Lim says he’s clean in wake of USADA findings, tried to ‘thwart’ Landis’ doping

BOULDER, Colorado (VN) — On April 30, 2010, the deposed former Tour de France champion Floyd Landis sent a now-infamous e-mail to American cycling regulators. In the note, he briefly, yet with a piercing tone, rattled off a quick (and dirty) history of his doping activities. Most of it, according to the tower of evidence the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency amassed, has turned out to be true. Allen Lim says that Landis’ accusations against him were false and that he has testified under oath to that effect.

In that groundbreaking letter, Landis named names. He said Johan Bruyneel showed him how to use testosterone patches in 2002, that Dr. Michele Ferrari took blood from him. He wrote that Armstrong and Bruyneel paid a visit to the UCI’s headquarters to bury a positive test for EPO at the Tour de Suisse in 2002.

He chronicled wholesale doping offenses in 2003, and noted his watching of Armstrong’s blood in a Spanish apartment while the Texan was away. The next year, 2004, saw much of the same according to Landis’ 2010 letter, though Johan Bruyneel had grown “more paranoid.”

By 2005, Landis wrote, he had figured out how to do a bulk of his transfusion “technicals” himself, writing that he “hired Allen Lim as my assistant to help with details and logistics. He helped Levi Leipheimer and prepared the transfusions for Levi and I and made sure they were kept at the proper temperature.”

And though a bulk of Landis’ original memo on doping to authorities has proven true, Lim, a Boulder-based exercise physiologist says this account is inaccurate. In an e-mail, Lim told VeloNews that Landis named him because the former U.S. Postal rider had an axe to grind and knew that Lim was aware of his doping in 2005.

“I believe that Floyd made the accusations he did about me in 2010 because he knew that I knew what he had done in ’05. I also figured, but don’t know, that he was mad at me for working for Lance and that he resented my attempts to thwart his doping,” Lim wrote.

Lim left his position as exercise physiologist at Garmin in 2009 to work with Armstrong at RadioShack.

“While I became aware of Floyd’s attempt to dope himself and Levi [Leipheimer] in 2005, my actions were neither complicit nor complacent and I made it clear that this wasn’t right, encouraging them as much as I could at the time to ride clean,” Lim wrote.

VeloNews attempted to contact both Landis and Leipheimer on Tuesday; Landis did not comment, and Leipheimer did not return a voice message.

Lim, who works with elite-level riders out of his Boulder headquarters, worked with Landis in 2005 and 2006, but said that he was never employed by Landis. In 2005, Lim analyzed Landis’ power files and says he was paid by the Saris Cycling Group. Lim maintained a diary that was used by PowerTap to promote its sponsorship and relations with Landis, Lim wrote.

“The PowerTap was a major part of my doctoral work and Floyd wanted an expert in this realm to help him with his training analysis and feedback. I worked with Floyd as part of my contract with PowerTap in 2005 at the Tour of Georgia, Catalunya, and then after the Dauphiné in his lead up to the 2005 Tour de France as well as at the ‘05 Tour de France itself,” Lim wrote.

In 2006, the year that Landis won the Tour and tested positive for testosterone, Saris paid Lim to analyze Landis’ power files at the Tour only. Lim claims he maintained spreadsheets of Landis’ training data.

“Floyd did not pay me a salary in 2005 or in 2006, though he did take care of miscellaneous expenses when we were together (hotel, some meals, travel expenses, no more than 3k for those two years). Floyd did not employ me,” Lim wrote.

Lim provided information to the federal investigation into Lance Armstrong, he told VeloNews, but USADA did not approach him, though he said he would have given USADA information as well. In that testimony, which Lim provided late in 2010, he says he told federal investigators that “Floyd’s statements in his initial e-mail are false.”

Lim recently trained Taylor Phinney (BMC Racing) and Christian Vande Velde (Garmin-Sharp), among others, over the summer of 2012. Lim runs Boulder’s Skratch Labs, an “active nourishment” company.

“I do believe that the sport has done an incredible job at cleaning itself up over the last five or six years, primarily due to the hard work and risk taken by the riders who are now coming out. There’s an entire generation of cyclists who have never been exposed to what the previous generation have had to see or deal with. Given what has been revealed in the last few months, that fact is pretty incredible and gives me tremendous hope and pride,” he wrote in a separate e-mail to VeloNews.