German billionaire behind Enhanced Games is dinosaur egg-collecting film producer

From his London office, the Enhanced Games co-founder Angermayer is plotting to disrupt the world of Athletics, with the help of fellow billionaire Peter Thiel.

The Enhanced Games

The Enhanced Games is setting itself up as a rival to the Olympics with a twist. Athletes will be permitted to use select performance-enhancing drugs, including steroids, with the chance to earn a $1 million payday if they break “significant” world records.

Angermayer co-founded the Enhanced Games with Aron D’Souza, with the aim of safely introducing these drugs into high-level competition.

Notorious investor Thiel has been the poster boy for the games as an early backer. Three-time Olympic swimming medallist James Magnussen emerged in February as an athlete interested in competing in the games, with others allegedly in the pipeline.

The group is looking to raise $300 million for the games, with Angermayer saying he has courted sovereign wealth funds as part of this drive.

Who is Christian Angermayer?

Angermayer made his first millions by co-founding and selling the biotech firm Ribopharma with his professors at Germany’s University of Bayreuth.

Angermayer, who according to Forbes is worth $1.1 billion, now makes a lot of his cash trying to push the boundaries of perceived medical thinking. 

Before steroids, he was an early backer of the psychedelics movement, founding atai Life Sciences in 2018, which is now valued at $244 million.

Angermayer’s first experience with magic mushrooms came when he took a yacht into legal waters with a group of friends.

“It was the single most meaningful thing I’ve ever done or experienced in my life,” he told Scientific American in 2019. “Nothing has ever come close to it.” 

Angermayer told Sci Am that he didn’t touch alcohol for the first 30 years of his life, owing to a teenage fear that his brain cells would die if he drank or smoked.

He now says he will trip on mushrooms in a legal setting twice a year. His home is decorated in psilocybin mushroom sculptures as a hat-tip to this obsession while he has also forked out around $10 million for a collection of eight dinosaur eggs, including that of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, Bloomberg reported.

Angermayer’s combination of wealth and eccentricity means his fingerprints are found in unusual places. He is credited as a producer on several Hollywood movies, including Samuel L. Jackon’s Big Game and Filth, an adaptation of an Irvine Welsh book starring James McAvoy. 

He has said that his push for the Enhanced Games comes from his belief that AI will enable more leisure time, increasing the demand for sports viewing.

However, you’re not likely to find him on the streets of his second home, London. Angermayer says he avoids walking around the U.K. capital’s street out of fear of being the victim of petty crime.

Regulations

Angermayer and his partner D’Souza have high hopes that they can create a new format for sporting excellence, arguing they can facilitate a safe, controlled environment to ensure their athletes aren’t at risk.

In an email interview with Fortune, D’Souza said he can imagine 1 billion people tuning in to watch someone break the 100-meter world record. That would put it up against the world’s biggest sporting events, including its rival summer Olympics.

“By creating an engaging and immersive environment, we’re going to capture the imagination of viewers worldwide, making the Enhanced Games a must-watch event,” D’Souza said.

However, the idea has invited huge criticism.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has condemned the Enhanced Games as a “dangerous and irresponsible concept” that would jeopardize the health of athletes. Several Olympians have supported this claim.

Angermayer has cited an anonymous survey suggesting a significant share of Olympic athletes already covertly use performance-enhancing drugs. Some might argue that would reduce the need for a competition catering to drug users.

D’Souza said Enhanced has hired a top recruiter to source potential athletes for the games, adding they are in advanced conversations with many of them.

“One of the challenges we face with confirming athletes publicly is that despite having had overwhelming interest, we also need to develop plans for the format of the first Games – including which sports and events will take place,” D’Souza said.

There is also concern it will further popularize a growing trend of the general public opting to use these drugs in an environment much less controlled than that proposed at the Enhanced Games.

Naturally, after spending years campaigning to popularize psychedelics, Angermayer is loath to follow regulations in the U.S. or in Europe, for which he gives the latter particular flak.

“The U.S. sets a bad precedent and then Europe is like, you know what? We can make it even worse. We can make it even dumber,” Angermayer told the Secret Leaders podcast last month.

Angermayer has succeeded in his first goal of drumming up huge media attention around the controversial Enhanced Games. But with a wave of detractors, doubts over its commercial appeal, and an unclear roster of athletes, it may be a bridge too far.