On February 25, 2025, the Australian swimmer James Magnussen stood on the starting blocks at a swimming pool in North Carolina with a million dollars and his reputation on the line. Magnussen, a triple Olympic medalist and world champion in the 100-meter freestyle, had been retired from professional sports for six years. But he had restarted his career to join the Enhanced Games, a kind of Olympics on steroids. This is meant literally: The event, which encourages athletes to take performance-enhancing drugs, is scheduled for May 2026 in Las Vegas.
Its founder, Aron D’Souza, is a slick-talking Peter Thiel acolyte who believes throwing off the shackles of drug testing can help push humanity to the next level. Enhanced, the company behind the Games, has secured millions from Thiel, Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital, and others, and praise from the likes of Joe Rogan. But the reaction from the sporting establishment has been split between horror over the health implications and skepticism over whether the event will ever actually happen.
At the time of his February swim, Magnussen was the only athlete to have publicly said he’d be willing to compete. He’d come to the Greensboro Aquatics Center for a secret time trial. If he could beat the world record time in the 50-meter freestyle—swimming’s flagship event—he’d win a million-dollar prize from Enhanced, and D’Souza would get to prove his many doubters wrong by demonstrating that a cocktail of substances usually banned from elite sport could turn an ex-athlete into the fastest swimmer on Earth.
For four months, Magnussen had been on “the protocol”—a regimen of daily injections in the stomach and backside. No one from Enhanced would tell me what he was taking—they say they don’t want to encourage copycats—but Magnussen let it slip to the Sydney Morning Herald: testosterone to boost muscle mass and bone density, the peptides BPC-157 and thymosin to speed up recovery, and ipamorelin and CJC-1295 to increase the release of growth hormone in the body.
James Magnussen, the first athlete to sign up to work with Enhanced, did not have an easy time training as enhanced athlete. Photograph: Ashley Meyers
Standing on the blocks, he looked insane—his already out-there swimmer’s physique pushed to the extreme. Veins popped on his forearms, and his shoulders were cartoonishly broad. His back muscles bulged so far out of the sides of his swimsuit that you could see them from the front. With the reflective goggles and black swimming cap, the overall effect was more alien than superhuman.
The target time was 20.91 seconds, set in 2009 by the Brazilian Cesar Cielo. But as soon as Magnussen broke the surface, you could tell something was wrong. He was sinking too low in the water. His arms raked forward, devouring the distance, but the more he strained, the more resistance he faced. He had put on 30 pounds of muscle, and his own beefed up body was working against him. The whole premise of the Enhanced Games seemed to hang in the balance. If the only elite athlete willing to come forward couldn’t get close to the world record after five months of enhancements, well, what was the point?
In 2009, D’Souza got a phone call that changed his life and set him on the path that would lead to Enhanced. The Australian was in his first week as a law student at the University of Oxford, and a friend who was close to the billionaire Peter Thiel got in touch to say they were visiting the city and to ask if D’Souza would show them around.