From the startup mavens at Sifted.eu, January 29:
The Enhanced Games will be the world’s first actively pro-performance enhancement sporting event
The Enhanced Games — an Olympic-style competition where athletes can take performance-enhancing drugs — is today announcing a “single-digit million-dollar” raise ahead of a planned first event in the summer of 2025.
“We’re reinventing the Olympic Games for the 21st century,” says London-based founder Aron D’Souza (a lawyer who represented wrestler Hulk Hogan in his Peter Thiel-funded privacy case that bankrupted Gawker Media in 2016).
Thiel’s now teaming up with the lawyer-cum-founder once again as an investor in The Enhanced Games. Christian Angermayer — who joins the company as a cofounder — also contributed to the round through his family office Apeiron Investment Group, with Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of crypto exchange Coinbase, also participating.
The seed round comes six months after the company announced its plans to a chorus of criticism from national athletics bodies, anti-doping agencies and a number of athletes. Opponents have called it a “danger to health”, “a clown show” and “a joke”.
D’Souza calls it a “real, honest and open celebration of scientific innovation”.
“44% [of athletes] admit to using banned performance-enhancing substances,” he tells Sifted. “Instead of lying, let's do this all out in the open.”
The first pro-doping sporting event
The Enhanced Games will be the “first sporting event in the world without drug testing”, says D’Souza.While the skateboarding, BMX, motocross, skiing-focused event the X Games has also never carried out drugs tests, the Enhanced Games will be the world’s first actively pro-performance enhancement sporting event, raising some big ethical and safeguarding questions.
At the Enhanced Games, the “couple of hundred” competitors will be able to take any performance-enhancing substances they like — from anabolic steroids to growth hormones and testosterone replacement therapy.
The event’s website praises the “brave athletes” involved in doping scandals, criticising the Olympic ban on performance enhancements as “stifling scientific innovation” and calls the growing rates of steroid use among bodybuilders a “movement”.
The risks of taking anabolic steroids include infertility, erectile dysfunction, hair loss and severe acne, according to the NHS.... [and psychosis, they didn't mention the psychotic breaks from reality. And testicular shrinkage. and...]
....MUCH MORE
note: be very polite around the javelin and hammer throwers. shotputters too.
