Over 40 international athletes are set to compete in the controversial Enhanced Games on Sunday, May 24, 2026, at a custom-built arena inside Resorts World Las Vegas.
The single-night event allows performance-enhancing drugs and offers a $25 million total prize pool.
Organizers position the competition as a platform to push human performance boundaries.
The venture is backed by Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr.'s venture capital firm, 1789 Capitol, while the publicly-traded Enhanced Group uses the event to research drug effects and sell supplements.
Medical professionals have raised significant ethical concerns about the health risks associated with the event's permissive stance on banned substances.
"I understand that there's a very large commercial opportunity for this company, but it is something I think borders on the lines of ethics," said Dr. Aaron Baggish, a professor of medicine at the University of Lausanne.
Baggish declined an invitation to join the event as a doctor.
Baggish noted that public understanding of safety is flawed because FDA approval does not equal safe usage when drugs are taken in extreme doses for athletic performance.
"We have to be careful not to confuse short-term success with long term implications," he said.
The medical professor warned that while athletes may complete the event without immediate visible issues, high doses of substances like testosterone greatly increase the risk of heart disease over time.
"But what happens to them three years from now, five years from now?" Baggish asked.
Baggish likened the presence of medical supervision at the games to a physician watching someone smoke cigarettes and claiming they can make the smoking habit safe.
"That's akin to me saying: If I'm a physician watching you smoke cigarettes, I can make smoking safe for you," he said.
The event was initially founded by Australian entrepreneur Aron D'Souza in 2023, before CEO Max Martin took over management in November.
"I imagined a new kind of competition, one where science and sport and society could evolve together, where we stopped apologizing for progress and started to embrace it," D'Souza said.
D'Souza previously claimed that independent medical and scientific commissions would oversee the administration of substances using fully personalized protocols to ensure safety.
"The Enhanced Games do not promote the indiscriminate use of restricted substances," he said.
The founder noted that the event aims to reduce risks by bringing unregulated doping practices under strict clinical supervision.
"Instead, we advocate for the safe, responsible and clinically supervised use of performance enhancements," D'Souza said.
The multi-sport event features swimming, track and field, weightlifting, and a strongman deadlift showdown.
Individual event purses stand at $500,000, with $250,000 awarded to first-place winners, alongside a $1 million bonus for breaking world records in the 100-meter sprint or 50-meter freestyle.
According to data released by organizers, 91 percent of the competitors used testosterone, 79 percent used human growth hormone, and 62 percent used stimulants.
These substances are entirely prohibited under standard International Olympic Committee and World Anti-Doping Agency guidelines.
High-profile participants include U. S.
Olympic gold-medalist swimmers Cody Miller and Hunter Armstrong, British Olympic silver-medalist Ben Proud, and American sprinter Fred Kerley.
Kerley enters the event following a recent two-year ban by the Athletics Integrity Unit for missing drug tests.
