When the most decorated 100-metre sprinter ever stepped to the line for a final time, she told herself what she knew: that she was prepared, powerful and this race was hers—for her. The next handful of seconds were to honour everything that had brought her to this moment.Green, yellow and black hair whipping behind her—a self-proclaimed "daughter of the soil", who chose to wear the colours of her nation's flag for her final finish—gold-hued&nbsp;nails splayed in front of her, <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/nike-celebrates-shelly-ann-fraser-pryce" target="_blank">Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce</a> exploded off the blocks in the World Athletics Championship final in a capacity-filled Japan National Stadium in Tokyo. She ended her 100-metre career in the same way she began racing 18 years ago in Japan—with fierce speed, strength and composure. It was a bold tribute to Jamaica, the nation whose unyielding support has carried her through two decades at the top of the sport.In her decades of dominance—from becoming the first Caribbean woman to win Olympic gold in the 100 metres in 2008, to returning as World Champion in 2019 after giving birth to her son, Zyon—Shelly-Ann has embodied the power of duality.&nbsp;The ability to have longevity in athletics's shortest, most intense discipline; exuding femininity and self-expression in a physically demanding sport; proving motherhood and greatness can coexist.What athletes everywhere, and especially young girls, can take from Shelly-Ann's lead: the courage to run your own race, on your terms. To trust that setbacks don't define you, only your response to them. And the assurance that, if you believe in yourself and work with discipline, harmony is possible. Dreams and family, career and legacy.For that and for the now 276 incredible races and finishing line moments, thank you, Shelly-Ann.Below, go behind the scenes of the GOAT's final meet days in Tokyo.

The shoes. The hair. The finish. At the 2025 World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, Shelly-Ann, a five-time world champion, ended her career her way.

Sofieke van Bilsen is a 29-year-old Dutch photographer with a passion for storytelling through imagery. She is the in-house photographer for the German women's national football team, and was team photographer for the German Olympic Team in Paris 2024. She works closely with Nike athletes such as Faith Kipyegon, Eliud Kipchoge and Sifan Hassan.In her photography, she aims to create compelling visual narratives, focusing on the deep connection between emotion and athleticism. She strives to capture the raw moments behind the scenes, the untold stories of the journey and everything in between, bringing the spirit of sport to life.Sofieke's personality creates instant connections with people, and she is loved by the athletes she works with. Her relaxed and enthusiastic personality complements an incredible skill level and the ability to work in high-pressure environments for athletes.

Sofieke van Bilsen

Photo essay

Icon Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce Ran Her Final 100 Metre On Her Terms

Over the course of his career, LeBron James has shared his passion for the game globally, partnering with Nike to travel throughout Greater China during his offseason, galvanizing a nation in its love for basketball and hoops culture. Just as LeBron's career has evolved through different eras, his tours have represented different values over the many times he's visited since 2005. Below are some of his most memorable moments in the country.

2005–2009

LeBron began his debut tour in Beijing in August of 2005. He was invited to watch the awards ceremony of the Nike Battlegrounds tournament, but he'd depart as more than just a spectator. From the moment he stepped down in China, he believed his tour could become a cross-cultural exchange rooted in a shared love of hoops and a mission to inspire the next generation of young players in China. "Basketball is not only a sport, it's also a bridge that connects people", he said.&nbsp;"This is a great learning experience for everyone. I hope I can continue to help grow the game globally and inspire the youth in China to reach their dreams".

LeBron's legacy in China is woven into special China-specific iterations of his signature footwear. In 2007, LeBron James appeared alongside NIKE, Inc.'s then-President & CEO Mark Parker to debut his Nike Zoom LeBron V "China" colourway.

LeBron returned to Beijing in 2009 after his MVP season, where he enjoyed a hero's welcome. As part of his trip, he donated equipment and provided scholarships for the Zhenhua School, a school for the children of migrant workers in suburban Beijing.

To celebrate his season, LeBron was presented with an exclusive pair of the Nike Air Max LeBron VII, featuring a Shenyang-inspired design dubbed "Loyalty" created by the local artist Ray Lei, and a Shanghai-inspired design dubbed "Family", created by the local artist Sic.

