Innovation of Olympic Proportions

Tag : athletics shoe

Beyond the double glass doors , out past the marble fountain burbling near the Tiger Woodsbuilding, a billion perfect blades of grass stood at attention.Songbirds twittered. Sunlight shone. Flags fluttered over twinsoccer fields so plush the pitches looked like swimming pools. Allwas as it should be on Nike's Beaverton, Oregon, campus: perfect.
Which was when one of Nike's prototype Olympic track shoes,code-named Flywire, went to pieces. A test athlete on the 400-meterMichael Johnson test oval, told to push the top-secret racingspikes to their limit, had done just that. "The shoe blew outon the side of his forefoot," says Sean McDowell, Nike'sdesign director for Olympic footwear, "like a balloon."
But in that breakdown three years ago, Nike caught a whiff ofengineering ambrosia: a loophole in the Universal Law of SportsTechnology, which says unequivocally that you can build somethinginfinitely light or infinitely strong but not both; that there areI-beams and there are feathers, and you can't build one from theother. No exceptions.
Except in this case.
"He said it was the most amazing 300 meters he'd everexperienced," McDowell says of the test runner's reaction tohis first strides in the ethereal prototype. "Like he wasrunning 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. Evennow, they are considered a marvel of shoe engineering because theywere designed to hold together just long enough for Johnson to makeit across the finish line, and maybe a few meters more. But theFlywire prototype that disintegrated on that Oregon track weighed67 grams per pair, or a little over 1 ounce each. They were anastonishing 41% lighter.
Flywire, which will debut at the Beijing Games, uses only thebarest exoskeleton of wispy, high-tech filaments -- roughly 7linear feet of thread, affixed to an ultrathin fabric scrim -- toprovide its structure and shape (think of a space-age Romansandal). With the usual need for supporting material reduced almostto zero, the shoe is not only featherlight, but also radicallysimple, fast, and cheap to build. So while it promises to improveracing performance, it also hints at dramatically lower productioncosts for everyday shoes -- a construction technique that springsdirectly from a designer's imagination, flows through a computerchip, then flowers in three dimensions in a matter of seconds."It opens up new frontiers," says Jay Meschter, Flywire'slead designer. "Analog stitching is gone. This is a digitallyprogrammed shoe. Everybody realizes this is a smarter way to buildshoes, 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 oftrack-and-field equipment), Speedo, and many others have beenworking feverishly to rewrite the Universal Law of SportsTechnology. And by August, all of them will have performed anotheramazing feat: collapsing the timeline that separates a new Olympicconcept -- often representing millions of dollars in up-frontR&D costs -- from its return on investment. Suddenly, Olympicinnovators will be able to make the long jump between the designstudio and the cash register. About a week before the lights go upon the opening ceremonies, you'll be able to find a pair of FlywireHyperDunk basketball shoes at a Niketown near you.