Back in 2017, after Eliud Kipchoge’s first Maurten-fueled sub-two marathon attempt, Rowe got in touch with Maurten to ask how they made their hydrogel. Let’s get the first question out of the way right from the top: the study wasn’t funded by Maurten. But the new study is impressive enough to revise my view of the evidence.

That was still the situation until last month, when Henrik Wingstrand, one of the company’s co-founders tweeted “It’s here!!!!! The data we have been waiting for since we started Maurten five years ago.” The object of Wingstrand’s enthusiasm was published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise by Joshua Rowe of Leeds Beckett University and his colleagues, and it more or less confirms everything that Maurten (and its many elite-athlete fans, like Kilian Jornet) claimed over the years.

Back in 2019, I wrote an article titled “ The World’s Hottest Sports Drink Faces the Evidence.” The Swedish company Maurten’s hydrogel-carbohydrate drink had swept through the endurance sports world like a highly transmissible viral variant-but the first few independent studies had failed to find any performance benefits compared to plain old carbohydrate sports drinks.

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