2011–2015

LeBron embraced his role as a global ambassador for the game, focusing on the opportunity to inspire China's young players. In 2011, his tour expanded to eight days over four cities, promoting grassroots basketball through a series of skill clinics and tournaments.

In 2012, with a fresh gold medal to pair with his championship ring, LeBron James made a triumphant arrival in Beijing to kick off a four-day tour as part of the&nbsp;Find Your Greatness campaign. "Greatness is defined by how much you want to put into what you do", said LeBron. "Greatness comes with victory. It also comes with being able to come back from adversity".

In 2013, LeBron returned to China with plenty to celebrate: his second straight NBA championship and MVP awards for both the regular season and the Finals.

In 2014, LeBron James was the first mentor to announce the roster for the Nike RISE, designed to help players raise their competitive game and improve their skill.

In 2015, Nike RISE 2015 evolved with LED Courts and motion-tracking drills to create a pinnacle training experience, teach the fundamentals of basketball and push the boundaries of sports training.

An emotional finale saw four players chosen to represent China at the World Streetball Championships.

2016–2019

After winning another NBA title in 2016, LeBron entered Guangzhou to a massive championship parade, the streets flanked by tens of thousands of fans, many of them in Cavs #23 jerseys. It was a signal for just how widely James's legacy had expanded throughout Asia.&nbsp;His More Than an Athlete campaign inspired young players to see basketball as one of many tools for affecting social change.

After a warm welcome from thousands of fans, he spent most of his time in Beijing working out with and coaching members of the Chinese Junior National basketball team.

Visiting primary schools throughout Beijing, LeBron shared his personal basketball experiences with young athletes, emphasising the role that hard work, dedication and self-belief played in his path to success.

In 2018, the first day of his "More Than an Athlete" tour in Shanghai began with a panel discussion with students at the Shanghai Theatre&nbsp;Academy, and ended with a park shootaround. Hundreds of fans gathered outside the court to watch him play, hoping to catch a glimpse of the icon.

This month, LeBron flew to China for his "Forever King Tour", his 15th in the country and marking the 20th anniversary of tours in Asia. There, he joined some of the world's most passionate hoopers and basketball fans, reiterating his commitment to giving back to the game across the world.

Over the course of his career, LeBron James has shared his passion for the game globally, partnering with Nike to travel throughout Greater China during his offseason, galvanizing a nation in its love for basketball and hoops culture.

Journey of an icon: 20 years of LeBron James in China

Hours of powering up steep ascents and navigating gnarly descents. Whipping mountain winds, glaring direct sun and biting evening temps. Getting mentally right with the fact that the next aid station is far, far away. Ultra trail running can sound like a gruelling, relentless sport reserved for the wildest, most hardcore athletes among us.According to our <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/nike-acg-all-conditions-racing-department" target="_blank">All Conditions Racing Department</a> runners—six of whom just conquered pinnacle UTMB races across the French, Italian and Swiss Alps, on trails spanning 15 to 174 kilometres, with elevation gains of 1,200 to nearly 10,000 metres—the grit, determination, joy and freedom trail running gives you are worth every ounce of work. See for yourself.

<h3>ROSS GOLLAN</h3>Race: Experience Trail Courmayeur (ETC); 15K with 1,200m elevation gain Global finish rank: 29th

<h3>MARIE NIVET</h3>Race: ETC; 15K with 1,200m elevation gain Global women's finish rank: 7th

CESARE MAESTRIRace: ETC; 15K with 1,200m elevation gain Global finish rank: 2nd

<h3>BAPTISTE COATANTIEC</h3>Race: Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB); 174K with nearly 10,000m elevation gain Global finish rank: 11th

<h3>ANTHONY COSTALES</h3>Race: Courmayeur—Champex—Chamonix (CCC); 101K with more than 6,050m elevation gain Global finish rank: 15th

<h3>DREW HOLMEN</h3>Race: CCC; 101K with more than 6,050m elevation gain Global finish rank: 3rd

Powering up steep ascents. Navigating gnarly descents. Whipping mountain winds. Ultra trail running is a relentless sport. But the payoff is well worth the grind.

