On May 24, 2026, an entity with ties to Peter Thiel, Donald Trump Jr., and Christian Angermayer will apparently offer athletes $250,000 per event won and potential $1 million bonuses to compete in the “Enhanced Games.”[1] In open defiance of the anti-doping rules found in the World Anti-Doping Code and the UNESCO International Convention Against Doping in Sport, this event allows competitors to use some performance-enhancing drugs (and, possibly, gene editing).

Aron D’Souza, the event’s founder and CEO of an AI adjudication company, defends the model as the “safest sporting event in history” claiming that organizers will pre-screen athletes for potential medical hazards and monitor athletes’ health status while they are competing.[2] However, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has rejected this competition as dangerous and irresponsible, emphasizing athlete health, the risk of powerful substances, and the danger of normalizing performance-enhancing drug use for entertainment and marketing.[3]

This essay gives background to the bodies governing sport, evaluates the competing claims of individual autonomy versus public health, and concludes with a proposal for an enterprise liability-shifting regulatory framework. I argue that athlete bans alone are incomplete, and that sports law should also ask when federations, promoters, teams, sponsors, or parent companies should bear responsibility for the enhancement risks they help create.

I. Anti-doping Governance is a Combination of Hard and Soft Law

WADA is the organization spearheading international efforts to standardize and harmonize anti-doping efforts. WADA has an unusual hybrid structure. Formally, WADA is a Swiss private-law, not-for-profit foundation, but it is composed and funded by both the Olympic Movement and public authorities representing governments. This hybrid design allows WADA to operate between private sport regulation and public legal authority, making international anti-doping governance a mixture of soft law, contractual sport rules, and state-backed legal obligations.[4]

The WADA Code itself functions primarily as soft law—a set of rules enforced through private contracts or informal means between athletes, national federations, and the International Olympic Committee.[5] When an athlete signs up to compete in a federation event, they agree to strict liability, meaning they are responsible for any substance found in their body regardless of intent. The WADA Code is reinforced by the UNESCO International Convention Against Doping in Sport, a 136-page document that governs anti-doping practices across the globe, which provides a hard law foundation by requiring signatory states to align their domestic legislation with WADA standards. For serious first violations, the Code can impose a four-year period of ineligibility, especially when the violation is intentional or involves a non-specified substance or prohibited method.[6]

The Enhanced Games challenges this hierarchy by attempting to operate outside the contractual jurisdiction of traditional federations. In doing so, it raises questions regarding enterprise responsibility: if a private company incentivizes high-risk chemical or biological enhancement, who bears the legal burden if an athlete suffers a catastrophic health failure? Unlike traditional sports, where the athlete often bears the brunt of “strict liability,” the Enhanced Games model suggests a shift toward corporate accountability for medical oversight.

II. Sports Already Draw Blurry Lines Between Risk, Technology, and Enhancement

Broadly speaking, doping refers to athletes’ use of any performance-enhancing methods that are considered to be unethical or that undermine a level playing field in sport.[7] To be against doping depends on the premise that regulators can identify a clear boundary between natural performance and impermissible artificial advantage. But across chemical enhancement, equipment regulation, testing regimes, and competition categories, that boundary is often unclear. Therefore, the legal question should not be limited to whether an individual athlete crossed it; it should instead ask who designed, enforced, or profited from the current boundary lines.

A. Regulating Chemical Risks in Already Physically Risky Sports is Paternalistic

Anti-doping policy can sound paternalistic in sports where athletes already accept serious bodily risk. Free solo climbing, professional football, and mixed martial arts all involve physical danger that spectators, sponsors, and governing bodies permit or even market.[8] A rule telling athletes that physical risk is acceptable but chemical risk is forbidden can look less like a pure safety regulation and more like a judgment about what kinds of risk sport wants to recognize. The line between those risks can be blurred too. For instance, the U.S. 9^th Circuit in Hunt v. Zuffa affirmed that the performance of a doped MMA opponent was not so enhanced by performance-enhancing drugs as to exceed opponent’s consent to battery in fight.[9] In other words, the court treated doping as insufficient, on those facts, to transform the physical contact of an MMA fight into a nonconsensual battery.

B. We Already Regulate Physical Advantages

The same line-drawing problem appears in equipment regulation. As new technologies enter competition, sports regulators must decide which innovations are permissible improvements and which ones distort the nature of the event. In 2009, Swimming’s International Federation moved to ban non-textile polyurethane suits after controversy over whether the suits could aid speed or buoyancy.[10] Similarly, in running events, World Athletics amended rules in 2020 on what shoes competitors could wear, including considerations of availability, prototypes, sole thickness, and shoe construction.[11] Technological advancements though high-tech swimsuits and carbon-plated running shoes already indicate that the boundary between acceptable enhancement and impermissible advantage is unclear. Even outside the context of drugs or biological modification, sports law governance faces the problem of deciding how much human performance may be shaped by external intervention.

C. Testing Results are Uncertain and Discriminatory

Testing uncertainty adds another reason for caution before imposing the harshest sanctions. In Shelby Houlihan’s case, the transnational Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) imposed a four-year ban after testing positive for nandrolone, an anabolic steroid, while Houlihan argued that a pork burrito could have caused the result.[12]

Kathryn Henne, in her book Testing for Athlete Citizenship, argues that anti-doping testing can be seen as needless surveillance and can be discriminatory or arbitrary, including for women and people from lower-income countries.[13] She notes that athletes caught and punished for doping are not always the ones using performance-enhancing drugs to cheat. In the case of female athletes, violations of fair play can stem from their inherent biological traits.

