Caroline D'Ambrosio

The Sweat Solution

The University of Florida football team always seemed to have a heat problem. That tends to happen when you build your football facilities on top of a swamp where the temperature averages over 80 degrees. Players often collapsed and were sent to the infirmary. Enter Dr. Robert Cade — artist, musician, horticulturalist, and, most important, world-renowned kidney specialist at the university. In the 1960s, Cade made sports hydration his mission. After a careful series of tests on some of the players, Cade developed a “magic elixir” that would keep the Gators out of the infirmary and on the field. They called it Gatorade.