Ultra trail running can take everything you've got—and give you even more

Born of need and elevated by expertise and diligence, today the Department of Nike Archives (DNA) cares for hundreds of thousands of artefacts and a limitless vault of connected stories.&nbsp;The brand archive began organically in the 1970s and officially became DNA in 2006. The department's purpose is to both preserve and accelerate the ever-evolving and interconnected story of Nike. "Knowing who you are and the fights you've come through can do huge things for morale, inspiration and creativity. That's what DNA provides". - Phil Knight

Department of Nike Archives

Basketball has never seen a decade like the 1980s. With a deep roster of incandescent stars and bitter rivalries in both the pro and university games, the sport's growth curve had never looked so steep, and may never again.In some aspects, Nike rode the wave of the round-ball revolution. In others, the Swoosh was out in front, fuelling—and occasionally suffering the effects of—the money and fame that pulsed through the sport.But before signature shoes, before billion-dollar categories, before basketball became central to Nike's identity, there was a foothold to secure.That foothold began in US university gyms.In March of 1979, the NCAA championship game between Larry Bird's Indiana State and Magic Johnson's Michigan State captivated the country. It remains the highest-rated televised university basketball game in history. A year later, ESPN launched with a heavy diet of university basketball programming. By 1985, the NCAA tournament would expand to 64 teams.US university basketball was no longer regional. It was televised, expanding and captivating the country.Nike was already moving.

University 101

Nike began its push into university basketball in the late 1970s with the help of a personality named Sonny.By then, the company's foray into the NBA was already underway. But aside from the University of Oregon, the university game had largely been ignored. That changed in the summer of 1977, when John Paul "Sonny" Vaccaro met with Rob Strasser, Phil Knight and a handful of others to pitch a sandal-type basketball shoe.The shoe idea was a dud; Vaccaro, however, had an idea that would stick.

Vaccaro's strategy: create connections. Through the Dapper Dan high school tournament he had been running in Pittsburgh since 1965—essentially the first countrywide All-Star showcase—he built a network inside the coaching ranks. And the university business was ripe for the picking. In the early to mid-1970s, only a handful of elite coaches were paid anything. A few received lecture fees. Converse had sent Georgetown's John Thompson to Italy in 1977 to run a clinic. But most coaches with shoe deals received little more than discounted products.Nike saw an opportunity. NCAA rules barred companies from paying players, but coaches were fair game. Provide products. Build relationships. Establish loyalty.

With that philosophy in mind, things moved quickly. By November 1978, Nike had 17 universities on board. By 1980, it had 71.What began as a gamble was starting to look like a sure bet. But contracts were only the first step. Growth gave Nike reach, but it still needed credibility.

The Lab

No programme encapsulated the 1980s university basketball scene and Nike's growing presence within it quite like the Georgetown Hoyas under head coach John Thompson, whose programme became one of the most formidable forces in the sport.

While serving as Nike's unofficial flagship, Georgetown made the Final Four in 1982, 1984 and 1985, winning the national championship in 1984 and claiming five Big East regular-season titles during the decade.Thompson first met Phil Knight on a trip to Nike in August 1980. "The esprit de corps manifested by your people is most impressive", he wrote in a letter to Knight soon after. Following a falling out with a close friend at Converse, Thompson signed with Nike and the relationship deepened quickly."What you found out about Phil, there were certain people he didn't cross", said Ron Hill, who ran the basketball programme in the mid-1980s. "If John Thompson barked, Phil didn't want to hear it. 'Just get him what he wants'. There were a few of those, not many".Georgetown became a lab of sorts for Nike ideas.Take the Legend, released in 1982. It featured thick, durable leather that took time to break in but was ultimately comfortable. It introduced coloured soles and linings, a perforated toe, a flex point at the lacing break and a hook on the back—small evolutions that felt distinctive at the time."Legend was the shoe when I came to the company", said Mike Caster, Nike's basketball marketing manager in the mid-1980s. "I remember everybody played in that shoe. It was just an awesome basketball shoe".

