An article on Allen Lim.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/02/skratch-labs/
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 **** 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.”
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.”
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.)
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/02/skratch-labs/