High-Tech Gear for Olympic Athletes

By: Paul HochmanFri Jun 20, 2008 at 12:30 PM

Adidas Adistar Rowing Shoes | photograph by Steve Pyke

When it comes to finding that last bit of leverage over the Olympic competition, gear makers strain as hard as the athletes.

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Nike's New PreCool Vest | photograph by Steve Pyke

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Speedo LZR Racer | photograph by Steve Pyke

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Flywire lead designer Jay Meschter's stroke of genius was to stop thinking of a shoe as something assembled and start thinking of it as something that is, well, printed. When Meschter connected the two ideas of filaments and strength, his mind leaped to embroidery machines, which, he realized, print out lines and shapes using colored thread stitches rather than ink. If Meschter could stitch in 3-D form the cabling that holds up a suspension bridge, and anchor the ultrathin "cables" around a foot shape, he'd be able to create an ultralight shoe in the same time it took to stitch somebody's name on a shirt.

"When we worked out the kinks," he says, "we realized what makes this so exciting: This embroidery machine is literally a printer for shoes. Most of [a Flywire shoe's] design can take place in a computer; you make decisions on-screen about where you're placing reinforcement, and then you trial the shoe as a 'printout.' "

No more laboriously handcrafted one-off prototypes. No more fabrics painstakingly selected for the right blend of weight and strength. Now, if a new shoe needs tweaking, all a designer has to do is add another filament to the design and hit PRINT.

The impact of Flywire could be huge. There have been rumors that the new technique is so inexpensive it could allow Nike to return some of its manufacturing to the United States from China, the company's largest manufacturing and materials source, drastically reducing labor and manufacturing costs. And like most miracles of design, Flywire did not spring from some gleaming white mountaintop -- it came limping out of a cruddy backwater, a tiny subset of a subcube on the Nike campus called the Innovation Kitchen.

To find the Kitchen, look for this welcoming sign on the right side of the lobby of the Mia Hamm building:

NOBODY GETS IN TO SEE THE COOKS.

NOT NOBODY

NOT NOHOW

POSITIVELY NO TOURS

When the doors swing open, the first color you see is blood red. It's probably paint, of course, but the crimson entryway is nevertheless a reminder that about 90% of the concepts hatched here are mortally wounded before they get to the lobby. Inside, the Kitchen is a disaster area: a jumble of blown-out test spikes, a rejected pair of Bryant's new HyperDunks, tickets to a Clapton concert, a René Magritte poster. But this ratty little warren of offices -- the only place in Nike's hypermanicured campus where you'll find chaos -- has been the source of some of the company's greatest hits: Michael Johnson's golden spikes, Cathy Freeman's famous speed suit, and every Air Jordan since the Kitchen was founded in 2001.

Rumor has it that tens of millions of dollars have been spent on the Kitchen since its inception. A number of people inside the company still ask why it exists. "What are you guys doing, man? Where's the stuff?" says the Kitchen's VP of special projects, Tinker Hatfield, recounting the challenges he still gets occasionally from Nike business-unit directors who question (or even resent) the Kitchen's freedom from the normal quarterly business cycle.

In fact, the Kitchen was first created to counter the negative effects of Nike's enormous growth. After the company stumbled in the late 1990s, it was divided into six discrete business units (basketball, women's fitness, running, and so forth), each responsible for its own profit and loss. "A natural casualty of [dividing up the company] is fewer resources going to new product design," Hatfield says, "because one of the easy ways in the short term to make your division's numbers look good is to cut back on innovation." The Kitchen was created as an antidote to fiscal prudence run amok.

"You have to remember, we're very strategically shot into an orbit around planet Nike," Hatfield adds, "but not too far out. In the end, innovation is not helpful unless there's a way to tie it to a powerful company that helps drive it somewhere."

Innovation isn't helpful unless it's tied to a powerful company that drives it somewhere.

Right now, that somewhere is Beijing, where athletes will be flying citius, altius, fortius in defiance of the Universal Law of Sports Technology. Their "faster, higher, stronger" ethos may stir our souls -- we mortals thrill to their victories and agonize at their defeats -- but the unromantic truth is that the guys who made all this cool stuff moved on a while ago.

"I don't sit there biting my fingernails when I watch somebody compete at the Olympics," Hatfield says. "I hope they do well, but we're working four or five years out, especially for these really meaningful performance innovations."

He pauses for a moment, a wry smile playing across his face. "There's a certain amount of swashbuckling that goes on in this process," he confesses. "You have to be a bit of a cold-blooded killer."