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The Enhanced Games are set to debut in 2025, and since its inception, they've been dubbed the "Olympics on Steroids" – and that's because performance-enhancing drugs will be 100% allowed.
Dr. Aron D'Souza founded the event last year, and the immediate backlash has been strong. He has been told his idea is unsafe, unfair and a mockery of the real Olympics, but disagrees with those assessments.
In fact, D'Souza calls his Enhanced Games "the future of sports" because his event epitomizes the safety and fairness of sports, not sports as we know them today.
Steroids, obviously, have the stigma of not being safe. So, allowing steroids is simply unsafe, right? Wrong, says D'Souza.
He says safety is actually his No. 1 priority for this event.
"Ultimately, we have one shot to do this right, and if that has any health complications whatsoever, it would not only derail the company and movement we’re creating, but also the social change that we’re attempting to create here," D'Souza said in a recent interview with Fox News Digital. "Ultimately, what we are doing is heavily destigmatizing performance enhancements and I think unlocking the field of performance medicine, which leads to longevity and anti-aging technologies, and the giant publicity storm that we’ve gone through, there’s so much attention, we know the world’s eyes are on us – we know we have to do this right. We know the expectations are very, very high, and there’s a great prize well beyond the future of the Olympics if we do it right, so we have to do it right."
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The International Olympic Committee headquarters (LAURENT GILLIERON/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
D'Souza also says he has plenty of medical professionals on hand, and athletes will go through rigorous testing before they can compete.
And, says D'Souza, there are a lot more people to whom sports fans should be issuing their safety concerns, particularly his own competition in the IOC.
"For the people who say this is unsafe or unhealthy, I’d tell them that the two longest-serving sponsors of the Olympics are Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, the two organizations that have done the most damage to health in human history," he said. "There’s actually no doubt about that.
"Fast food and fake sugar have done more damage to human health than anyone in human history. You can read the history books. The rise of McDonald’s and the rise of Coca-Cola have been very much attached to the Olympic movement. So, when the IOC and its cronies want to lecture me about safety, I point to their own history."
But convincing the public that the event is safe is half the battle. That fraction actually may be generous.
Those who take steroids, in just about every sport, are punished. Olympic athletes are stripped of their medals, and professional athletes are stripped of salaries and games via suspension. So, how could an event full of steroid users be fair? Well, that's actually what would make it fair because everyone is honest about what they are doing, which is far from the case in the Olympics, says D'Souza.
Recent studies – highlighted on the Enhanced Games' website, which D'Souza says is the Olympics' "own research" – have shown that roughly half of Olympic athletes actually use performance-enhancing drugs but only around 1% of them get caught.
D'Souza even noted a study that says around 60% of swimmers claim to be asthmatic yet only 2% of the world's population actually is. That way, swimmers could use "high-powered steroid inhalers."
General view of swimming lane markers at a pool. (Simon Bruty/Anychance/Getty Images)
With those notes, D'Souza asks how the Olympics are fair if the Olympics knows about the supposed dishonesty of their own athletes, yet he says his event gets mocked for being unfair despite being 100% truthful.
"The Olympics claims to be natural. They claim to be the personification of natural sport, and the drug-testing regime is so ineffective for a variety of structural and democratic reasons that the Olympics can never be natural," D'Souza said. "So, what we are doing will actually make the Olympics cleaner. It will make the Olympics more natural, and it will create a more fair and level group of playing field."
"If you’re an athlete who uses performance enhancements, you can come over to our side, you can have a career on our side, you can be open and you can be honest about it, and you can make good money. If you want to be natural, go complete at the Olympics. But you know what? The Olympics should be all natural – get rid of the supersuits in the swimming. Get rid of the shoes in track and field. Be truly natural like ancient Greece and go back to your roots.
"The Olympics are the ultimate form of human competition. It’s so wonderful to see athletes compete at the highest level and see who’s the best. But you know what? The Olympics themselves have never had competition, and we are creating that competition. That creates for a healthier and better environment for the athletes and the taxpayers."
On top of that, there are numerous performance-enhancements, like testosterone and human growth hormone, that are actually legal to use recreationally but banned by the Olympics and other sports leagues.
"And that’s where the real opportunity is, is to take something that’s done in the dark alley, destigmatize it, bring high-quality clinical supervision and make it open and honest," D'Souza said.
"Doesn’t everyone have the right to be strong?"
The Olympic rings float on a barge ahead of the 2020 Summer Olympics, July 19, 2021, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
D'Souza has had several wealthy investors, including PayPal founder Peter Thiel, invest in the games so that way he can pay his athletes, which is something the Olympics does not do in their high-powered "corruption train," as D'Souza calls it.
The chance at prize money is working, he said.
James Magnussen, an Australian swimmer who won eight golds at the World Championships, Pan Pacific Championships and Commonwealth Games will compete and win $1 million if he can break the 50-meter freestyle world record (it would not be officially recognized due to his taking of PEDs). D'Souza said it would take about a year to get an athlete of that caliber, but "it took, like, four days."
James Magnussen of Australia is shown prior to the men's 50-meter freestyle event during the Commonwealth Games, April 9, 2018, in Gold Coast, Australia. (Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
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In his efforts to prevent the public from thinking his event is unsafe and unfair, he's started a lot of conversation, and that alone is a success.
"My theory of social change is very simple: Until someone puts a suit on and goes to work every day trying to solve a problem, it will not get solved. So, no one had ever tried to destigmatize performance enhancements. No one had ever tried to build a new Olympics. And it’s so gratifying that, after just a few tweets, we’ve really captivated the global public imagination. Now, we have every venture capital fund, it seems, breathing down our necks to invest more into this deal, so we can have not just millions but tens of millions and soon to be hundreds of millions of dollars to build the future of sports.
"I will be very proud if I can, if anything, force the Olympics to pay their athletes, create a more fair and equitable playing field in sports, and that conversation’s already starting."
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