An Olympics-style competition in which there is no drug testing is expected to launch in December 2024. The Enhanced Games will allow athletes who use performance-enhancing drugs to compete with the goal of breaking world records.
So far, the sports included in the competition include track and field, swimming, gymnastics, combat sports and weightlifting.
"Fundamentally, the Olympics are broken," Enhanced Games founder and president Aron D'Souza told the New York post. "The Olympics are bloated and over-bureaucratized. The many layers of organizations and committees and subcommittees and federations are an alphabet soup that has created an unbridgeable gulf between the athletes and the Olympic apparatus that is meant to sustain them."
D'Souza said he sees the Enhanced Games as something that could help humanity as a whole because of the science behind these drugs. He told the Australian Associated Press that performance-enhancing medicine is the road to anti-aging and the fountain of youth. His goal, he said, is to see even 60-year-olds break athletic records.
The Enhanced Games will be held annually, but there is not a host city for the inaugural games yet.
Olympic athletes don't get paid with a traditional salary for competing in the Olympics, although they receive bonuses if they earn a gold, silver or bronze medal. Meanwhile, athletes competing in the Enhanced Games will be given a salary, and since the goal is to push limits, athletes will have the incentive of a large cash prize for breaking a world record.
"The underpayment of athletes is the core moral failing of the Olympic movement — it is a vestige of the aristocratic sentiment behind the outdated unpaid 'amateur' requirement," D'Souza told The Post.
As expected, not everyone is going to welcome the new competition with open arms. Australia's Olympic Chef de Mission for Paris 2024 Anna Meares -- a former Olympic gold medalist in cycling -- described the Enhanced Games as "a joke" and said the competition was "unfair" and "unsafe."
But D'Souza believes each athlete is responsible for their own bodies. The Enhanced Games has tried to make the argument that "we are all enhanced in one way or another" because of things like drinking coffee or wearing glasses.
"My body, my choice. Your body, your choice," D'Souza told The Post.