Lance Armstrong’s Fuel Guru Reboots. His Quest? Kill Gatorade

“Is that Allen Lim?” Cycling fans crowd around the man wearing the aviator glasses and a VIP lanyard. It’s day five of the 600-mile 2013 USA Pro Challenge in the Colorado Rockies, one of the country’s highest-profile cycling races. But Lim, the 5’6″ guy attracting attention in the team parking lot near the start of the day’s race in Vail, isn’t a rider. He’s a sports physiologist.

“I am entirely anonymous everywhere except at a bicycle race,” he says after posing for a few photos in the August heat. But at an event like this, the 41-year-old mad scientist of cycling is famous for hacking the sweaty, chaotic performances of some of the world’s best athletes. He’s the guy who told Floyd Landis to pour bottles of water onto his head while en route to winning the 2006 Tour de France, the guy who used rice cookers to turn a tiny cycling squad called Team Slipstream into one of the biggest names in the sport, the guy who stuffed Lance Armstrong’s jersey with ice-filled panty hose. (Not to mention the guy who flew to Washington, DC, to give then-president George W. Bush tips on his riding form.)

But Lim is here today with his sights set on a target larger than any particular race: the estimated $7 billion-plus sports-drink industry. Lim says that Gatorade, Powerade, and their ilk rely so much on artificial and excessive ingredients that their effects are actually the opposite of what’s intended—making athletes not lean and mean but sick and sluggish. With Skratch Labs, his company based in nearby Boulder, he’s dreaming up products that change the way those athletes fuel themselves. At the Skratch Labs kitchen trailer in the parking lot, folks are jockey­ing for free samples of the company’s signature Exercise Hydration Mix powder. “I haven’t touched Gatorade since I tried your mix!” a fan gushes. “Taking Gatorade out!” Lim cries with his typical giddiness, slapping the guy a high five.

Lim has a right to sound cocky. In less than three years, Skratch Labs has grown from three employees to 19, and its all-natural hydration mix is now sold in 2,500 locations nationwide, from REI to Whole Foods Market. There’s also a pair of cookbooks that translate endurance-sports concepts like ATP synthesis and glyco­gen depletion into fried rice and tikka masala recipes. And along with a recently launched high-sodium pre-exercise drink and daily electrolyte mix that competes against flavored-water beverages, the company also plans to release an oral rehydration solution comparable to Pedialyte.

But the competition is just as fierce in the world of sports nutrition as it is in pro cycling—and just as messy. Two other companies have launched drinks similar to Lim’s: One is the relative giant behind Clif Bars, and the other, Osmo Nutrition, was founded by Lim’s erstwhile partner, who once upon a time helped him develop his celebrated drink-mix recipe.

There’s heat from behind as well; other associates from Lim’s past have written him off, convinced that he’s as dirty as he is enthusiastic. Subsequent to working with him, Landis and Armstrong were exposed as dopers, a fact that has more than tainted Lim’s legacy. Some critics and past associates have accused Lim of turning a blind eye to, or even abetting, some of the sport’s worst excesses. At the very least, they wonder whether Lim’s science can take full credit for any of those standout performances. That’s another reason Lim is here—to throw off the taint of association and reclaim his good name. He sounds typically confident. “There is nobody else who can do what we can do,” he says with the swagger of a coach who’s focused on the awards podium. “If you don’t put yourself on the front line, you’re way off the back.”

“This is ‘no-duh’ science,” Lim says. It’s early November and he’s explaining the basics of his hydration mix to reps of an online sports-nutrition retailer at Skratch Labs’ headquarters, a 6,500-square-foot warehouse and office space in East Boulder that’s filled with the detritus of frenzied work and play: shipping boxes and bike helmets and distribution maps and yoga balls. To make room for his presentation, Lim puts away a stand-up paddleboard left on an office table.

The presentation’s no-duh science, it turns out, is a complicated stew of thermo­regulation, fluid dynamics, and intestinal metabolism—but Lim plows through it like it’s an action movie, weaving in metaphors involving sumo wrestlers crammed into an airplane. He usually comes across as a determinedly upbeat ball of energy, and his “Wow, neato!” excitement infuses everything he does, whether it’s testing his product by putting firefighters through repeated workouts wearing 60 pounds of gear or developing prerace cooling regimens for the Joe Gibbs Racing Nascar team so members can cope with the heat.

