It is almost two years since the American Floyd Landis soared clear of the pack to win the 17th stage of the Tour de France. And it is almost two years since I first set eyes on Allen Lim. We were both in Morzine that afternoon and watched the final kilometres of Floyd’s epic ride from the same vantage point – a large, flat screen on one of the outside broadcast units positioned just behind the finishing line.

“Who’s that guy?” I inquired. “Which one?” “The small Asian guy.” “Oh, that’s Allen Lim.” “Allen Lim?” “Yeah, Floyd’s coach.” He was wearing headphones and being interviewed, but the thing that struck me most was how happy he looked. The guy was absolutely thrilled. Me? I wasn’t happy. For me, Landis’s performance was just too good to be true. I remember looking at the proud American as he stood on the podium and thinking: “This is a doper.”

And I remember frowning at his beaming coach: “And this is his sorcerer.”

So it was somewhat of a surprise to discover that Lim was a key member of Jonathan Vaughters’s staff at Garmin-Chipotle, the cleanest and most ethical team in the Tour de France. Had “JV” lost the plot? Can a leopard change its spots? ALLEN LIM is showing me how he makes his magic potion; it is 6:40 on a Wednesday morning in room 243 of a Novotel in a suburb of Nantes and his fifth working day on the Tour begins with a rice cooker, a frying pan and a small electric hot plate. “What you eat on the bike is fundamental,” he explains, removing rice and eggs and some packets of prosciutto ham from a specially designed case. “In China, they call this ‘chong’.”

For 92 minutes I watch, enthralled, as he applies himself with the precision and devotion of a gourmet chef . . . Pouring the water (1.75 litres) into the cooker and measuring the Calrose rice (1.5 kilos) . . . Frying the prosciutto (20 slices) until crisp and slicing into tiny pieces . . . Lightly scrambling the eggs (12) before mixing them into the prosciutto and rice . . . Dashing the mix with soy sauce and balsamic vinegar . . . Pouring the mix into silicone trays to set and sprinkling with salt and sugar . . . Dividing the mix equally into 64 squares (seven per rider) . . . Wrapping the squares neatly in slips of paper foil.

“Do you think you would find that appe-tising in a race?” he demands, offering me a square. “Yes,” I reply, “it’s delicious.”

Lim, 35, is no ordinary Gordon Ramsay. First out of bed each morning and last to hit the pillow each night, he’s a human dynamo, the heartbeat of Vaughters’s team and the brains behind most of their cutting-edge technology. Every night he spends hours poring over the data from the riders’ on-board computers. He’s found the “space boots” (a massage simulator) to ease sore legs; the “cooling hats” (an air-condi-tioned cap) to help them sleep in sweaty hotels; and the latest, a hand-cleanser, a policy recently introduced on the team bus.

“The culture that Jonathan has created here has always been one of, ‘If you’ve got an idea, speak up’,” Lim smiles. “The cleanser was Shannon Sovndal’s [a team medic] idea. His notion was that if we did something as simple as squirt-in [with a hand cleanser] when you come on to the bus, and squirt-out when you leave, we would eliminate some of the risk of getting sick in the middle of the race.”

Lim has been blessed with a truly brilliant mind. He’s an encyclopaedia of physiology, a wizard with technology and a superb amateur psychologist. Chinese proverbs are (naturally) a speciality and during our 90-minute cookathon I was bombarded with favourite wisdoms and witticisms from everything from Waiting for Godot to The Art of War to Full Metal Jacket.

This is my rifle. There are many like it but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without it my life is useless . . .

However, there is one subject that, two years later, still leaves him curiously tongue-tied: “What happened at Morzine, Allen? Tell me about Floyd.”

THE FIFTH stage of the Tour - a mostly flat 240km to Chateauroux - has just started; we’re sitting on the team bus travelling towards the finish and Lim is retracing the path of his journey through cycling. The younger of two boys born to Chinese immigrants, it began at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 when he watched, enchanted, as the road race passed near his home in the northern suburbs.

