Faster, higher, stronger, and full of drugs. The Billionaire quest to hack sports.

He was bigger, stronger, and quicker than he’d ever been in his life. And the cocktail of chemicals coursing through Kristian Gkolomeev’s body had helped him pulverize the 50-meter freestyle faster than anyone in history.

At any major competition, that turbocharged swim would have had Gkolomeev thrown out and banned. Instead, it earned him the biggest paycheck of his career: $1 million.

The world record wasn’t recognized by any major sporting 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 backers, an organization known as the Enhanced Games, weren’t trying to rewrite the old history books.

With investors that include venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr., Enhanced is attempting to push sports into a world of logical and physical extremes, unencumbered by the rules, regulations or doping controls of traditional competition. They plan to host their own Olympic-style competition in Las Vegas next year with a roster that already includes the British swimmer Ben Proud, who won silver at Paris 2024, and U.S. sprinter Fred Kerley, a multiple world champion.

The World Anti-Doping Agency has 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 finally paying athletes what they deserve.

For Gkolomeev, a 32-year-old who has represented Greece at four Summer Olympics and is the father of a toddler, the debate boiled down to this: Make another four years of sacrifices for one last shot at a medal, or close that chapter forever for a modicum of financial security. Over 14 years as a pro, his career earnings had amounted to roughly $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 had grappled with the ethical quandary and come out on the side of trying something different. The Enhanced project had realigned his entire worldview on professional sports.

“For this money," he says, “I probably needed five, six careers."

The idea for a no-testing, whatever-it-takes, free-for-all version of the Olympics has an extensive history. For as long as performance enhancement has been around, there have been thought exercises and barroom debates that ask, what if athletes could just take everything? How fast would humans run? How high might they jump? How many home runs could they crush?

The philosophical arguments against it, meanwhile, have centered on sporting integrity—the idea that performance should be generated through sweat, focus, and skill, unassisted by potentially dangerous chemicals.

But the Enhanced Games have a different read on what constitutes a level playing field. They are taking taboos and turning them into hacks. Technological advantages, such as ultra-buoyant swimsuits, are encouraged. And the unapologetic use of performance-enhancing drugs is a given, tapping into the larger, often controversial movement that is challenging the rules on what we eat, how we age, and what our bodies need.

In fact, performance-enhancing products underpin the entire enterprise.

The Enhanced Games have no corporate sponsors or broadcast deals. Instead, they have built their revenue model around the sale of 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 isn’t a medical doctor, but rather holds a degree from Oxford and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Melbourne. Though he has spent much of his career in tech, it was his involvement in a high-stakes legal battle that first earned him attention in the U.S.: He takes credit for devising the strategy behind Thiel’s litigation that ultimately bankrupted Gawker Media. (That said, the most surprising line on D’Souza’s CV is his role as the Honorary Consul of Moldova in Australia.)

“I’m addicted to the action," he says.

In 2023, D’Souza decided that the action was in sports. So he founded the Enhanced Games to correct what he viewed as rampant hypocrisy that left athletes not only underpaid, but also limited in their potential by constantly shifting and arbitrary rules.

“Let’s remember in 1896, when Baron Pierre de Coubertin invents the modern Olympiad, the line was about amateur versus professional," says D’Souza, 40. “It was somehow viewed that being a professional athlete was cheating. It was doping…That took nearly 100 years to go away."

D’Souza speaks in the sweeping terms of a person convinced he can fix any problem—market forces and social change, inefficiencies and revolutions. He says his dream is to one day build a trillion-dollar company. Beyond that, he also believes that he can usher in new ways of living, in which performance-enhancement isn’t reserved for elite athletes, but becomes a daily fact of life.

“In 10 years time, I imagine we will not even be talking about pharmacological enhancements," D’Souza says. “This is gonna be so commonplace, it’s going to be like Ozempic. Everyone’s going to be doing it…"

“What I’d like to be remembered for is not bringing the Enhanced Games to life, but bringing the enhanced age into existence," he adds. “Who would want to be a Human 1.0 when you can exist in the world of Humans 2.0?"

First, though, he needed to create Swimmer 2.0.

Gkolomeev first learned about the Enhanced Games when he heard an experienced coach named Brett Hawke appear on a podcast. Hawke himself had signed up to the organization after hearing D’Souza on the Joe Rogan podcast last year.

Hawke, an Australian-born former coach of the Auburn swimming team, explained that in his years of pacing the pool deck, his greatest frustration was seeing athletes earn less than they deserved.

“Olympic swimmers, they always struggled," Hawke says. “The athletes that I trained, these are the best swimmers in the world and they should be regarded as such."

Gkolomeev felt that pain sharply. After last summer’s Paris Games, he was sitting at a crossroads in his career. He’d 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 facing 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 would need to do something else. Plus, Gkolomeev couldn’t shake the feeling that others in the pool might not have always played by the same rules. His suspicions were borne out when it emerged last year that 23 Chinese swimmers had tested positive for a banned substance before the Tokyo Olympics and been cleared by their country’s national doping agency.

