Happy Wednesday,
Every year, the same photos go viral: athletes with eerie red eyes and some theory about why the lenses disappeared.
This week, Jake and I went straight to the source: Dr. Alan Reichow, an optometrist and vision performance researcher who spent nearly two decades at Nike helping build the Nike MaxSight tinted contact lens and now leads its modern successor, ALTIUS.
He’s also our first doctor on the podcast, and he walked us through why a footwear company got into vision, what those tints actually do, and what really happened to the original product.
You can have the greatest technology in the world, but unless you market it right, you’re not going to reach the potential for the product.
How Dr. Reichow Got Here
Growing up: His father played in the NFL for ten years, then spent the rest of his career in the Vikings’ front office. His younger brother is blind. Between the two, he grew up around both elite sports and a clear understanding of how much vision matters.
Early on: Back then, the assumption was that pro athletes had perfect vision. Many weren’t even tested beyond the standard eye chart, and 20/20 isn’t actually the ceiling. He wanted to improve visual performance and eventually built one of the first research-based clinical programs on vision in human performance, working with the IOC and USOC.
1993: Nike runs a search for someone to lead its new vision efforts. Its marketing and legal teams each independently come back with his name, partly because his university research lab was only about half an hour from Nike’s headquarters at Pacific University.
The pitch to Phil Knight: He studies the eyewear market, then presents to Knight in a two-hour meeting, opening with a prediction: you’re going to tell me to have Nike just do it yourselves. Knight thought that was a little forward, then ended the meeting with “Let’s do it.”
His time at Nike: He spent 12 years there, splitting time between Nike and his university lab, the last six as Global Research Director of Vision Science. Early products included running eyewear with a “flying lens,” and a magnet-attached design called the Magnetos.
1997: He and his colleague Dr. Carl Siddick start secretly researching the ultimate performance-tinted eyewear at the university lab. The conclusion: get the tint directly on the eye.
The first test: A small university baseball team, Pacific University. After three pitches wearing an amber lens, the head coach turned around and said to put them on every player. The team started setting batting records, local media caught on, and Nike executives called him asking why he hadn’t told them. His answer: I wasn’t going to tell you until I knew it worked.
2005: Nike MaxSight launches with the Swoosh behind it, ending up on over 100 MLB players, Manchester United players, and stars like Ken Griffey Jr.
2012: After the original product was pulled (2008), Nike shifts its vision group to a distributor, and he leaves. It takes several years to rebuild the lens as a single-use daily disposable, and that product becomes ALTIUS.
The Big Idea: Setting the Record Straight
The rumor that comes back every year, that MLB or the NFL banned the lenses for being unfair, is false. In Dr. Reichow’s telling, MaxSight was a 30-day lens that came with a cleaning and storage solution, and that solution became contaminated. Some users got infections, and the product came off the market. The lens itself wasn’t the problem. However, fixing it meant redesigning it as a single-use daily disposable, which required different materials and a different lens design, and Nike seemingly didn’t want to make that investment. So in 2008, they discontinued the product.
Still, what stuck with me is how the players reacted. Nike’s baseball lead told Dr. Reichow that the best product endorsement he’d ever seen came when pros heard the lenses were being pulled: several bought enough supply to last their careers. And most of them weren’t paid to wear them (in fact, only two were).
As for whether players can wear them in games today, the answer is yes. They’re FDA-cleared, and Dr. Reichow says a spring training umpire once told a player he couldn’t, and it turned out to be a non-issue. Nike, by the way, loved the “banned” rumor. Anything that gets people talking is free attention.
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Here’s what the tinted lenses actually do:
Why on the eye? Sunglasses with wrap induce a prismatic effect (the image jumps) and leak light around the frame. A lens on the eye eliminates the frame, reflections, pressure points, and fog and sweat issues.
Gray-green (~38% light transmission): Designed for environmental sports like golf and fishing. Dr. Reichow says that because there’s no light leakage on the eye, the pupil lands at about this level, whereas traditional gray sunglasses can transmit as little as 15-18%.
Amber (~50% transmission): Built for dynamic, reactive target sports like baseball, volleyball, and mountain biking, where you’re tracking a moving object or moving relative to a target.
The third tint (in development): Nicknamed the “stadium tint” and champagne in color, it transmits about 80% of light and was tested at night in a rented stadium and on ice hockey players. It’s designed for artificial lighting and filters out the scattering end of the spectrum, which Dr. Reichow says reduces an image-degrading aberration by 53%.
Bonus fact: Research from World War II shows vision can be affected for up to six hours after bright light exposure, which matters for day-to-night baseball doubleheaders.
5 Tactical Takeaways
Prove it before you pitch it. Dr. Reichow ran the research quietly in a university lab for years, so by the time Nike found out, he had data from a real baseball team. That’s a much stronger position than just walking in with an idea.
Let the decision-maker experience it. Whether it’s a coach, a trainer, or an executive, he wants them to try the technology firsthand. A coach who watches three pitches with the lenses on will sell the product better than any slide deck. So will Nike executive Peter Ruppe, who put them on over a weekend and came back saying they were for everyone.
Great technology still needs great marketing. Dr. Reichow credits Nike’s marketing and sports marketing teams for putting MaxSight on athletes and in clubhouses. Without that machine, he says, the product wouldn’t have reached its potential.
The audience you expect isn’t always the audience you get. Nike assumed tinted lenses would be niche, for people who already wear contacts. Instead, two-thirds of MaxSight users had never worn a vision correction at all.
Demand can outlive the product. When MaxSight disappeared, athletes, trainers, and eye doctors kept asking for it. That’s what pushed Dr. Reichow to rebuild it, and he assembled a team of advisors from the original effort to do it.
Why It Matters
The red lens story is a great example of how a rumor can outrun the truth for years.
The actual story is quieter yet more interesting: a scientist who spent decades obsessed with one narrow problem, a company with the curiosity to bankroll it, a product athletes loved enough to stockpile, and a founder who refused to let it die.
For anyone building in a niche, that’s worth remembering. The people who care about your product most will keep it alive long after the company behind it moves on. I’m getting a pair sent over to try myself, so expect a full report.
📩 And don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.
See you then,
Tyler & Jake