Thompson's Hoyas were fiercely loyal to it. So when Nike executives approached him about switching Georgetown into softer-leather Air Force models or the upcoming Dunk, Thompson refused. He preferred the thicker material, and he wanted Georgetown to stand apart. Wearing the same shoe as a dozen other programmes was not acceptable."He said, 'I'm not wearing anybody else's shoes, number one; and number two, I want it exactly this way'", Hill recalled.By then, the Legend had been discontinued and the name was no longer available. So designer Mike Aveni modified the design slightly, adding a heel counter stamped with "NIKE", and created what became the Terminator. For Georgetown's player-only versions, "HOYAS" was stamped on the back instead, avoiding university royalties and reinforcing Thompson's demand for identity.The collaboration extended beyond footwear. In 1983, Thompson had Patrick Ewing wear a Nike undershirt in a nationally televised game against Virginia, featuring an illustration of the Legend on the sleeves. The NCAA objected, banning what it considered "free" on-court advertising.But the message was clear.Nike wasn't just supplying products. It was embedded inside one of the sport's most visible programmes, testing ideas, responding to a powerful coach and building trust on a national stage.

Be True to Your School

If Georgetown gave Nike credibility, March gave it scale.At the 1985 Final Four, Nike leaders Rob Strasser, Jack Joyce and members of the New Products team saw university passion up close. Students and fans lined up overnight to get into the games. University colours dominated the arenas. Allegiance was visible, tribal and loud.

They began to see something bigger than product placement. If Nike could create footwear in the actual colours of these programmes, fans might wear them as badges of identity.The success of the Air Jordan 1 and Jordan player trousers had already suggested that consumers would embrace bold colour. Now the idea moved to college and university basketball.The College Colours programme was born.

Conceived by Strasser, Joyce and a small internal team that included creative director Peter Moore and Mary Bodecker McGoldrick, the programme paired footwear, apparel and bags in coordinated university palettes. It began as part of the "Guns of August" sales push in June 1985, promising samples by August and carrying a simple directive: "Be True to Your School".

Twelve universities anchored the initial release: UNLV, Arizona, Iowa, Purdue, Michigan, St. John's, NC State, Georgia, Maryland, Syracuse, Georgetown and Kentucky.The centrepiece was a high-top basketball shoe originally sketched by Moore. At first called the College Colour High, it was, as Nike veteran Brad Johnson later said, "a mash-up of different shoes"—a common design practice at the time. Its outsole resembled the Air Jordan I and the Big Nike. Its upper echoed familiar silhouettes. It was built on the same last used for the Legend, considered one of Nike's best-fitting basketball forms.Eventually, the shoe took a name from that lineage.It became the Dunk.

College Colours disrupted a basketball footwear landscape that had largely been defined by white shoes with minimal colour. For the first time, university identity could be worn head to toe, on campus, in dorm rooms and in packed arenas during March.The Dunk's initial retail performance was moderate. The marketplace was suddenly crowded with colour after the Air Jordan I. But culturally, something had shifted. Nike had aligned itself not just with players and coaches, but with fan allegiance itself.The foothold in university basketball was no longer theoretical. It was visible—in blue and orange, in red and white, in navy and grey—on feet across the country.

March on the Main Stage

As the 1980s progressed, that visibility only intensified.Nike universities began advancing deeper into the NCAA tournament with increasing regularity. By 1985, the shift was undeniable: the entire Final Four—Villanova, Georgetown, St. John's and Memphis State—wore Nike.

The tournament had become the sport's national convention, and Nike was everywhere.By that point, Phil Knight reportedly asked what it would cost to sign every top-level programme in the country—an idea that never materialised but spoke volumes about how far the company had come in less than 10 years.Exposure in March did more than sell shoes. It cemented perception. University basketball was now national theatre, broadcast into living rooms across the country, and Nike was attached to some of its most high-profile programmes.The 1977 strategy—build through coaches, embed through relationships—was no longer speculative. It was unfolding in front of a national audience.

The Coaching Fraternity

The relationships that fuelled that rise extended beyond contracts.Each autumn, Phil Knight received envelope after envelope from university towns around the country containing handwritten notes on university letterhead thanking Nike for the summer trip and praising the company.

