I wasn’t fully convinced that they had really thought it through. And I just said, let’s make sure. Let’s take a little time. And we ultimately did sign and that athlete is excited to be here and doing terrific things.
“I encouraged every athlete, even those we signed, I said, speak to everyone in your network that you think you should. Talk to your family, talk to your coaches, talk to the people you love and that love you back, and really think about what this means.”
The IOC, WADA, the White House and the world’s media have spent three years explaining why what is about to happen on Sunday will not or should not happen.
In four days, it is happening.
Act 2: Ground zero
To fully understand how an unfinished pool in the Nevada desert came to host the most contested sporting event in living memory, you have to go back to a co-working office space off High Street Kensington in London.
When I first walked into the Enhanced Games office in February 2024, it was a single room in a members club. Bare walls. A few desks. The founder, Aron D’Souza, with a handful of staff and a pitch deck.
I had privately messaged Christian Angermayer, the German biotech investor and Enhanced co-founder, on X on the 21st November 2023. He passed me to D’Souza via his then Communications Chief at Apeiron Investments, Mike Oakes (a distinct early asset to the project who had international editors on speed dial and always gave great counsel to the leadership team). After an initial Zoom call, D’Souza invited me in to meet him in person.
At that time he had no athletes, no venue and no real money.
What he did have was a well-financed black book, a vision and unshakable self-belief.
“When I met Aron, I was actually quite rude about the Enhanced Games,” says Damian Reilly, who wrote “Why the Enhanced Games Won’t Work” for the Spectator in 2023 and interviewed D’Souza for the magazine’s podcast. “We had a pretty robust debate about it. But he was very charming, very intelligent and very courteous throughout. I came away impressed with him but, at the time, I didn’t think the project would ever get anywhere.”
“My argument,” Reilly told me earlier this month, “was basically that sport only matters when it feels relatable. If I go for a 10K run, I can look up the fastest 10K times ever recorded and that’s exciting because, however distant they are, they still exist within the realm of human achievement. But if those times were achieved by people taking drugs I can’t take, then they may as well be on wheels. They stop feeling relatable and therefore stop being interesting.”
From Miami to the House of Lords
The idea for the Enhanced Games had come to D’Souza a little over a year earlier, in a Miami gym, when he asked a man in the weights room how he had built his body. The answer was steroids. Between Christmas and New Year, in a rented apartment overlooking Biscayne Bay, D’Souza drafted a pitch deck.
He showed it to Peter Thiel at a New Year party. Thiel said “that’s cool”. It was enough.
By June 2023, the company existed in the form of a single promotional video, made for £200, in which a stock-footage sprinter beat Usain Bolt’s 100-metre time over a voice-over that said: “I am a proud Enhanced athlete. The Olympics hate me. I need your help to come out.”
Within weeks the press were circling.
By the time I sat across from him in that small rented office room, he was fielding more than a hundred interview requests a week.
The attention was building but he was, by any sane measure, far further from a working sporting event than the volume of press coverage implied.
On the evening of the 26th February 2024, I was standing next to the mantelpiece in Christian Angermayer’s London penthouse, wine glass in hand, talking to Oakes about his thrilling and unexpected career detour.
Unfiltered was one of four global media outlets invited to a closed-door reception the night before the first-ever conference on human enhancement at the House of Lords, convened by Enhanced. The mantelpiece was decorated with framed photographs of Angermayer shaking hands with heads of state.
The room was a mix of scientists and investors. The conversation, with input from a leading transhumanist, was about frontier research and the future of humanity. Not a group preoccupied by tomorrow’s headlines. One focused on shaping the years and decades ahead. It was a rare occasion in my life where I have felt close to power and surrounded by people who have the intellectual and financial resource to influence global affairs.
In just a few months, D’Souza’s conviction and contacts book had taken him from a single rented room in Kensington to a Palace of Westminster conference hosted by Lord Stone of Blackheath.
Passing the baton
That night, in Angermayer’s penthouse, D’Souza introduced me to his co-founder Martin, the man who would replace him as company CEO.
The significance of that succession is that D’Souza and Martin are not the same kind of operator. D’Souza, who recently launched Objections, an AI-powered litigation tool that makes it easier to sue the press, is a master strategist and a man who is unafraid to embark on a challenge with the odds stacked against him.
Martin has put his entire fortune into a company that needs to live up to a public listing, deliver a clinical study under a sovereign health ministry and host a four-day sporting event in Las Vegas.
Strategically, it was right for Enhanced to retire the more provocative tactics of the early days but the reality is that they would not be where they are now without D’Souza’s willingness to court controversy as the only option available to him at the time for generating the consumer appetite and awareness that made the project investible.
Act 3: An enhanced future
When I last spoke to Martin in April, over videolink, he was in Abu Dhabi at the athlete training camp. He was wearing a plain black top. He looked chiselled, fresh-faced and composed. Not like a man about to take on the world.
He was also unusually candid for the CEO of a publicly traded company. Most NYSE chief executives would not, on the record, walk a journalist through their personal pharmacology. Martin did.
