“If Lance Armstrong, after defeating cancer and winning the Tour de France, had stood up and said openly that his comeback from the brink of death was made possible by EPO, then EPO would have been the hottest-selling product of the early 2000s,” Aron D’Souza tells me, a statement that perfectly illustrates his iconoclastic outlook. “Every middle-aged guy would be on EPO if it were available under safe, clinically approved FDA [the USA’s food and drug administration] regulations,” he adds.

This is quite the way to start an interview – and there’s more bullishness to come. “It’s a classic misconception to say that performance-enhancing drugs are unsafe. It’s hysteria,” he states. In case you hadn’t guessed, D’Souza is a man on a quest to change sport. Or, as he puts it, “on a mission to build a new superhumanity” – that being, the Enhanced Games, a yearly Olympic style event where athletes would be encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs.

An Australian lawyer and businessman who founded the technology company Sargon, D’Souza has turned to sport for his next profit-making enterprise. Not everyone has welcomed his Enhanced Games concept, with two time Olympic gold medallist swimmer Kieren Perkins branding D’Souza a “borderline criminal”.

But backed by billionaire investors including Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, the Australian is promising better pay for athletes and believes that the global sporting arena would not merely benefit from but needs the Enhanced Games. In taking on the Olympic Games, he is challenging the conventional interpretation of fair play in sport. “I think of myself as Uber and Netflix, and they [sport’s governing bodies] are the taxi cabs and Blockbuster,” he says. “It [the Olympics] is an oppressive and exploitative system, and we’re creating a better one.”

This article was published in Cycling Weekly in November 2024. You can read the full article here.