From the Olympics to Your Kitchen Counter: Why an Olympic Athlete Built Antidote

By Reese Hanneman · U.S. Olympian · 10-Year U.S. Ski Team Member · Co-Founder of Antidote
Written from firsthand experience as a drug-tested Olympic athlete who formulated Antidote in partnership with sports nutritionists.

Originally published: May 2026 · Updated: July 8, 2026 · 8 min read

A founder story is supposed to be polished. This one isn’t. Antidote started because I was broke, drug-tested every other week, training six hours a day, and couldn’t find a pre-workout I was willing to put in my body.

When I was racing on the U.S. Ski Team and the World Cup circuit, the public-facing version of my life looked impressive. The actual version was that I was barely making rent, training four to six hours a day, and traveling Europe between races with a backpack and a recovery routine. I needed supplementation that would do real work, wouldn’t fail a drug test, and that I could afford. The first two constraints were absolute. The result of optimizing around the third was, eventually, Antidote.

Why does an Olympic athlete start a pre-workout brand?

Because nobody at the top of competitive sport trusts the pre-workout aisle, and that distrust is the same one a health-conscious adult should have. Athletes just confront it earlier. I was tested by WADA and USADA on a routine basis — testers can show up anywhere, anytime, with no warning. A positive test from a contaminated supplement doesn’t come with an “I didn’t know” defense; strict liability is the rule. That forced a habit most lifters never develop: I read every label, checked every supplier, and assumed every ingredient was guilty until proven innocent. The pre-workout category was, almost entirely, on the “don’t trust” list.

What does the supplement situation look like when you’re drug-tested for a living?

A constant negotiation between performance and risk. The well-formulated pre-workouts were also the ones most likely to be cross-contaminated with banned substances at the manufacturing level, because the same contract manufacturers produce harder products on the same equipment. The “safer” consumer products were formulated with cheap synthetic stimulants, artificial sweeteners, silicon dioxide, and proprietary blends — less likely to fail a test, but not dosed well enough to do much. There was no third category: nothing clean enough to pass, dosed well enough to work, transparent enough to verify, and built for daily use.

The DIY blend that came before the brand

So I gave up on the shelf and started buying ingredients individually — high-grade, single-ingredient powders: beet root extract for nitric oxide, tart cherry for recovery, beta-alanine for buffering, creatine for power output. I mixed them by hand before training. Not cheap, and I couldn’t really afford it, but I could feel the difference. That blend — all dosed individually, all from sources I could verify — was the original version of what became Antidote. I carried that protocol through the rest of my competitive career, including the Olympic Games.

The “that stuff is sketchy” moment

After I stepped back from competition, I asked around — hundreds of professional athletes plus a much larger group training hard while juggling jobs and kids. Most weren’t taking any pre-workout, and the answer came back over and over: “Oh, I don’t use pre-workout. That stuff is sketchy.” Not “I don’t need it.” Sketchy. That was the moment Antidote became a product instead of a personal protocol — the market was much larger than elite athletes. It was every careful, ingredient-conscious person who had quietly opted out of the whole category.

From DIY blend to Antidote 1.0

The path from personal blend to shippable product took a year of formulation work with co-founder Ryan Sheldon and a partnership with sports nutritionists. The original four ingredients stayed; we added a moderate naturally sourced caffeine dose (150 mg from green tea), a full 9-EAA blend (2.79 g leucine), B-vitamins, pink Himalayan salt, and the probiotic blend. Ryan had his own reason for being there: a former D-I thrower at Belmont University, he’d watched a teammate suffer kidney failure from extended use of a low-quality pre-workout, which made him allergic to the category until we started building something different. His test of Antidote 1.0 — improbably for a shot-put thrower — was training for and finishing the NYC Marathon on it.

What “Olympic-level standards” actually mean

People hear “Olympic athlete-founded” and assume it’s a marketing claim. The content is specific: every ingredient sourced from a supplier that documents purity; every batch tested for contamination, including substances that don’t appear in normal food but could trigger a positive doping test; every dose verified against the research, not the marketing claim; and a fully disclosed label because a compliance officer needs to read it. That rigor is overkill for the average consumer in some ways and exactly right in others — the same habits that protect an athlete’s career protect an ordinary user’s body. We didn’t design “the pre-workout for Olympic athletes.” We designed the pre-workout that meets the standards an Olympic athlete would apply, available to anyone who wants a product built that way.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Antidote?

Antidote was co-founded by Reese Hanneman, a former U.S. Ski Team athlete who competed in the Olympic Games and spent ten years on the World Cup circuit, and Ryan Sheldon, a former Division I track and field athlete (discus and shot put) at Belmont University who trained for and finished the NYC Marathon on Antidote 1.0.

What sport did Reese compete in?

Alpine ski racing. The U.S. Ski Team competes on the World Cup circuit, the top professional ski-racing series, broadcast on primetime television across Europe.

Was Reese drug-tested as an athlete?

Yes — routinely, by both WADA and USADA throughout his ten-year professional career, which is why the formula was originally built around supplements clean enough to pass anti-doping testing.

What were the original ingredients in Reese’s DIY blend?

Beet root extract, tart cherry extract, beta-alanine, and creatine monohydrate — all dosed individually from verified high-purity sources. Those four remain core to the current formula.

Is Antidote available outside of Erewhon?

Yes. Antidote is sold direct-to-consumer at antidote-life.com in addition to its Erewhon placement.

What does “naturally powered” mean?

The active ingredients come from whole-food sources where possible — caffeine from green tea, nitric-oxide support from beet root, recovery from tart cherry — rather than synthetic isolates designed for the strongest first-time sensation at the lowest cost.

Educational content only; not medical advice. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Consult a physician before use if pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or managing a health condition.