Welcome to the DOPERS OLYMPICS: Depressing plan for ‘Enhanced Games’ next year with no drug-testing… and there’s interest from British athletes
- Aron D’Souza intends to launch the first ‘Enhanced Games’ in December 2024
- The Australian is perhaps better known for making Hulk Hogan a fortune in court
- A social media video showed a mystery runner with a clock stopped at 9.49s
The man with the most troubling of plans has a few thoughts to share. Our chats have focused on a disruptor’s wish for shock and awe but one particular revelation is glowing within the details of those helping him.
The speaker is Aron D’Souza, an Oxford-educated, Kensington-based lawyer who prior to the past week was more widely known for making Hulk Hogan a fortune in court.
This 38-year-old Australian has done well in the legal world. Ditto in the lucrative business of his entrepreneurial ventures. But he also has a vision of the future that is, in the view of many sensible observers, outrageous, dangerous or not even worthy of consideration.
It centres on his idea, supported by a number of academics and Olympians, including a gold medallist, to create a monster out of what has long been a theoretical exercise: an alternative to the Olympic Games in which doping is allowed.
As a proposition, it has gone down as you might expect since it was announced last week. But where our conversation moves up a notch is D’Souza’s response to the question of whether there has been any curiosity from British athletes.
Aron D’Souza is a 38-year-old Oxford-educated, Kensington-based lawyer from Australia
D’Souza is perhaps more widely known for making American wrestler Hulk Hogan a fortune in court
Canadian-born sprinter Ben Johnson (centre) won the 100m final in 1988 before being stripped of his title
‘Yes,’ he tells Mail Sport. ‘I actually just had a British sprinter reach out to me (on Monday morning). I will be speaking with him later this week.’
An international athlete?
‘Yes. An Olympic sprinter who has worn a Team GB jacket.’
He also claims at least one British medallist from an undisclosed sport has made contact and that a British competitor from the most recent summer Olympics, in Tokyo, wants to be involved. If those comments morph into a living reality, they will add a localised twist to a bigger picture that was already quite unlike anything we have seen in sport.
But D’Souza is keen to have his say. He will point to his ‘disgust’ at the ‘corrupt’ International Olympic Committee, and his view that doping can be safe and will make sport and humanity better and fairer. His solution? He intends to launch the first ‘Enhanced Games’ in December of next year. Audacious is one word; ridiculous and a potentially reckless act of attention-seeking is the consensus of those consulted by Mail Sport.
‘In one version we fully defeat the Olympics and become the dominant international sports event,’ D’Souza says. ‘Or there is natural and there is enhanced. You can watch the Enhanced Games with superheroes, or you can watch the old, natural Olympics with Greek gods. It is two different worlds.’
Indeed. A choice between five iconic rings or the nine circles of what might reasonably be termed a sporting hell.
D’Souza alleged that a British Olympian that competed at Tokyo 2020 reached out to him lately
The Enhanced Games circulated a surreal video on their social media channels last week. The short clip showed an athletics track, a mystery doper, and a clock stopped at 9.49sec.
Set against soft music, a voice then shares his tale: ‘I am the fastest man in the world but you have never heard of me. I have broken Usain Bolt’s 100m world record but I cannot show you my face. I am a proud enhanced athlete. The Olympics hate me. I need your help to come out. I need your help to stop hate. I need your help for the world to embrace science.’
Among other questions of taste, it has the ring of a spoof. But D’Souza says his secret sprinter is a real athlete whom he ‘understands has competed extensively at international level’.
He adds: ‘We look forward to revealing his identity at the first enhanced games. You know, it’s such a courageous step. My calendar has been filled with conversations with athletes and it was so hard to get ones willing to come out before the launch.
‘They were like, ‘Oh, how is the world going to react to this? How will my parents react?’ And our anonymous man in the video is not the only world-record holder we have interacted with.
‘The interesting thing about doing a pro-enhancements Games is that maybe we don’t need the No 1 sprinter in the world. We could get the No 5 in the world, but he could break the world record regardless.’
The details of D’Souza’s plan, such as they are, centre on a Games comprising athletics, swimming, weightlifting, gymnastics and, most alarmingly, combat sports. To date, he estimates up to 200 athletes have expressed an interest in joining him and, crucially, those that do will not be tested for drugs.
What that means in real terms is open to a frenzy of speculation. D’Souza talks about sensible clinical supervision and the use of substances regulated by the FDA (the Food and Drug Administration in the US), though it is conspicuously unclear how that might be patrolled in the absence of testing.
A video posted on social media showed a mystery runner and a clock a stopped at 9.49 seconds
Usain Bolt is the current holder of the 100m sprint world record posting a 9.58-second time in 2009
‘I think that fundamentally adults with free-informed consent should be able to do to their body what they wish,’ D’Souza says. ‘We want to enable that bodily sovereignty for athletes.’
D’Souza’s motivation for this venture appears to hinge on two lines of ideology – a conundrum and his cure, if you prefer. The first is the inadequacies of the status quo, and his criticisms in this area alone have some merit.