"The Nike company is simply amazing", wrote George Blaney of Holy Cross. "Not only are you aggressive, young and dynamic, but the company is actually concerned about people. I like that".Those letters followed Nike's annual university coaches trips, gatherings that were nominally about product evaluation but functioned as something deeper. Coaches met with designers. They discussed equipment. They compared notes. They built bonds both with the company and with each other.Clinics expanded the network further. Nike-sponsored events brought elite university coaches together with high school coaches and players, spreading influence and reinforcing the company's presence at every level of the game."It's about relationships, service and product", Ed Janka later recalled of the philosophy from the early days. "None is more important than the other".Service became a differentiator. Nike representatives were on the road constantly, visiting campuses, talking with trainers, building custom solutions when needed. While competitors sold stock products, Nike showed up.The approach required sustained time and investment. It proved effective.By the mid-1980s, being a "Nike university" meant more than wearing a logo. It meant belonging to a network, and one that connected product innovation, marketing visibility and personal relationships in ways the sport had never previously experienced.

A Proving Ground

Even as colour and culture captured attention, performance remained central.Georgetown's status as an informal laboratory was not cosmetic. Coaches demanded durability. Trainers offered feedback. Designers iterated.Models like the Legend and the Terminator reflected those conversations—incremental shifts in materials, structure and identity. Shoes were refined season by season, informed by the needs of university programmes competing at the highest level.

By the close of the decade, Nike universities had claimed multiple NCAA championships. The company that had started the 1977–78 season with a single university wearing its shoes had embedded itself across more than a hundred programmes.The experiment had scaled.Basketball's growth in the 1980s is often told through signature athletes and market-share battles. But before any of that came into focus, Nike's position inside the sport was built in university gyms.By the time the tournament lights grew brighter and basketball's commercial stakes escalated, Nike no longer needed to prove it belonged. It already did.

Basketball's growth in the 1980s is often told through signature athletes and market-share battles. But before any of that came into focus, Nike's position inside the sport was built on university courts.

History

Full-Court Press: How Nike Found Its Footing in University Basketball

About Nike—stories from inside NIKE, Inc.

This is, obviously, a running story.But the story of the <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/nike-pegasus-42-official-images" target="_blank">Nike Pegasus</a> is also something more specific—a case study in how restraint, clarity and attention to fundamentals can produce lasting success. Launched in 1982, the Pegasus would go on to become Nike's most consistent and popular running shoe of all time, a franchise that has endured across eras, innovations and shifting footwear philosophies. "There's no modest way of saying this", said Sebastian Tesche, product line manager of the Pegasus 35. "The Peg is the single biggest and best running shoe in the world. It's bigger than many of our competitors".It wasn't designed to be an icon. It was designed to solve a problem.

In the late 1970s, Nike's earliest experiments with Air were full of promise but hindered by the realities of the technology. The 1978 Tailwind introduced Air to running yet it introduced stability issues that the company would spend the next several years trying to fix. The Columbia and Aurora that followed solved some of those problems but felt stiff at a time when runners wanted something livelier underfoot. Fortunately, Nike knew Air was a long game.&nbsp;

The great thing that we always thought about Air at that time—and it's still true—is that it doesn't lose its cushioning properties hardly at all through time", said Howard Banich, who oversaw running product in 1982. "Jeff Johnson, Nike's first employee, always wanted us to do an ad that showed a person coming back to the shoe store with just the Air bag from their shoe and saying, 'I would like another shoe around this please.' Because the Air bag was still going strong".Still, the question remained: how do you put Air where it matters without making the shoe too expensive or too complicated?One solution came from an ongoing innovation project led by former Nike CEO Mark Parker. Known internally as the Air Wedge Trainer—the concept that would ultimately become the Pegasus—it&nbsp;borrowed an Internationalist upper and outsole, added a heel Air unit encapsulated in polyurethane and positioned Air right at heel strike. It was essentially a simpler, cheaper expression of Air and it tested well.

