Faster, higher, stronger, full of drugs. The Billionaire Quest to Hack Sports.

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limited All rights reserved. Joshua Robinson, The Wall Street Journal 13 min read 25 Oct 2025, 07:33 IST Kristian Gkolomeev during a swim practice in Las Vegas. (Photo: Mikayla Whitmore for WSJ) Summary A new sports competition lures athletes to openly use performance-enhancing drugs and break records with million-dollar paychecks. Is it a grotesque spectacle or pushing the limits of human achievement? One Tuesday last February, alone in a pool in North Carolina, a former Olympic swimmer took exactly 20.89 seconds to prove that his highly customized doping program was working. He was bigger, stronger and faster than he had ever been in his life. And the cocktail of chemicals coursing through Kristian Gkolomeev’s body helped him pulverize the 50-meter freestyle faster than anyone in history. At any major competition, that turbocharged swim would have thrown Gkolomeev out and banished. Instead, it earned him the biggest payday of his career: $1 million. The world record was not recognized by any major sports authority, nor did it officially topple the mark of 20.91 set by Brazil’s César Cielo in 2009. But that was the whole point. Gkolomeev’s supporters, an organization known as the Improved Games, did not try to rewrite the old history books. With investors including venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr. include, Enhanced aims to push sport into a world of logical and physical extremes, unencumbered by the rules, regulations or drug controls of traditional competition. They plan to host their own Olympic-style competition in Las Vegas next year with a roster that already includes British swimmer Ben Proud, who won silver at Paris 2024, and American sprinter Fred Kerley, a multiple world champion. View full image Kristian Gkolomeev represented Greece at four Summer Olympics. (Photo: Mikayla Whitmore for WSJ) The World Anti-Doping Agency called it a “dangerous and irresponsible” undertaking. Seb Coe, the president of World Athletics, dismissed any participants as “moronic”. But organizers argue that they are simply more transparent than the regular Olympics – and ultimately pay athletes what they deserve. For Gkolomeev, a 32-year-old who represented Greece at four Summer Olympics and is the father of a toddler, the debate came down to this: Make four more years of sacrifices for one last shot at a medal, or close that chapter forever for some financial security. Over 14 years as a pro, his career earnings totaled approximately $200,000. Gkolomeev understood that widely publicized doping would mean he could never go back to the swimming world he knew. But by the end of last year, he wrestled with the ethical dilemma and stepped aside to try something else. The Enhanced Project realigned his entire worldview about professional sports. “For this money,” he says, “I probably needed five, six careers.” The idea for a free-for-all version of the Olympics without testing, whatever it takes, has an extensive history. For as long as performance enhancement has existed, there have been thought exercises and barroom debates asking, what if athletes could just take it all? How fast would people run? How high can they jump? How many home runs could they smash? The philosophical arguments against it, meanwhile, centered on sporting integrity – the idea that performance should be generated by sweat, focus and skill, unassisted by potentially dangerous chemicals. But the Improved Games have a different reading of what constitutes a level playing field. They take taboos and turn them into hacks. Technological advantages, such as ultra-swimsuits, are encouraged. And the unapologetic use of performance-enhancing drugs is a given, tapping into the larger, often controversial movement that challenges the rules about what we eat, how we age and what our bodies need. In fact, performance-enhancing products support the entire enterprise. The Enhanced Games have no corporate sponsors or broadcast deals. Instead, they built their revenue model around selling training plans and supplements. The organization’s website currently offers three testosterone-boosting products, which it hopes to begin selling later this year. The lawyer and entrepreneur behind it is dr. Aron D’Souza, who is not a medical doctor, but rather a degree from Oxford and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Melbourne. Although he spent much of his career in technology, it was his involvement in a major legal battle that first earned him attention in the US: He takes credit for designing the strategy behind Thiel’s litigation that ultimately bankrupted Gawker Media. (That said, the most surprising line on D’Souza’s resume is his role as the Honorary Consul of Moldova in Australia.) View full image Aron D’Souza is the founder of the Enhanced Games. (Photo: Mikayla Whitmore for WSJ) “I’m addicted to the action,” he says. In 2023, D’Souza decided that the action was in sports. So he founded the Improved Games to correct what he saw as rampant hypocrisy that not only underpaid athletes but also limited them in their potential through constantly shifting and arbitrary rules. “Let’s remember in 1896, when Baron Pierre de Coubertin invented the modern Olympics, the line was about amateur versus professional,” said D’Souza, 40. “Somehow being a professional athlete was considered cheating. It was doping…It took almost 100 years to go away.” D’Souza speaks in the most general terms of a person convinced that he can solve any problem—market forces and social change, inefficiencies and revolutions. He says his dream is to one