When Donald Trump and billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel poured millions into a $1.2 billion sports venture pursuing a Nasdaq listing, they were not betting on athletes. They were betting on a pharmacy. The Enhanced Games, which holds its inaugural event in Las Vegas on May 24, greets visitors to its website not with a competition schedule but with an offer to purchase testosterone replacement therapy, supported by a 2007 endocrinology study claiming 90% of men with low testosterone go untreated.
Travis Tygart, CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, called it “a dangerous clown show.” Its investors call it the future of human performance. What neither side has spent much time discussing is why the athletes are actually there.
The answer, it turns out, is depressingly simple. The athletes are there because no one else showed up with a paycheck.
The Enhanced Games sits at the collision point of three forces that have been building for years: a professional sports system that extracts enormous value from elite athletes while paying most of them almost nothing; a booming pharmaceutical wellness industry operating in a gray market thriving under an administration that pushes deregulation; and a growing cultural appetite for human optimization. Together, these created an opportunity that The Enhanced Games seized.
Natalia Fryckowska is a College Swimming & Diving Coaches Association (CSCAA) Scholar All-American who swam at Arizona State, competed at Pac-12 championships and finished her eligibility as a graduate student at Duquesne University, where she posted the second fastest 50-yard freestyle time in school history. For years, she was exactly the kind of dedicated, internationally competitive swimmer that the sporting world likes to celebrate.
It never paid her a cent.
The Enhanced Games is now offering her a salary, the first one swimming has ever put in her bank account. From a financial standpoint, her decision needs no further explanation.
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, the United State Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) paid its gold medalists $37,500, a figure unchanged since 2017, with nothing for those who did not medal. A survey conducted by the Associated Press found that 58% of Olympic athletes said they did not consider themselves financially stable. The Enhanced Games is offering $250,000 to event winners, a $1 million bonus for breaking a world record, a guaranteed baseline salary before competition begins and a full medical team included in the contract. Three-time Irish Olympian Shane Ryan said he earned €18,000 a year representing Ireland across three Olympic cycles, describing it as below minimum wage in Dublin, where he lived and trained for over a decade. He is now guaranteed over six figures for nine months with the Enhanced Games, with potential earnings exceeding $600,000.
Kristian Hall, a former legal counsel for the Enhanced Games, was compelled to join the company because of this very structure that allows it to generate the revenue needed to pay athletes: it is not just a sporting competition, but also a massive experiment in healthcare.
“I think, just like any industry, variety is, you know, the spiced life. You know, variety is a great thing,” Hall said.
“I mean, they are separate competitions,” he said. “Let’s have a natural world record and an enhanced world record. Let those stand separately on their own merits.”
Thinking of clean sports and enhanced sports as completely separate competitions, to Hall and Fryckowska, suffices to explain why the Enhanced Games aren’t necessarily in conflict with the integrity of sports.
“Cheating is when someone gains a hidden or undisclosed advantage and uses that to win,” said Fryckowska. “This environment is designed to be transparent and structured, which creates a level playing field.” She also points out a dissatisfaction with the reality of clean sports in a world where five athletes were charged with doping at the most recent Summer Olympics. “I would like to see clean sport truly be clean. If someone is not competing clean in traditional sport, then that is cheating.”
“Doping does happen across those competitions still,” said Hall. “That’s not me being controversial. That’s proven fact.” Hall points to an example of an often overlooked contradiction in the World Record system. The 50-meter freestyle record that stood for years was set by a swimmer in a polyurethane supersuit that was subsequently banned from competition. “Things that were allowed in 2009 aren’t allowed now,” he said. “It makes no sense to me how those world records are actually utilised in the Olympics if the person that holds that world record wouldn’t have been able to break it if the same criteria was used today.”
Hall believes the Enhanced Games could ultimately force traditional sport to reckon with what it has long refused to address. “How amazing is that for the athletes if it does force these organizations that make billions to actually pay their athletes appropriately?” he said. “Look at tennis. Look at Wimbledon. If you win that, you make a lot of money. I think you can draw absolute parallels between winning Wimbledon and winning the 100 metres at the Olympic Games.”