"A heel wedge still provided the benefits of Air where it was needed the most—under&nbsp;the heel at heel strike—but it was less expensive because it was really only a third of the size of the full-length Air-Sole that was used in the Tailwind", Parker said.At the same time, New Balance had just released the 990 with a provocative tagline: "At a suggested retail price of $100, is the 990 too expensive or too inexpensive?" The price point shocked the market and galvanised Nike. If the competition was willing to push upward, Nike saw an opportunity to create a shoe that delivered performance at a more approachable cost.The Air Wedge Trainer, with its strong test results and modest bill of materials, suddenly looked like the perfect platform.

Building a "best practices" shoe

With the Air Wedge Trainer as a foundation, development for the Pegasus took place at Nike's facility in Exeter, New Hampshire, where the heel Air wedge concept was built into a fully realised running shoe. Bill Peterson designed the outsole. Bruce Kilgore, deep in Air Force 1 development, offered design input. Parker integrated those ideas into a simple, functional upper: grey, with Dark Navy accents—a look one European sales rep later described as "a rainy day".Nike also made a strategic shift to hit its target price of around $50: manufacturing moved to Korea, to the Poon Young factory. Very few running shoes were being produced in Korea at the time. Components had to be imported—Air wedges from the US, nylon from Germany—and Nike developers scrambled to refine techniques. "The Air unit didn't fit correctly in the shoe at first", recalled footwear innovation veteran Steve Roth. During a holiday back in the US, he spent two weeks in Saco, Maine resizing Air wedges by hand so they would sit properly in the midsole.Still, the project moved fast. In only about four months, Nike had a completed shoe—one built around Air and a carefully selected set of core features: a new EVA foam called Tomilite offered a resilient ride. A Waffle outsole, with lugs orientated for motion, gave runners better ground contact and stability. The upper was simple, lightweight and unpretentious.

"The Pegasus was essentially our 'best practices' shoe", Roth said. "It had Air, yes, but it was mostly about: what are the best features we can put in a product that hit the sweet spot of the market?"It wasn't the flashiest running shoe in the line, nor was it meant to be. It was designed to work.

A running manual for the masses

Nike's confidence in the Pegasus showed in the small details. The company had begun releasing "owner's manuals" with its higher-profile footwear to help runners understand new technologies and the Pegasus received one, too. It walked consumers through Air, Tomilite and the shoe's geometry. The transparency helped reinforce the Pegasus as a shoe built on clarity, usefulness and trust.

Naming the Pegasus

Today, many assume the Pegasus name came from the idea of a half-horse, half-winged creature, an allusion to the balance of EVA and Air in the midsole. But the real story is far simpler.To name the shoe, employees dropped suggestions into a bowl. Several slips of paper read Pegasus, including one from Mark Parker. Nike had been playing with mythology themes—Odyssey, Valkyrie—and Pegasus fit the family. "Names were a lot easier back then", Parker said.The name stuck. And with it came the beginnings of what would become Nike's most beloved running shoe.

The instant hit

Nike introduced the Pegasus at the 1982 New York City Marathon. While Alberto Salazar powered to his third consecutive win in a pair of Mariahs, the men's Pegasus debuted in limited quantities as part of Nike's technical running line. It launched to select dealers and quickly posted strong early sales: nearly $200,000 in under a month, with roughly 8,000 units sold. By December, that number had climbed to more than 35,000 pairs.When the Pegasus rolled out more broadly in early 1983, the reaction was immediate. "The initial reaction to the Pegasus was very good", said Jim Docherty, who began his career as a Nike EKIN that year. "When the Tailwind hit the market, some consumers thought it was too soft because most midsoles were fairly firm at that time and the Tailwind was a big change from the norm. The Pegasus with heel Air bridged the gap between old EVA midsoles and total Air".

For young runners and store employees alike, the Pegasus quickly became the reliable choice—the shoe you knew you could recommend. In 1983, long before he became a Nike Running veteran and future Pegasus PLM, Tim Slingsby was a student working in a running store. "The Pegasus was your go-to shoe when someone would come in, you would sell them", he said. "As a high school kid, you knew it would work, it would perform, and it was a great price. It had everything".Within six months, Nike had sold nearly 300,000 pairs, generating $6.4 million in men's sales alone.The formula worked.