D. Creating a Separate Category May Improve Competition Fairness

International bodybuilding competitions already separate a natural category from a performance-enhanced one. Kayser, Mauron, and Miah argued in 2007 that current anti-doping policy may create health problems of its own and that medically supervised doping could be ethically preferable to hidden, unsupervised use.[14] If enhancement exists anyway, disclosure and medical supervision may be safer than denial and underground use.

III. Shifting Responsibility from the Athlete to the Federation May Be a Way Forward

Modern sports enhancement is produced by systems, not just individual athletes. So rather than a binary choice between total prohibition and a separate, unregulated competition category, a more sustainable model may involve a regulatory framework that shifts liability to enterprises.

Just as enterprise liability for defective products can move responsibility from the individual user to the commercial actor that designs, markets, and profits from the risk, perhaps the same can be done with sports. Doing so could still preserve athlete sanctions for serious intentional doping, but adds enterprise duties of disclosure, independent testing, medical monitoring, insurance, and compensation when organizations fail to manage doping risk.

The stakes of maintaining the current athlete-centric model are high. History demonstrates that when regulators focus solely on punishing individual competitors, the systemic exploitation of human biology continues unabated. During the German Democratic Republic (GDR) regime, doctors and coaches administered the anabolic steroid Oral-Turinabol to athletes without explaining what the substances actually were.[15] More recently, WADA banned Russia in 2019 from international sports competitions for four years after the country was found to be running a years-long, state-sponsored doping scheme.[16] In both cases, institutions encouraged, concealed, or normalized enhancement practices. Punishing only the athlete therefore misidentifies the source of the harm; it leaves untouched the officials that create the conditions under which athletes are pressured or deceived into modifying their bodies for competitive gain.

Instead of asking only whether the athlete should be banned, regulators should ask what duties should fall on the league, promoter, federation, team, sponsor, or parent company that designs the competitive environment. The U.S. appeals court in Hunt pointed towards this path when it considered UFC’s alleged representations, testing practices, and role as event organizer.[17] While the court ultimately rejected Mark Hunt’s claim that UFC encouraged a doped athlete fight, it allowed legal theories tied to Hunt’s claim that he suffered actionable harm because he would have withdrawn from the fight had the promoter disclosed the truth about his opponent’s doping status.[18]

In WADA-regulated sport, transferring liability to the parent organization could mean stronger sanctions for support personnel and teams that facilitate doping and larger consequences for institutions that create incentives for hidden enhancement. In enhanced competitions like the Enhanced Games, it could mean mandatory health funds, physician oversight, and strict sponsor or promoter liability for misleading safety claims. A neutral policy could therefore keep WADA’s four-year ban for serious intentional doping while requiring the parent enterprise to bear costs when its business model increases the risk of chemical coercion, hidden enhancement, or unreliable enforcement.

By shifting the legal focus from “catching individual cheats” to “regulating enterprise designs,” sports law can finally hold the true profit-makers accountable for the physiological risks they help create.

References

[1] John Hoberman, The Enhanced Games: A Techno-Fantasy That Will Fail, 14 Performance Enhancement & Health 100380 (2026), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.peh.2025.100380; Clara Molot, Inside the Enhanced Games, Where Athletes Compete on Steroids. And Growth Hormones. And Adderall., Vanity Fair (Apr. 30, 2026).

[2] J. Whitehead, Enhanced games: Event for doped athletes backed by group who want to ‘cheat death,” N.Y. Times (Mar. 22, 2024).

[3] World Anti-Doping Agency, WADA Condemns Enhanced Games as Dangerous and Irresponsible (May 22, 2025).

[4] World Anti-Doping Agency, Governance, WADA, https://www.wada-ama.org/en/who-we-are/governance.

[5] World Anti-Doping Agency, World Anti-Doping Code art. 1, 2 (2021).

[6] Id. at Art. 10.2.1 (2021).

[7] Kathryn Henne, WADA, the Promises of Law and the Landscapes of Antidoping Regulation. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 33, 306-325 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1555-2934.2010.01116.x.

[8] Bengt Kayser, Alexandre Mauron & Andy Miah, Current Anti-Doping Policy: A Critical Appraisal, 8 BMC Med. Ethics 2, 5-6 (2007).

[9] Hunt v. Zuffa LLC, No. 23-3113, 2025 WL 1164219 at *1 (9th Cir. Apr. 22, 2025) (affirming the lower court’s decision).

[10] Swimming: Hi-Tech Suits Banned, Sky Sports (July 24, 2009).

[11] World Athletics Modifies Rules Governing Competition Shoes for Elite Athletes, World Athletics (Jan. 31, 2020); World Athletics Amends Rules Governing Shoe Technology and Olympic Qualification System, World Athletics (July 28, 2020).

[12] World Athletics v. Houlihan, CAS 2021/O/7977, Award, paras. 5, 26-33, 153 (Ct. Arb. Sport Aug. 27, 2021).

[13] Kathryn Henne, Testing for Athlete Citizenship: Regulating Doping and Sex in Sport (2015).

[14] Bengt Kayser, Alexandre Mauron & Andy Miah, Current Anti-Doping Policy: A Critical Appraisal, 8 BMC Med. Ethics 2, 5-6 (2007).

[15] Kyle James, East Germany’s Doping Program Casts Long Shadow Over Victims, DW.Com (Jan. 10, 2010) https://www.dw.com/en/east-germanys-doping-program-casts-long-shadow-over-victims/a-5968383.

[16] Eric He, What Does ROC Stand For? And Why Did Russia Get Banned from Olympics?, NBC Olympics (Feb. 5, 2022).

[17] See Hunt, 2025 WL 1164219 at *1.

[18] Id.