Nike breathes Olympic spirit into Air technology

Nike is warming up for the Paris Olympics. During the Games, the global sport apparel and equipment giant will set up the base camp for its staff, guests and athletes at the Centre Pompidou. On April 11, Nike instead staged a presentation at Palais Brongniart, also in the heart of the city. Huge statues sat before the historic building’s colonnade, celebrating the stars sponsored by Nike, some of the greatest names in sport, as the US giant welcomed staff members and several hundred guests to the event.

Inside the former Paris Stock Exchange building, a giant screen, 30 m in length and 5 m in height, broadcast Nike’s slogans and showcased the brand’s new trainers models, before being raised like a stage curtain to reveal several athletes in competition kit, like US sprinter Anna Cockrell, German javelin thrower Julian Weber, and Kenyan superstar long-distance runner Eliud Kipchoge.

The presentation, entitled ‘The Future of Athletes on Air’, was designed to kindle the audience’s Olympic enthusiasm through the US group’s product innovation philosophy. In the second part of the event, the athletes came back on stage clad in quasi-futuristic urban outfits, showcasing spectacularly shaped prototypes of new Nike trainers created in collaboration with elite athletes.

For the occasion, many top executives and designers travelled to Europe from Nike’s global headquarters in Portland, Oregon, to present the shoes and apparel developed in recent months by the brand for the Olympics, displayed in a lavish exhibition setting. As an industry leader, Nike invests millions of dollars each year to explore the possibilities offered by new technology and materials. The group operates R&D hubs like the Lebron James Innovation Centre and the Nike Sports Research Lab, in order to develop the most attractive products in as short a time as possible.

Through the Paris presentation, Nike emphasised how co-designing its products with elite athletes using cutting-edge technology lends maximum credibility to its entire range.

Beyond the showcase, what were the take-aways from the Paris presentation? Firstly, that product development has been accelerated in the last few years by optimising the use of data collected from athletes. This is how the kit design for athletes from Kenya, the USA and China has been optimised, according to Janett Nichol, vice-president apparel innovation at Nike.

“Thanks to the technology available at our R&D centre, we are able to collect athlete performance information and transform it into usable data. Product engineering enables us to work on development almost pixel by pixel, creating kits that are as closely suited to athletes’ requirements as possible. This methodology also allows us to have a broader product range, and to deploy it much more quickly,” said Nichol.

Nike staff believes that adopting technologies like motion capture and body morphing, as well as AI-generated solutions, enables the brand to work much more precisely in responding to athletes’ needs. “In the case of performance products for athletics, for example, this allows us to tweak more accurately the design of breathability areas,” said Amy Melczer Montagne, vice-president/GM Nike Women. “New sports have been introduced in the Olympics, like skateboarding at the Tokyo Games and breakdancing this year. Athletes need performance products but they also love lifestyle looks. We have been able to develop sportswear essentials with high-performance features. Athletes love this,” she added.

Meanwhile, Nike is continuing to anchor its main product narrative to a reliable mainstay, the Air technology. The Parisian presentation showcased the developments in air cushion technology featured in Nike trainers, from the Tailwind in 1978 to the latest Air Max DN, launched in early 2024. The shoes created by Nike for the Olympics incorporate some of these air cushions, mostly found in the latest generation of leading models like the Air Zoom GT Hustle 3 for basketball, the Air Zoom Mercurial for football, as well as Nike’s lightest marathon shoes ever, the Alphafly 3.

“Over a dozen Olympic titles were decided by less than a tenth of a second difference in Tokyo. Athletes train for years for these occasions, in which everything is down to a few hundredths of a second. Our philosophy is to do the utmost to help them gain these hundredth-of-a-second margins by developing the best-performing products,” said Martin Lotti, who was named Nike’s vice-president and chief design officer last autumn.

Having introduced a new version of its Air technology in the Air Max DN lifestyle model, Nike is looking forward to tapping Air innovation for many years to come. “There are several cushions that create an amortisation system that is much more responsive than in the past. It took us three years of research to develop this new solution,” said John Hoke, who was in charge of design at Nike for nearly 15 years. “The Air Max DN is the first interpretation, but we’re making progress with deploying this solution further. I know what the next developments will be. We’ll use it to offer the same level of comfort and the same benefits in our various sports,” said Hoke.

On Thursday, Nike presented the Pegasus Premium model, which incorporates the Air Zoom feature visibly in its sole, and will introduce similar features in models for other sports from 2025. Air technology is an asset on which Nike is relying to bounce back in the medium term, having predicted a tough fiscal 2024.