Adidas Adistar Rowing Shoes | photograph by Steve Pyke
Beyond the double glass doors, out past the marble fountain burbling near the Tiger Woods building, a billion perfect blades of grass stood at attention. Songbirds twittered. Sunlight shone. Flags fluttered over twin soccer fields so plush the pitches looked like swimming pools. All was as it should be on
Which was when one of Nike's prototype Olympic track shoes, code-named Flywire, went to pieces. A test athlete on the 400-meter Michael Johnson test oval, told to push the top-secret racing spikes to their limit, had done just that. "The shoe blew out on the side of his forefoot," says Sean McDowell, Nike's design director for Olympic footwear, "like a balloon."
But in that breakdown three years ago, Nike caught a whiff of engineering ambrosia: a loophole in the Universal Law of Sports Technology, which says unequivocally that you can build something infinitely light or infinitely strong but not both; that there are I-beams and there are feathers, and you can't build one from the other. No exceptions.
Except in this case.
"He said it was the most amazing 300 meters he'd ever experienced," McDowell says of the test runner's reaction to his first strides in the ethereal prototype. "Like he was running naked. Like he had spikes growing out of his feet."
Before that day, the lightest pair of track shoes ever made -- Michael Johnson's golden Nike spikes -- weighed 112 grams. Even now, they are considered a marvel of shoe engineering because they were designed to hold together just long enough for Johnson to make it across the finish line, and maybe a few meters more. But the Flywire prototype that disintegrated on that Oregon track weighed 67 grams per pair, or a little over 1 ounce each. They were an astonishing 41% lighter.
Flywire, which will debut at the Beijing Games, uses only the barest exoskeleton of wispy, high-tech filaments -- roughly 7 linear feet of thread, affixed to an ultrathin fabric scrim -- to provide its structure and shape (think of a space-age Roman sandal). With the usual need for supporting material reduced almost to zero, the shoe is not only featherlight, but also radically simple, fast, and cheap to build. So while it promises to improve racing performance, it also hints at dramatically lower production costs for everyday shoes -- a construction technique that springs directly from a designer's imagination, flows through a computer chip, then flowers in three dimensions in a matter of seconds. "It opens up new frontiers," says Jay Meschter, Flywire's lead designer. "Analog stitching is gone. This is a digitally programmed shoe. Everybody realizes this is a smarter way to build shoes, and it's just going to pervade everything we do."
Nike is not alone in its Olympic cries of "Eureka!" Adidas, Mizuno, Gill Athletics (the world's largest manufacturer of track-and-field equipment), Speedo, and many others have been working feverishly to rewrite the Universal Law of Sports Technology. And by August, all of them will have performed another amazing feat: collapsing the timeline that separates a new Olympic concept -- often representing millions of dollars in up-front R&D costs -- from its return on investment. Suddenly, Olympic innovators will be able to make the long jump between the design studio and the cash register. About a week before the lights go up on the opening ceremonies, you'll be able to find a pair of Flywire HyperDunk basketball shoes at a Niketown near you.
What you'll discover on these pages are 18 technological masterworks -- from archery bows to BMX gear -- and a behind-the-scenes look at how they were created, including a rare tour of Nike's supersecret Innovation Kitchen. Each item represents a dramatic technological insight, a critical increment of leverage over the competition. Such improvements are hard enough to come by but even rarer in the tradition-bound context of the Olympics.
Take Adidas, for example: With just two years until the opening ceremonies in China, the German giant was struggling to conjure a new track spike for its star Texan runner, the 400-meter gold medalist Jeremy Wariner. After watching hours of super-slow-motion footage of Wariner's quirky gait, the company decided to replace his Pookie spike, which helped Wariner win in Athens (and nearly every 400-meter race he has entered since). Called Lone Star and sporting a crown insignia to signify Wariner's leadership in the sport, the new shoe has the following unorthodox feature: It lists to port.
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Recent Comments | 10 Total
June 25, 2008 at 10:47pm by Olympics Clothing
The innovations are pretty incredible - most visibly the Speedo LZR swimsuit.
http://www.olympicsclothing.net
September 10, 2008 at 5:02pm by James Belle
the technology clearly worked, I can't count how many records were broken in the pool alone!