Nike's Chief Design Officer John Hoke on Wednesday stopped by Cheddar to unveil the company's latest collection of sneakers designed for the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics.
The global games are somewhat synonymous with the Nike brand, which has been an official sponsor and supplier for Team USA since the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Torino, Italy.
With that role, Hoke said, comes a responsibility to meet athletes' needs and ideally help them improve their performance through constant design innovations.
"Innovation is a commitment, not a guarantee," he said. "We're lucky enough to have athletes like [marathoner Eliud Kipchoge] and countless others who are pushing us to innovate continuously."
Kipchoge famously wore a Nike prototype shoe in 2019 when he finished the 26.2-mile Vienna City Marathon in under two hours, a threshold that many had considered an impossible feat.
The official version of that shoe is part of the 2020 Olympics lineup. Dubbed the Nike Air Zoom Alphafly NEXT%, the race-day shoe features a carbon-fiber plate, special "pods" for cushioning and energy return, and an "ultra-breathable, lightweight Flyknit upper," according to Nike.
"This is basically a tour de force of innovation," Hoke said. "We've been studying the runner for 50 years, so imagine 50 years of innovation all coming to bear on the Tokyo Olympics."
How much advantage a shoe should provide is a source of considerable debate in the athletic community. World Athletics, the governing body of the Olympics, recently updated its technical regulations for shoes that set limits on the width of the sole, the number of carbon fiber plates, and other specifications that qualify the amount of running technology allowed in competition.
Nike is aware of the new regulations and has taken them into account for its latest batch of high-tech sneakers.
"One of the constraints that we face is how we progress sports forward, and where there are constraints that's where creativity comes in," Hoke said.
On the more fashionable end of the spectrum, Nike has released another sneaker for athletes to wear along with the rest of their branded gear while standing on the winner's podium.
The style that Nike is calling the Space Hippie uses post-industrial and post-consumer materials to create a shoe that wears its sustainability on its threads. Hoke said that NASA and the limits of space travel inspired the design ethic of the shoe.
"We actually constrained ourselves as designers and gave a certain amount of materiality and said 'that's all you got,'" he said.
While these shoes are being rolled out for the upcoming Olympics, Nike's long-term goal is to let the new technology trickle down into other shoes for other athletes around the world
"The way we operate is that we take learnings from these lead athletes and we immediately cascade that to every single athlete," Hoke said. "Because our job is to invite more to sports. We believe making sports a daily habit is important. We believe the world is better with sports."
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