He started two years ago, on testosterone. He stopped after a year, deliberately, to feel what his body did without it. Then he restarted in early 2026 and added peptides.
“I wanted to never be in a position where I talked to an athlete about enhancements and quoted some research that suggests the benefits without knowing what it does to your body,” he said.
The sport of office work
The peptides he uses are targeted, he says, on recovery, muscle growth, focus and skin. He is not training for the hundred metres. He is running a public company through the most pressurised stretch of his career. The peptides, he says, help him do the job.
“I’m an athlete too,” he told me. “But my sport is office work.”
He says it as a throw away line but it captures the reason Enhanced exists and why he was confident enough to go public so early in its journey. “The whole world will see where we deploy our capital into and if our money is where our mouth is in terms of putting athletes first. That’s the first thing.
“The second thing that we’re able to do is to make Enhanced and the financial success of it accessible to the people that are interested in enhancements. That’s something that’s really important for us. Living Enhanced should not be something privy to just the select few, the same few that over and over invest in successful startups. It should be accessible to anyone who not just wants to be a fan of Enhanced sports or a consumer to live Enhanced from the consumer business, but also participate in the bigger direction that the movement is taking.”
Ask Martin who Enhanced is for, and he doesn’t describe elite athletes. He describes someone else. “That person works very hard, provides for his family, comes home from work, feels absolutely drained. The kids are still excited to get like this one hour with their dad in. And that person is just like, don’t talk to me. I’m drained.”
“Single mum, same thing,” he added.
“It’s not about that person swimming 50 metres in under 25 seconds. It’s about giving that person the right protocol to come home from work, excited to see their kids, with the energy to play with them, wrestle with the kids, take them on the weekend and throw them into the pool.”
This is the part of Enhanced story the media have largely overlooked because they were too busy reacting to IOC press releases. The elite athletes who will compete on Sunday are not, in Martin’s framing, the product. The product is the consumer health platform Enhanced launched two months ago. A platform offering a range of peptides, longevity supplements and hormone replacement therapies.
The customers are the drained father and the exhausted mother. It is me. And it is you. The athletes on the start line are the ambassadors who get us in the door.
The business is direct to consumer performance medicine, under medical supervision, at a scale no one has built before.
To help them do that, they recruited Bret Kovacs, a marketing man who has made a career out of avoiding the herd and commercialising tribes. He was previously Head of Revenue at BuzzFeed and Chief Marketing Officer at Barstool Sports before they were acquired for $550 million by Penn National Gaming.
“I don’t want [an advert] to talk about increased muscle mass,” he told me. “I want a billboard that says throw your kid higher than all the other dads in the pool. When I’m catching the train, which I’m always running for, I want a billboard that says never miss the train again. Increase VO2 max.”
In describing the Enhanced Games as a doping Olympics, the press missed the real story.
Enhanced is a longevity company with a sports marketing budget, albeit a $25 million one.
The future is enhanced
The Enhanced Games is also one of the most visible expressions of a bigger phenomenon. The longevity industry, almost invisible to the public five years ago, is now one of the best-capitalised frontiers in modern medicine.
Throughout medical history, doctors have treated ageing as an inevitability. You get older. Your cells deteriorate. Your tissues fail. Eventually one of those failures kills you. Medicine has focused on the individual diseases that come with the deterioration, such as heart disease, cancer and dementia, rather than on the deterioration itself.
That model is now being abandoned. Over the past five years, scientists have begun developing drugs and therapies designed to slow, halt or partially reverse the underlying biology of ageing.
Therapies such as cellular rejuvenation (reversing or delaying the aging process by restoring youthful functions to old or damaged cells) and senotherapeutics (a class of drugs and therapies designed to delay, prevent, or reverse age-related diseases) have a goal that was, until recently, the stuff of science fiction; to keep the body biologically younger than its chronological age.
The first FDA-cleared human trial of a therapy designed to reset the biological age of cells back toward youth began enrolling patients earlier this year. The Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka, whose Nobel-winning work made the entire field possible, is now a senior advisor at Altos Labs, a $3 billion biotech company founded specifically to bring his discoveries to market. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was Altos’s lead backer. Open AI founder Sam Altman personally funded Retro Biosciences, another reprogramming company, with $180 million of his own money. Peter Thiel and Christian Angermayer, the early billionaire investors in Enhanced, have written substantial cheques into other companies across the same field.
The scientists leading the research, such as Yamanaka, Rick Klausner from Altos and, again, Enhanced’s own George Church, the dozens of clinicians and researchers running protocols inside Calico, Retro Biosciences, NewLimit, Rejuvenate Bio, and Loyal are not figures that the stories covering the Enhanced Games for the last three years have mentioned.
The media came at the story through the lens of doping or funding rounds. Neither of those angles reveals what the company really is. Both miss what the longevity field around it is becoming.
The future is enhanced. Whether the legacy institutions catch up to that or not, science is rapidly moving in one direction. By the end of this decade, peptide protocols, hormone optimisation, GLP-1 metabolic interventions and the first generation of cellular rejuvenation therapies will be available to ordinary adults in clinics on the high street. The Enhanced Games did not invent this future but they are betting on it.