He bought an old Schwinn varsity bicycle, joined the Montrose cycling club and four years later finished fifth to George Hin-capie at the junior national championships - four places ahead of a skinny kid from Denver called Jonathan Vaughters. Hinca-pie and Vaughters would go on and make their names as top-class professionals (Hin-capie is riding his 13th Tour) but for Lim it was the end of the road.

“As much as I loved cycling then, and still love cycling now, it wasn’t in my head that I could be a professional,” he says. “I was interested in other things like science and culture. I loved going to class; I loved learning history; I was your classic, very shy nerd growing up in school.”

After completing a degree in physical education at the University of California at Davis, where he coached the cycling team to its first collegiate national championships, he was hired as a resident coach with the US cycling team in Colorado and started a masters in physiology.

It was at the University of Colorado that he encountered Professor Bill Burns, a kindred spirit he describes as his mentor. In 1997 they travelled to Asia to study the physiology of load-carrying in Nepal. “I had this very specific interest in human performance, and so I went off to Nepal with Bill,” he says. “I mean, if you think the Tour de France is hard, you’ve got guys in Eastern Nepal who [weigh] maybe 50 to 55 kilos who are carrying 75 to 100 kilo loads for three to six hours a day for maybe two weeks at a time. The terrain is so hostile that you can’t get goods across by any other means except a helicopter or human porting; it’s one of the last cultures of the world that exists in load-carrying.”

“And what did you learn?” I ask. “What surprised you?”

“It surprised me that their physiology was not unique; they weren’t healthier or better or more unique than the average American or any other guy out there but physically they could do things that we would consider to be unbelievable. What I learned out of that experience was that it wasn’t physiology; it was a lot about your mind and mindset. You just have to want to do it, or have to need to do it in their case.”

In 1998, he started a women’s professional cycling team and was offered financial support from the sponsor - Celestial Seasonings - to begin a PhD. “Much of my work was done using cycling as a model for human performance,” he says, “and looked at fundamental questions in sport such as: How do we quantify what training load is? How do we quantify performance, especially in a sport like cycling where there are tactics and environment and so much that can play into the outcome?

“So my whole bent was on really trying to explore those notions, not just for athletes but from a clinical perspective as well.”

“What about doping?” I ask. “Given your knowledge of physiology, I would imagine you were interested in the effects of doping in sport?”

“Not at all,” he says. “I grew up in a traditional [Chinese] family and from a cultural perspective, the notion of medicine to try to treat all ills wasn’t something that sat very well with me. Even in the work I did on the clinical side, with the cardiac and the cancer rehabilitation, the emphasis was always on physical activity.

“It wasn’t about what we could take to treat disease; it was about what you could do to change your habits, so the notion [of doping] to me was really grotesque, as grotesque as the meds are for using the pharmaceutical industry.”

Lim’s PhD in integrative physiology took six years to complete and by the end the new doctor was ready for a break. In 2005, he accepted an offer from Vaughters to join his exciting new development team. He was also working as a consultant for Powertap, the designers of the new power meters being coveted by the elite.

“It was Powertap who introduced me to Floyd,” he says. “He had left the US Postal Service team [for Phonak] and was looking for someone to help him with all the power analysis. It was a very interesting year for me because he committed to riding the power meter for the whole of the 2005 Tour and I came along to analyse the data.”

After a ninth-place finish in 2005, Landis returned a year later as one of the favourites for the Tour with his favourite analyst in tow. On the 15th stage to L’Alpe d’Huez, Landis seized control of the race and its prized yellow jersey but cracked a day later, losing 10 minutes on the mountain-top finish at La Toussuire.

“I was at the hotel, waiting for him to finish,” Lim says, “and the power profile that day was, like, good, good, good and then no more fuel. He had bonked [forgotten to eat], it was that simple.”

Lim spent a lot of time tossing and turning that night and returned to Landis’s hotel before breakfast the following morning with a plan he called “thermal regulation”. “I went to his room and said, ‘Hey, look, if you were riding by yourself and it was 65 degrees Fahrenheit and the rest of the pack was chasing you in 110 degrees weather, what would you think your chances were?’ And framed from that perspective he thought his chances were pretty good. We asked the soigneurs [masseurs] to fill up all these extra ice-cold water bottles in the car and hatched this plan that he would go off the front and keep himself cool by throwing all these water bottles on.”