That enthusiasm carries over to the free informal training camps he organizes for his pro-cycling buddies. As a result, cyclists tend to love the guy. “Allen is everyone’s personal Yoda,” pro cyclist Taylor Phinney says. “He’s got the wisdom of a thousand years, and he’s trying to build up everyone around him.” “I don’t know if I’ve met many people who have been so driven to help others,” former Slipstream cyclist Christian Vande Velde says. Ian MacGregor, a onetime pro, agrees. When a blood-flow condition forced MacGregor to retire in 2010, Lim—who had worked with him several years earlier on a development squad of young cyclists—supported him financially. Now MacGregor is CEO of Skratch Labs.

Born in the Philippines to Chinese political refugees who emigrated to the US when their son was not quite 2, Lim became obsessed with cycling after watching the 1985 film American Flyers, starring Kevin Costner as a bike racer and physician who works at a sports-science lab. Lim rode his bicycle incessantly around suburban Los Angeles and was already experimenting with his own sports drink at age 13. (“My mouth feels kind of guey [sic],” he noted in his journal after trying a concoction of honey and water.) A top-10 finisher at the 1988 Junior National Road Cycling Championships, he pursued his PhD at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Applied Exercise Science Laboratory.

In 2005 Lim got an offer from Saris Cycling Group, the company behind PowerTap, to help coach a sponsored rider: Floyd Landis. He thought it would be the perfect opportunity to apply his research—but instead, Lim says, “I really walked into a shit show.” He became a witness to Landis’ doping, at one point having to nurse the rider back to health after a bad blood transfusion. Lim quit, but he agreed to return in a limited role after Landis promised he’d never dope again. A year later, with Lim as his training adviser, Landis won the Tour de France after a spectacular break­away in Stage 17, a brutal 113-mile route through the mountains. But two weeks after the victory, officials announced that doping tests following Landis’ Stage 17 ride had come back positive, a finding Landis vehemently disputed.

Lim says he had suspected Landis was still doping but insists he had no part in it. He does, however, take partial credit for Landis’ now-notorious Stage 17 perfor­mance. “Floyd, like a lot of other riders, was doped out of his mind,” Lim says. “But he won because of rational thinking.” Lim had persuaded Landis to continually pour bottles of cold water on his head that day so he’d be racing in what felt like 65-degree weather, instead of the 100 degrees everyone else was facing.

Still, Lim’s time with Landis was traumatizing. “I was not the guy who helped Floyd Landis dope, but I was the guy who helped Floyd Landis survive doping,” Lim says in a rare moment of open frustration at the accusations he’s faced since. “And some­times I wish I had just let him die.”

Of course, he adds quickly, “I wouldn’t do that.” Instead, after that 2005 Tour de France, he joined forces with a kindred spirit: Jonathan Vaughters, a former pro cyclist determined to clean up the sport. With Lim as his sport-science director, Vaughters launched Team Slipstream, a new kind of cycling program. Lim and Vaughters for the first time put into practice a theoretical concept called the biological passport; it involved tracking an athlete’s bio­logical markers that were the results of doping, such as patterns of red blood cell changes, rather than more fleeting traces of the illegal substances themselves. The team was committed to creating champions without drugs—and for that it turned to Lim’s science.

Lim pulled out all the stops. When riders complained that their intensive regimens, which involved as many as 10 consecutive days of hard training, were too long, he changed the routine to two days on, one day off. When they got sick of PowerBars, Lim adapted a family recipe for zongzi, or rice dumplings, making dozens of bacon-and-egg “rice cakes” each morning. And to maximize riders’ sleep in stifling European hotel rooms, Lim put them to bed in water-cooled body wraps. Then there was the really outlandish stuff, like the ice-filled panty hose that Lim had cyclists stuff under their uniforms during races and the inflatable muscle-compression “space legs” he had them put on afterward.

By its first Tour de France in 2008, Slipstream was known as Team Garmin-Slipstream. “We looked like a bunch of idiots,” Vande Velde says of the odd equip­ment Lim made them wear. But after Vande Velde finished fifth overall, a lot of Lim’s innovations became standard. Soon other teams were employing space legs, and race routes became littered with the soggy remnants of the athletes’ ice socks. Science, it seemed, was winning.