day build a trillion-dollar company. In addition, he also believes that he can usher in new ways of living, in which performance enhancement is not reserved for elite athletes, but becomes a daily fact of life. “In 10 years, I don’t think we’ll even be talking about pharmacological enhancements,” says D’Souza. “It’s going to be so mundane, it’s going to be like Ozempic. Everyone’s going to do it…” “What I want to be remembered for is not bringing the Enhanced Games to life, but bringing the advanced age to life,” he adds. “Who wants to be a Human 1.0 when you can exist in the world of Humans 2.0?” But first he had to create Swimmer 2.0. Gkolomeev first learned about the Improved Games when he heard an experienced coach named Brett Hawke appear on a podcast. Hawke himself signed up with the organization after hearing D’Souza on the Joe Rogan podcast last year. View Full Image Kristian Gkolomeev gained 13 pounds in a matter of weeks after starting to use performance enhancing drugs. (Photo: Mikayla Whitmore for WSJ) Hawke, an Australian-born former coach of the Auburn swim team, explained that his biggest frustration in his years on the pool deck was seeing athletes earn less than they deserved. “Olympic swimmers, they’ve always struggled,” says Hawke. “The athletes I trained are the best swimmers in the world and they should be considered as such.” Gkolomeev felt that pain keenly. After last summer’s Paris Games, he sat at a crossroads in his career. He finished fifth in the 50-meter freestyle final in 21.59 seconds, coming closer than ever to an Olympic medal in 12 years of trying. The podium was just three hundredths of a second away. So the question that faced him was whether another four-year cycle of discipline and self-denial was worth it for the chance to bridge that blink of an eye. He had no savings, no investments and no assets. At some point he will have to do something else. Moreover, Gkolomeev couldn’t shake the feeling that others in the pool might not have always played by the same rules. His suspicions were confirmed last year when it emerged that 23 Chinese swimmers had tested positive for a banned substance before the Tokyo Olympics and had been cleared by their country’s national drug agency. “As athletes, we know if something is sketchy or not,” says Gkolomeev. “I know for sure that I didn’t compete against athletes who did everything according to WADA rules…They win prize money that you were probably supposed to win.” “I always told myself, give me what these guys take and, you know, I’ll be unbeatable.” As it happened, the Enhanced Games offered swimmers exactly that opportunity. Gkolomeev talked about it with his wife Lindsay, a former swimmer at the University of Alabama. And last fall, she reached out to Enhanced by sending an unsolicited email to the general inbox. Soon Gkolomeev met Hawke and the pair realized that they had never had so many training options available to them. Everything Hawke knew about workload and recovery times went out the window. So he researched, consulted doctors and spent hours interviewing ChatGPT to explore this new possibility. View Full Image Kristian Gkolomeev spent time practicing in Las Vegas, the city to host the first Enhanced Games next May. (Photo: Mikayla Whitmore for WSJ) Hawke has already seen dramatic results working with the Enhanced Games’ first swimmer, a former Olympian from Australia named James Magnussen. They could train six days a week. Instead of taking 24 hours to recover from a workout, he would take 12. They pushed so hard that the barrier was no longer physical, but mental and, as Hawke says, “neurological.” Magnussen was becoming a machine. By the time he started working with Gkolomeev, Hawke had adjusted his plan to five days a week to prevent burnout. Still, sessions could be 20% more intense than they were during Gkolomeev’s career and the turnaround times would be unprecedented. He expected to complete a traditional 12-week training block in just six. “I think it’s endless,” says Hawke. “Where’s the limit?” The harder part was navigating the perception of the outside world. Across the swimming ecosystem, former friends and acquaintances told Hawke he was making an embarrassing mistake. He could only talk about small doses and medical supervision, but critics, including WADA, insisted that Enhanced puts athletes at risk and sets an extremely toxic example. “I’ve lost friends over this. I’ve lost colleagues,” says Hawke. “I wasn’t naive enough to think it wouldn’t have an impact.” Still, Gkolomeev was ready to throw in his lot. In November, he decided there was no going back. For more than a decade, Gkolomeev faithfully followed every rule of life as a drug-tested athlete—the 6 a.m. knock on his door, the supervised urine collection, and the constant updating of his whereabouts so testers could find him. All this was about to end. He contacted the anti-doping authorities at WADA to let them know: Kristian Gkolomeev should no longer be their concern. To figure out which performance-enhancing drugs he should take, Gkolomeev first had to learn which parts of his performance needed to be upgraded. Under the direction of his doctor in Orange County, California, he underwent a series of tests to paint a complete picture of where he was, biologically, as an athlete. They measured everything that could be measured—his heart, his lung capacity, how he absorbed oxygen. What they found was that there was plenty of room for him to grow stronger. Gkolomeev has always gotten the impression that no matter what he eats or how he trains, he’s hit a ceiling when trying to gain more useful muscle. He also wanted to recover faster. With chemical help, both