A few hours later, Landis broke clear of the favourites on the Col des Saisies and didn’t look back until he had reached Morzine. It was one of the greatest performances the race had ever seen, but the celebrations were short-lived.

“Where were you when you heard about the positive test?” I ask.

“I was back home in Boulder.” “How did you hear of it?” “Just like everyone else.” “A news report?” “Yeah.” “What did you think?” “I was totally floored: I was like, ‘Wow! Are you kidding me?’”

(Long pause.) “Go on,” I urge, “keep going. You say you were floored.” “Yeah, I was very surprised.”

“Is that all?” “Yeah, I mean I felt . . . eh . . . I was just very surprised, because it was totally unexpected. It would be the last thing I could ever dream of.”

“That’s interesting,” I observe, “because it’s the first thing I would ever dream. Are you just incredibly naïve or am I just incredibly cyni-cal?”

“Maybe a little bit of both,” he smiles. “I don’t think I’m naïve, I just like to believe in the best of people and stay focused on the positive and do the best that I can. There is so much that we cannot control.”

“And that was something you couldn’t control?”

“Emm, it was something that really inspired us to do what we are doing with this team, with our antidoping programme, with all of the testing, with having no doubt about what happens. So in a sense I came out of it with a good lesson and a very positive experience.”

“Okay, fair point,” I acknowledge, “but stay with Floyd. I was in Morzine that afternoon and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought: ‘Landis is doping.’ And I looked at you and thought: ‘And this is the guy who is giving him the drugs.’”

“Oh shit!” he gasps. “No way.” “I thought, ‘This is the latest crooked doctor on the block and what the sport needs now is to run these guys out.’”

“Shit,” he says. “And I wasn’t the only one thinking that.”

“Yeah.” “How does that make you feel?” “That’s a bummer,” he says. “I guess they should all come and watch me make rice cakes in the morning.”

“You didn’t feel disappointed or betrayed?”

“No, because I didn’t know what was true or not true. I would have to make a lot of assumptions to feel betrayed.”

“No, you don’t have to make any assumptions,” I argue. “He used drugs. He tested positive. It’s in the urine.”

“You know, the bottom line for me is that I love cycling and I’m very easy to believe in people, and see the best in people, not ignoring the truth or ignoring the facts. I mean, that’s the whole basis of what we started here with this programme.”

“Stay with Floyd, please,” I urge, “and the effect it had on you. You’re not giving it to me.”

“I guess I don’t feel that.” “What did you feel? What was it? Anger? Sadness? Disappointment?”

“I felt badly for Floyd and . . . I would be really selfish or self-centred to make it about me - it wasn’t happening to me. Yeah, I had this experience but it wasn’t about me; and for me to think, ‘Oh, I feel sad or betrayed or upset’ would have been self-centred. I didn’t leave the 2006 Tour de France hatching some business plan to open up some coaching service or whatnot.

“I came home that summer and called my mom up and she was like, ‘How’d your friend do in that bike race in France?’ You know, and I was like, [laughs] ‘Oh, he did pretty well’. I was just happy to be home. So if anything I was bummed just like everyone else was bummed.”

“Your body language tells me you were hurt,” I suggest.

“It’s a sense of hurt that people would think poorly of you,” he concedes.

“What about Floyd? When was the first time you met him after the positive test?”

“Jeez . . . it was probably four or five months later at a fundraiser.”

“Did he say anything?” “No, he just kept on ranting about the testing.”

We’ve reached the finish and it’s time for him to prepare the postrace snacks. He takes some tomatoes and mozzarella and fruit (kiwis) from the fridge and lectures me on the wonders of balsamic vinegar. He’s in full flow again and won’t stop until midnight. He’s a rare one, no doubt.

Floyd Landis rode 125 kilometres in an incredible breakaway on the 17th stage to Morzine in the 2006 Tour, where Allen Lim was his coach and mentor. The American was later found to have doped and was disqualified from the race