“As athletes, we know if something is sketchy or not," Gkolomeev says. “I definitely know that I haven’t competed against athletes that have been doing everything according to WADA rules…They win prize money that you were probably supposed to win."

“I was always saying to myself, give me what these guys are taking and, you know, I will be unbeatable."

As it happened, the Enhanced Games were offering swimmers precisely that opportunity. Gkolomeev talked it over 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 did research, consulted doctors, and spent hours interrogating ChatGPT to explore this new realm of possibility.

Hawke had 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 began working with Gkolomeev, Hawke had adjusted his plan to five days a week to prevent burnout. Even so, sessions could be 20% more intense than they’d been during Gkolomeev’s career and the turnaround times would be unprecedented. He expected to complete a traditional 12-week training bloc in only six.

“I’m thinking it’s endless," Hawke says. “Where’s the limit?"

The harder part was navigating the perception from the outside world. All over the swimming ecosystem, former friends and acquaintances told Hawke that he was making an embarrassing mistake. He could talk about small doses and medical supervision all he wanted, but critics, including WADA, insisted that Enhanced was putting athletes in danger and setting a profoundly toxic example.

“I’ve lost friends over this. I’ve lost colleagues," Hawke says. “I wasn’t naive enough to think that this 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 had faithfully complied with every rule of life as a drug-tested athlete—the 6 a.m. knocks on his door, the supervised urine collection, and the constant updating of his whereabouts so testers could find him. All of that was about to end.

He contacted the antidoping authorities at WADA to let them know: Kristian Gkolomeev should no longer be their concern.

In order to figure out which performance-enhancing drugs he should take, Gkolomeev first needed to learn which parts of his performance stood to be upgraded.

Guided by his doctor in Orange County, Calif., he underwent a battery 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 get stronger. Gkolomeev had always gotten the impression that no matter what he ate or how he trained, he hit a ceiling when he tried to gain more useful muscle. He also wanted to recover faster. With chemical help, both would be easy to fix.

Gkolomeev began “the protocol," as he calls it, early in the year by microdosing three different drugs for a short spell, a mix of steroid hormones such as testosterone or its derivatives, metabolic regulators, 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 for an athlete seeking immediate results, that’s because it is. When nothing is banned, there’s no reason to look for workarounds. No one has to bother with elaborate prescriptions to avoid detection or slower-acting alternatives.

Immediately, Gkolomeev identified a boost during recovery. He used to come home from a hard practice and vegetate on the couch, shattered by exhaustion. Now, it seemed as though someone had put in fresh batteries.

Then came the changes he could see, not just feel. In the space of three weeks, he was up 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 might be, he had packed on 13 pounds of lean muscle.

“I feel different in the water, outside 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 within a night 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. That much he was prepared for. The strange surprise was how quickly his body was evolving.

“When you change your body and you become stronger, it changes everything inside the water, your buoyancy, your resistance," he says. “You need to change small things in the stroke, in your technique—I’m much heavier in the water."

Because of that, neither Gkolomeev nor Hawke went to North Carolina in May expecting a serious attempt at the César Cielo record. Even with a faster, more buoyant 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 hopping on a plane to attend in person.

But from the moment Gkolomeev dove in that Tuesday, he knew he was motoring. Fifty meters. One length of an Olympic swimming pool, all in a single breath. As he pounded through the water, Gkolomeev sent waves rolling into the empty lanes beside him. And when he reached for the wall, he spun around to look at the clock: 20.89. It was a time he’d never imagined in two decades of striving.

It was also more cash than he’d ever considered possible in his former life of doing things by the book. But there it was, a round million, printed on a giant novelty check.

The reaction to Gkolomeev’s swim came swiftly. There was elation from like-minded fans who shared D’Souza’s views on the contradictions of modern sports. There was also a barrage of abuse from those who called Gkolomeev a cheater. 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.

“This," he typed, “is sad."

The following month, World Aquatics went even further in June when, in the name of sporting integrity, it adopted a new bylaw that gave it the power to ban any athlete, coach, trainer, or doctor who “actively supported or endorsed a sporting event or competition that embraces scientific enhancements that include the use of Prohibited Substances or Prohibited 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 sporting 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," D’Souza says. “When they lose control of it, it’s all over for them."

That’s why D’Souza is targeting 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 plenty 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 doubts 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 them to fill out his fields when the Games come to life next May in Vegas, 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’s running on himself. He’ll have just one objective: sweeping up more of the paychecks that swimming clean never earned him. Should he best his own mark in the 50-meter freestyle, he’ll collect another $1 million.

“I know what I did in my career," Gkolomeev says. “I know I’ve been clean, I’ve been fair to everybody. And yeah, I have no regrets."

Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com