‘(You’d think) if you win an Olympic gold medal, your life was made, you’re a millionaire,’ he says. ‘Nope. The poverty that even medallists live in is disgusting. And when you see Thomas Bach flying around the world in private jet and living in a palace at the IOC’s expense, that is disgusting.’
Those assessments of the IOC will chime with many rational observers of the Olympics, as will his take on the ‘farcical’ anti-doping structures currently in place – around 150 athletes from London 2012 alone have been suspended for doping offences – but it is his vision of a solution that has been the headline in recent days. It’s an answer that seems wildly out of kilter with the problem.
Doubtless, there would be intrigue in the results. It is an age-old poser – what is possible? How fast would X run if he was on Y, though as one senior individual in the Olympic orbit told Mail Sport: ‘They presumably realise most of the best 100m times in history are already held by tainted athletes.’
Tyson Gay, Yohan Blake, Asafa Powell, Justin Gatlin, Chistian Coleman – the list of elite sprinters to have served bans is a long one. It points to the façade we have to buy into when we watch the Olympics. But a landscape where there is no pretence of clean sport? For some, that might be interpreted as a more honest series of races; to others, to most of us, it is simply depressing as well as a risk to safety.
At the very least, the marketing of dopers as a hated breed who want to ‘come out’ into a brave new world would seem to be a pitch of Olympic proportions.
American sprinting pair Tyson Gay (right) and Justin Gatlin have both served bans in the past
D’Souza has had an interesting career. In overseeing Hogan’s privacy case against Gawker Media, he famously helped secure the wrestler a $140m judgement, prior to a settlement. He is also experienced in building from the ground – he has started five companies and sold three.
In conversation, he is intelligent, open to criticism – he doesn’t present as an eccentric, but he doesn’t spare the bullets. When he discusses his hypothetical army of enhanced athletes smashing world records, he asks who subsequently ‘is going to want to watch the slow Olympics?’
Frankly, it has the whiff of Barnam’s circus.
Plainly D’Souza has scented an opportunity here, albeit one that seems destined to live in the shadows, if anywhere. For a start, he has no venue – he is looking at the southern states of the US, though you wonder which landowner with the appropriate facilities will embrace such associations.
Likewise, there is the question of sponsorship – by D’Souza’s admission ‘some wouldn’t touch this with a 10-foot pole’.
To get this proposal off the drawing board, he is pursuing $50million-$100m in equity capital to offset costs of ‘double digit millions’, with a share of the financial pot going to the athletes. It’s a line of distinction that separates them from the Olympics, and one D’Souza is using as a lure for athletes to ‘come out’. Given how many would need to cross over to make this viable, the foundations feel desperately soft and spongy, even if he does find an appetite out there for the unusual.
‘I’m sure you’ve seen what happened with LIV golf,’ D’Souza says. ‘We are now in the era of the disrupter sports league.
‘You only need to look at Dana White’s slap fighting League to know that brands and television networks are looking towards new forms of sports that are bold and engaging. We are at the vanguard of that.’
D’Souza also claimed that Dana White’s (pictured) slap league evidences that brands and television networks are looking towards new ‘bold’ forms of sports
‘Vanguard’ was something of a buzzword across a couple of discussions we had. D’Souza believes they are expanding a frontier, not only in sport but also the scale of science, and he speaks of the importance of regaining ‘credibility’ for a sector questioned by some during the pandemic.
As a stated motivation, that claim might raise eyebrows, just as the entire project is a question of taste. Tastes that mean this product will more likely become content for social media, if it evolves that far, rather than any of those grander plans to rival the Olympic Games.
But even with all of that being said, the glaring question is one of safety, because doping goes beyond conversations about integrity.
D’Souza has repeatedly pointed to academic papers that support the idea of safe doping in sport and he has an interesting team behind him. That includes Dr George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard University, and on an athlete panel he has amassed an incongruous mix.
It ranges from a South African Olympic champion swimmer, Roland Schoeman, who once beat Michael Phelps and later served a doping ban, to clean Olympians such as the Canadian bobsledder Christina Smith and the Tokyo swimming semi-finalist Brett Fraser.
Between them, they face a very hard sell.
UK Anti-Doping’s view was shared in a statement to Mail Sport: ‘UKAD is extremely concerned by the concept of an enhanced games and the health risks it could pose to athletes. Testing, alongside values-based education are essential in supporting athletes to prioritise their health and approach sport in the right way.’
The informed opinion of Professor John Bower, formerly a board member of UKAD, was similarly critical. ‘It’s just dangerous,’ he says. ‘The health risks of doping are considerable – heart problems, some cancers, among them. You also have to ask about the message it sends to aspiring athletes.
The International Olympic Committee declined to comment – there is a vibe that this idea doesn’t deserve the oxygen of publicity
‘The safety aspect is obvious, especially around dosages. If I can take one pill and gain an improvement, what is to stop me taking four and making four times the gain? The risks go up and up.’
Others who were contacted, including the British Olympic Association and the IOC, declined to comment. There is a vibe that this idea doesn’t deserve the oxygen of publicity.
For his part, D’Souza equates it to sugar and our freedom to consume as much as we please, irrespective of the health risks.
When this was put to one figure within Olympic sport, he laughed for longer than the time it took a mystery sprinter to run 100metres.
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