But while the change brought on by The Enhanced Games could lead to compensation reform, it could also lead to a more troubling reality as it seeps into the consumer sphere. Derek Beres, an Emmy-nominated health journalist and co-host of the “Conspirituality” podcast who has spent years tracking the wellness and supplement industries, sees the organization’s business model clearly.
“If you have someone who broke a ‘world record’ because they were on this cocktail of drugs, and then you can sell those drugs because look, you can perform in this manner,” he said, “that’s very appealing to people with no real moral compass but who want to make a lot of money.”
His deeper concern is not just the athletes on the starting blocks in Las Vegas, but the far larger audience watching from home. He sees The Enhanced Games as an efficient delivery mechanism.
“The people, the influencers who sell these products, they are usually wealthy,” he said. “They have access to medicine, they have access to good healthcare. But they’re not selling to people who necessarily have that.”
The Enhanced Games offers its competing athletes a full medical team, continuous blood monitoring and round the clock clinical supervision. Whereas the customers clicking through the ‘Products’ tab on the Enhanced Games website will not. The customer-facing telehealth platform offers simply a questionnaire and a credit card field. That gap, between who the science protects and who the marketing reaches, is where Beres believes the real risk lives.
The magnitude of potential threat for the enhancement market to reach a broad audience may have seemed small when the games were originally announced last May. Almost a year later, it is on the radar of just about everyone in the clean sports world. Ella Welch is a senior at the University of Louisville and a former member of the US National Swimming Team. She said that at the very beginning, there was doubt in the swimming world whether the Enhanced Games would really happen.
That soon changed: now, one of the U.S. National Team athletes that she competed with has started training with Enhanced.
“Our national team coach came out and said ‘don’t post anything about it, we’re not talking about it, we’re really trying not to be affiliated with him anymore,” Welch said.
“The United States is so good around drug testing and doping that we didn’t think we would see much US competition, if any,” she said. “We’ve seen people jump into the Enhanced Games and it’s pretty shocking, but in my perspective and the people I talk to, we think it’s kind of just a money grab.”
After two weeks of outreach to the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), the Catalyst received little response and engagement from the agency.
“We’re unfortunately unable to accommodate the many requests for interviews that we receive from students,” a representative wrote, redirecting questions each time to a public statement on the organization’s website. No spokesperson. No scientist. No athlete advocate. Just a link to what the group had already said.
The Enhanced Games, the event USADA declined to discuss, have received a multi-million dollar investment co-led by 1789 Capital, the venture fund of Donald Trump Jr. At the same time, the Trump administration has continued to freeze the U.S. government’s annual $3.7 million payment to the World Anti-Doping Agency, the global body USADA operates beneath.
Kristian Hall, who watched the organization from the inside, does not find the contradiction surprising.
“Whether the Enhanced Games are a flash in the pan, whether there is only one game or two hundred,” he said, “if it means that the IOC wakes up and starts paying athletes, or has some form of award system just like any other sophisticated competition has, then I think that’s amazing.” He paused. “And how amazing is that for the athletes!”
The cautious optimism for the Enhanced Games as a catalyst for change in the clean sport world is echoed by the athletes as well.
“I think it has kind of lit a fire under people who are doing things under clean sport,” Welch, the Louisville swimmer, said. “All the athletes who are clean, I think it gives them a little motivation to be like ‘hey just because you’re breaking the rules and you’re taking all these caveats, we will still be better than you.’”
The Enhanced Games open in Las Vegas on May 24. Within sports, eyes will be turned to the event; sports fans, anti-doping agencies, pharmaceutical executives and regulators alike, all waiting to see if a $1.2 billion bet on the human body pays off. But the most important audience may be the thousands of elite athletes still competing clean, still earning almost nothing, quietly doing the math.