Which made what came next all the more sensational.

In 2010 Lim became director of sport science for Team RadioShack—which was led by Lance Armstrong, around whom doping allegations had been swirling for years. “Up to that point,” Lim says, “I had spent my whole career despising Lance, actively hating everything he stood for.” Lim believes it was Armstrong who inspired Floyd Landis to cheat, Armstrong whom Slipstream’s methods were implicitly challeng­ing. So how could Lim possibly work for him? At the time, Lim spoke of wanting a more focused role—concentrating on science and technology and working primarily with Armstrong—but there was money as well. After the ’09 Tour de France, Lim told Slipstream he wanted to reduce his commitment; as a result, he says, Slipstream wanted to halve his $120,000 salary. Soon after, Armstrong offered him the job for roughly double what Lim had been making. “I felt like I had been taken advantage of,” Lim says. “The cleanest team in the world wasn’t going to take care of me—but the dirtiest guy in the world was.”

Still, Lim says, the decision wasn’t easy. Landis had confirmed to Lim that Armstrong, his former teammate on the US Postal Service squad, had long doped. But Lim saw it as the only option he had at the time as a sports scientist. “If I could transform Lance’s culture,” Lim says of Armstrong’s mindset, “I could change the arms race.”

The experiment didn’t last long. After a crash-plagued 2010 Tour de France, Armstrong retired. By that point, he was under federal investigation for doping while on the US Postal team years earlier. Two years later, he was stripped of his titles and banned from competitive cycling. Armstrong eventually admitted to the allegations.

Armstrong, who didn’t respond to an interview request, insisted in the past that he wash’t doping in 2010, while Lim was working with him, and the US Anti-Doping Agency never accused Lim of any wrongdoing. But for some people, the association was hard to ignore. The guy who championed science over doping had worked closely with the sport’s two biggest cheaters. It didn’t help that when Landis finally admitted to doping, in 2010, he accused Lim of having helped him. Lim claims Landis “wanted to throw me under the bus” for working with Armstrong; Landis, through his lawyer, declined to comment.

But one thing was clear: This time there would be no plucky upstart effort like Slipstream for Lim to fall back on. “Until he’s prepared to come clean with his involvement with Floyd Landis and Lance Armstrong, I am not interested in supporting him in anything he does,” longtime Slipstream team physician Prentice Steffen says. (Vaughters had even less to say about his former ally, declining to comment for this article.)

It was time to start from scratch.

For most of the past century, endurance sports and hydration didn’t mix. Until 1977, international marathons banned runners from drinking in the first 11 kilometers. These days, as mounting research shows that losing more than 2 percent of body mass through dehydration impacts endurance performance, convention has swung toward the opposite extreme. It doesn’t hurt that sports drinks have actively courted exercise scientists. In fact, a 2012 investigation reported in the peer-reviewed BMJ concluded that Gatorade and Powerade are so tied to sports-medicine organizations that the relationships have led to scientifically question­able athletic recommendations benefitting the companies’ bottom lines. For example, the journal reported that in 1996, four years after receiving a $250,000 donation from Gatorade, the nonprofit American College of Sports Medicine issued new hydration guidelines, developed at a Gatorade-funded meeting, advising athletes to “drink as much as tolerable.”

Lim was aware of the hydration debates when he was working with Slipstream, and he knew sports drinks made his riders sick. So he set about trying to tweak them, feeding his cyclists various concoctions during a training camp in Spain before the 2009 Tour de France. He found that the original idea behind Gatorade was accurate: adding electrolytes (salt) and carbohydrates (sugar) to water hastens fluid absorption and replaces nutrients lost to sweating and metabolism. But these days Gatorade and other sports drinks have so many other ingredients like flavorings, coloring agents, and preservatives—not to mention extra carbo­hydrates so they can be marketed as both fuel and hydration products—that their osmolality, or molecular concentration, is greater than blood’s. That means water flows into the gut to dilute the solution, leading to discomfort, bloating, and even hindering rehydration (in worst-case scenarios, this may be via some fairly unpleasant evacuations).