could be easily fixed. Early in the year, Gkolomeev began “the protocol”, as he calls it, by microdosing three different drugs for a short time, a mixture of steroid hormones such as testosterone or its derivatives, metabolic law ulators and FDA-approved growth hormone. (He declined to name the specific products because he didn’t want to encourage anyone to copy his program without medical advice.) If this regimen seems obvious to an athlete looking for immediate results, that’s because it is. When nothing is forbidden, there is no reason to look for solutions. No one needs to bother with elaborate prescriptions to avoid detection or slower-acting alternatives. Gkolomeev immediately identified a boost during recovery. He came home from a hard workout and planted himself on the couch, crushed with exhaustion. Now, it looked like someone put in new batteries. Then came the changes he could see, not just feel. In the space of three weeks he was 5 pounds with no discernible side effects. By the end of his two-month cycle, when he was ready to find out just how fast he could be, he had packed on 13 pounds of lean muscle. “I feel different in the water, out of the water,” he says. “My strength was good, my recovery was good, my confidence got really good. Everything, everything was just so much better. I could recover overnight and then be ready for the next day to push and push more.” On most days he swims less than 1,500 meters, 30 lengths of an Olympic pool, at an intensity high enough to break any amateur. Gkolomeev is a sprinter, so workouts are focused on building the explosive power to turn him into a torpedo. So much for which he was prepared. The strange surprise was how quickly his body developed. “When you change your body and you get stronger, it changes everything in the water, your buoyancy, your resistance,” he says. “You have to change little things in the stroke, in your technique – I’m much heavier in the water.” As a result, neither Gkolomeev nor Hawke went to North Carolina in May expecting a serious attempt at the César Cielo record. Even with a faster, livelier suit designed for open water swimming — illegal in regular pool competition — 20.91 seconds seemed out of reach. Hawke even told D’Souza that Gkolomeev probably needed more preparation. It wasn’t worth getting on a plane to attend in person. But from the moment Gkolomeev dove in that Tuesday, he knew he was riding. Fifty meters. One length of an Olympic swimming pool, all in a single breath. As he punched through the water, Gkolomeev sent waves rolling into the empty lanes beside him. And as he reached for the wall, he turned to look at the clock: 20.89. It was a time he never imagined in two decades of pursuit. It was also more cash than he had ever considered possible in his previous life to do things by the book. But there it was, a round million, printed on a giant novelty check. The response to Gkolomeev’s swim came quickly. There was excitement from like-minded fans who shared D’Souza’s views on the contradictions of modern sport. There was also a barrage of abuse from those who called Gkolomeev a fraud. Among some of his former peers, there was outright disgust. Four-time Olympic champion Leon Marchand, France’s hero of the Paris Games, wrote as much under one of Gkolomeev’s Instagram posts. “That,” he typed, “is sad.” The following month in June, World Aquatics went even further when, in the name of sporting integrity, it passed a new bylaw that gave it the power to ban any athlete, coach, trainer or doctor who actively supports or endorses a sporting event or competition that involves scientific enhancements involving the use of banned substances or banned methods. Gkolomeev could never return to official competition, even if he wanted to. Enhanced responded in August by filing an $800 million lawsuit in New York’s Southern District against World Aquatics, USA Swimming and WADA, alleging antitrust violations. The filing argues that these sports bodies are trying to organize a de facto boycott of the Enhanced Games. “The central element of their winner-take-all market structure is having that record book,” says D’Souza. “When they lose control of it, it’s all over for them.” That’s why D’Souza targets as many iconic records as he can. As a sport with dozens of different events and clear correlation between an athlete’s engine and his results, swimming offers a lot of low-hanging fruit. But beyond the pool, D’Souza also has Usain Bolt’s 100 meter mark in his sights. And he has no doubt that the talent is there. Thousands of athletes have been in touch since the Enhanced Games Project launched two years ago, he says, with “hundreds of potential Olympians” in that group. D’Souza will need plenty of that to fill out his fields when the Games come to life in Vegas next May, with events in swimming, track and weightlifting—and lavish appearance fees and bonuses for all. Gkolomeev will be there, at that point several cycles into the science experiment he is conducting on himself. He will have only one goal: to collect more of the paychecks that clean swimming never earned him. Should he achieve his own mark in the 50-meter freestyle, he will collect another $1 million. “I know what I have done in my career,” says Gkolomeev. “I know I was clean, I was fair to everyone. And yes, I have no regrets.” Write to Joshua Robinson at [email protected] Get all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Catch the live action on IPL 2024 with the complete IPL Schedule, and their IPL Points Table, also know who currently holds the IPL Purple Cap and IPL Orange Cap. Download TheMint News app to get daily market updates. more topics #sport Read next story