James Magnussen knows he’s a puppet in a trillion-dollar play.
And he’s fine with that, given he could earn more money swimming for less than two minutes in Las Vegas than he did in eight years as a clean athlete.
Magnussen, on performance enhancing drugs, will race at the inaugural Enhanced Games in the so-called Sin City on Sunday night (Monday AEST).
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The financial lure is substantial for the Australian, a two-time Olympian and dual 100m freestyle world champion who retired from swimming in 2018, until the arrival of Enhanced Games.
Magnussen will swim the 50m freestyle and 100m freestyle in Vegas with $US250,000 ($A358,000) prizemoney for race winners; and a $US1 million ($A1.4 million) bonus for breaking the 100m freestyle world record.
That bonus is also on offer to anyone breaking the 100m sprint world record at the inaugural Games, a multi-sports event with no drug testing founded by an Australian.
The Melbourne-born entrepreneur, Aron D’Souza, has since left the company that became The Enhanced Group.
On May 8, the company officially launched on the New York Stock Exchange with a reported $1.2 billion enterprise valuation.
“I am kind of a zero-one kind of guy. I like being in early variations of the business, that is when it’s exciting,” D’Souza told AAP.
“In the end, I am not an event organiser. I am a philosopher.
“And I feel very happy about where not just the business, but the movement, is.”
In D’Souza’s vision, Enhanced Games is the vehicle to build “super humanity – humans 2.0”; to stop a stigma around using medically-supervised enhancements in society.
And to make a lot of money doing so – the performance enhancing drugs being taken by Magnussen and other athletes are being marketed and sold by The Enhanced Group.
“It may sound a bit science fiction,” D’Souza has said.
“It may or may not take a long time to develop. But if we get it right, it’s laying a claim to what I believe will be the largest industry of all time.”
Australian swimmer James Magnussen is racing for riches at the inaugural Enhanced Games. Credit: AAP
The industry is effectively the age-old search for the fountain of youth.
“Performance medicine is the road to anti-ageing; it’s the route to the fountain of youth,” D’Souza has said.
“Nothing will improve the productivity of our society more than preventing ageing.”
Which is where Magnussen and other Enhanced Games athletes come in: they’re the shopfront window for the industry.
Magnussen was the first athlete in the world to commit to Enhanced Games, to feature swimming, athletics, and weightlifting.
And he knew from the outset that, given the stakes, there was no margin for error.
“Me being the first athlete on board, we have to get this perfect,” Magnussen has told AAP.
“It’s in everyone’s best interest for me, A, to swim fast, B, to prove that this process can be done safely and, C, to document that for everybody to see.”
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