Not only is the founder of the Enhanced Games against drug testing. He actively endorses the use of performance-enhancing drugs in athletics.
“My body, my choice. Your body, your choice,” London-based businessman Aron D’Souza told The Post.
D’Souza is the president of the Enhanced Games, a series of athletic competitions, open for anyone to apply, designed with the goal of breaking world records. He hopes to bring the competition to life in December 2024 as an alternative to the “corrupt” Olympics. (French police recently raided the Paris headquarters of the 2024 Olympics as part of a corruption probe.)
“Fundamentally, the Olympics are broken,” he said. “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.”
Seeing it as his “moral duty to fix elite sports,” D’Souza said competitors will “be given a salary and a large cash prize for breaking a world record. We are creating an alternative elite sporting competition – giving elite athletes the choice between a life of poverty and obscurity competing in the Olympics, or financial well-being and the right to build their brand at the Enhanced Games.
“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athletes is the core moral failing of the Olympic movement — it is a vestige of the aristocratic sentiment behind the outdated unpaid ‘amateur’ requirement.”
It’s more than that, though. Athletes will also be given free range to use performance-enhancing drugs.
“We believe that individuals are best placed to make decisions about their own bodies, in consultation with their doctors. Therefore, we would welcome all performance therapies that are done under medical supervision,” D’Souza added.
“It shouldn’t be the place of a sports federation to intervene in the clinical process”
But, D’Souza admitted: “Our insurers may mandate some limitations.”
Athletes will also be offered cardiac screening, at no cost, before the games to assess heart health.
D’Souza said that the games’ “showcase event — aiming to break the 100-mete world record” — is planned for December 2024, and that he is in venue discussions for a Division 1 university campuses in Florida, Texas and California. “The full-stack games will take place in 2025.”
The sports will be individual, and designed in a way to, in the words of D’Souza, “maximize entertainment value.”
And anyone who can do that is invited to apply.
“If you think you can break a world record, you will be able to apply to enter the games, said D’Souza, noting that the application process is still being finalized.
He claimed that both “sleeper” (amateur) athletes and former Olympians have shown interest.
“Since launch, we have had over 560 athletes reach out to us, asking to compete in the first full-stack Enhanced Games,” D’Souza said.
Anna Meares, Australia’s Olympic chef de mission for Paris 2024 and former Olympic gold medalist, told the Guardian that she is appalled by the concept of a drug-enhanced games.
In response, D’Souza told The Post that he is “frankly disgusted that Anna Meares doesn’t believe that bodily autonomy is a human right.”
Not surprisingly, Meares isn’t the only individual with reservations.
Dr. John William Devine, a senior lecturer in ethics at Swansea University and a member of A-STEM’s Sports Ethics and Integrity Group, thinks the Enhanced Games raise a number of moral quandaries.
His concerns: “That ‘enhanced sport’ will pose an unacceptable risk to athletes’ health, that competition will be more unfair than before, and that sporting excellence will be undermined.”
Devine warned that accepted doping could end up “creating an environment in which athletes may be pressured by coaches, parents, sponsors, or even governments to ingest experimental or inherently dangerous drugs that pose a serious risk to their well being.
“The ‘my body. my choice’ argument, advanced by [D’Souza] assumes that athletes would not become subject to autonomy-limiting coercive pressures.”
Dr. Crwyn Jones, a professor of sports ethics at Cardiff Metropolitan University in the UK, is less pessimistic.
“[Athletes] will be freely choosing to accept any risks — i.e. exercising their autonomy,” Jones told The Post. “It’s always seemed a little odd that an MMA fighter or a boxer is denied access to ‘risky’ performance enhancing drugs whilst engaging in such an inherently dangerous activity.”
