Enhanced Video games: audacious plan for sporting occasion with out drug testing | Medicine in sport

An Olympic-styled competitors for drug-taking athletes is being launched by an Australian entrepreneur.

Melbourne-born, London-based businessman, Aron D’Souza is the president of Enhanced Video games, a coalition of athletes, medical doctors and scientists. He plans to stage the inaugural video games of no drug testing in December subsequent yr, with two high-profile Australian athletes amongst these expressing curiosity.

The competitors is difficult the Olympic Video games mannequin which, he says, is damaged.

“The IOC (Worldwide Olympic Committee) has successfully been a one-party state operating the world of sport for 100 years,” D’Souza instructed AAP. “And now the opposition social gathering is right here. We’re prepared for a battle. I do know they’ll play soiled. I do know they’ll threaten us. However in the end we all know that we’re morally right.”

5 sports activities classes – observe and discipline, swimming, weightlifting, gymnastics, and fight sports activities – will likely be on this system of the Enhanced Video games, to be held yearly.

Australia’s Olympic chef de mission for Paris 2024 and former Olympic gold medallist Anna Meares says she is appalled by the idea. “It’s a joke, to be trustworthy. Unfair, unsafe — I simply don’t suppose that is the fitting solution to go about sport,” she stated.

D’Souza stays defiant: “Athletes are adults … they usually have a proper to do with their physique what they want – my physique, my alternative; your physique, your alternative,” he stated. “And no authorities, no paternalistic sports activities federation, needs to be making these selections for athletes – notably round merchandise which can be FDA regulated and accepted.”

D’Souza stated there was nice curiosity about any restrict to human endeavours. “It’s not only a query of can we break the nine-second 100 metre, I’m positive we’ll,” he stated. “I wish to see a 40, 50, 60-year-old break world data as a result of efficiency drugs is the rod to anti-ageing, it’s the path to the fountain of youth. Nothing will enhance the productiveness of our society greater than stopping ageing. It feels like science fiction now however we reside sooner or later, take a look at the rise of synthetic intelligence and different applied sciences.

“And the explanation why anti-ageing has been so stymied within the scientific neighborhood is as a result of tons of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} of taxpayer cash world wide goes to fund anti-science authorities – ie WADA, USADA, Sports activities Integrity Australia – whose job it’s to cease scientific progress. The fact is that the IOC and WADA have created an unsafe system which has pressured using efficiency enhancements underground.”

A location for the inaugural Enhanced Video games was but to be settled however a metropolis wouldn’t have to spend exorbitant funds to host, as Olympic cities do, he stated. “By decreasing it from 13,000 (Olympic) athletes to possibly a few thousand, no specialist infrastructure – as an alternative of costing $100 billion to ship this, it should price double-digit hundreds of thousands,” D’Souza stated.

D’Souza stated competing athletes can be given shares in Enhanced Video games, a for-profit entity which he was self-funding but in addition attracting curiosity from traders in California’s Silicon Valley, the situation of many start-up and world tech corporations together with Apple and Google.

“Should you take part, you’re going to get inventory within the league and be a co-owner and that’s actually vital to us as a result of that’s going to be a chance for athletes to generate wealth,” he stated. “I assumed that when you had been an Olympian and gained a gold medal, your life is made – it’s not the case. It’s unhappy to see individuals who have achieved the very best stage of human excellence they usually’re residing an objectively impoverished existence. On the similar time you’ve these sports activities bureaucrats incomes hundreds of thousands.”

The Enhanced Video games web site bears an inventory of ‘enhanced world data’ which celebrates the achievements of athletes stripped of medals and data for doping.

“The IOC has dedicated itself to vilifying enhanced athletes,” it reads. “Every Olympiad, one other cohort of courageous athletes units new world data, solely to have their medals revoked, their careers suspended, and their names dragged by means of the mud. It’s time to finish this oppressive cycle. The Enhanced Video games hereby reinstates the world data set by the next athletes and commends them for his or her bravery.”

The checklist contains seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, who was later stripped of his medals for testing constructive to performance-enhancing medication.