The Olympic rings on the Eiffel Tower for the 2024 Paris Games. The global sporting event has always been against performance-enhancing drugs but the Enhanced Games could be ready to challenge that. NEW YORK – On a recent morning this fall, Aron D’Souza was at home in London expecting a long-anticipated delivery – a vintage set of the “Great Books of the Western World”, a collection with over 50 volumes of philosophy, history and literature published in the 1950s by Encyclopaedia Britannica, including “Faust”, Freud’s “On Narcissism” and “The Hippocratic Oath”.
“It’s like 200 kilos’ worth of books,” D’Souza said in a video call. “This is now my task over the next decade, to read all of these books.” “The Hippocratic Oath”, which is a guide to ethical standards in medicine, should be an interesting one for D’Souza.
In the summer of 2023, D’Souza shocked the sports world with an announcement that he was creating an event called the Enhanced Games, which he said would be a far-ranging athletic competition seeking to challenge the Olympics by allowing participants to use a variety of banned substances, including performance-enhancing drugs. Reactions after the announcement were overwhelmingly negative. Critics, including representatives from anti-doping agencies and sports commissions, called the concept a “clown show” and said it was “dangerous and irresponsible”, while the International Olympic Committee (IOC) told multiple .