The every-runner's shoe

By 1985, Pegasus sales had reached 2.5 million pairs. Nike had found its lane and owned it. Longtime Nike designer Bob Lucas compared the shoe to an automotive staple: "to use an automotive analogy, auto manufacturers have their Pegasus in their lines: a Honda Civic, the Toyota Corolla. … that kind of product line where it's a value-based proposition".Over the next several years, Nike made only modest adjustments to the shoe—incremental material updates, seasonal colour changes—while leaving its core intact. That restraint became part of the Pegasus's identity. "I think everybody always knew it was one of those things where you didn't want to change it", said Clare Hamill, a leader at Nike Running in the mid-1980s. "That was the biggest challenge—how&nbsp;to make it better without changing it".

At the heart of the early Pegasus was a simple principle: don't complicate it. The midsole, upper and outsole were all guided by what Hamill described plainly. "The core philosophy of the Pegasus was, keep it simple. No junk. Give people what they need and don't overbuild".Runners felt that clarity. By the late 1980s, the Pegasus had become a dependable constant in an increasingly crowded running landscape, one defined less by flash than by trust. The 1989 Air Pegasus, built on existing tooling with a soft poly-pag and synthetic suede upper, would later be remembered as a high-water mark. "If you asked loyal Pegasus wearers through the years what their favourite version has been", said former Nike Running Leader Kevin Paulk, "I would be willing to bet a lot of people would say the Peg '89. It had a nice soft upper and fit like a glove".

From its earliest years, that has remained the draw of the Pegasus: a running shoe built not to chase trends but to earn loyalty, mile after mile.

The Peg wasn't designed to be an icon. It was designed to solve a problem. See how that solution became "the single biggest and best running shoe in the world".

Nike Pegasus: The Origin of a Running Workhorse

Words: <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="/company/people/department-of-nike-archives" target="_blank" class="ql-size-small">Department of Nike Archives</a>Not every breakthrough in sports science begins in a lab.For Nike's iconic Waffle sole—one of running's most game-changing innovations—it began in the kitchen.It was 1971 and <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/stories/bill-bowerman-nike-s-original-innovator" target="_blank">Bill Bowerman</a> was wrestling with a problem he'd been turning over in his mind ever since a hard, slick new urethane track had been installed at the University of Oregon two years prior, which was injuring runners. Bowerman had to face a reality: he had chosen a track surface that wasn't holding up, and he needed to find a fix. How could his runners get better grip? Spikes dug in too deep; flats didn't bite enough.One morning, while glancing at his wife, Barbara's, waffle iron—a Model 251 by Bersted Manufacturing Company, which the Bowermans had received as a wedding gift in 1936—he was struck by the grid pattern. The raised squares seemed like the exact geometry that could deliver the lightweight traction he'd been chasing.He poured liquid urethane straight into the family waffle iron, only it instantly glued shut permanently, ruining their 35-year-old wedding present. Undeterred, he drove into town, bought several more secondhand waffle irons, and kept experimenting. Those first imprints came out inverted with concave bumps, but they sparked the idea that would lead him to refine moulds and materials until a workable prototype finally emerged.

What resulted was the first version of the Nike Moon Shoe—a design that would shape the future of running for decades."The Waffle sole changed everything", says Nike Running Historian Rick Lower. "Not only did it transform how runners thought about traction and cushioning but it showed people what Nike was about: solving problems in new ways".

A catalyst for the future

In 1971, Nike, then still known as Blue Ribbon Sports, an American importer of Japanese running shoes, hadn't yet become the global force in sports innovation that it is today. The fledgling company was still finding its footing, and Bowerman—co-founder, coach and relentless tinkerer—was at the centre of that push. To him, every surface was a problem waiting for a solution.&nbsp;That included the new Astroturf laid down at Autzen Stadium, where the Oregon Ducks football team struggled for traction. In wet conditions, players often ditched their boots for basketball shoes with a herringbone outsole that gripped better. Bowerman and teammate Jeff Johnson began exploring traction ideas for football as well as athletics, a line of thinking that would lead to the Astrograbber—a shoe prototyped in 1972 and <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/nike-bode-rec-astrograbber-official-images" target="_blank">reissued decades later</a>."There had been no real innovation in outsoles for decades", says Nike Running Historian Rick Lower. "Running shoes were basically just a sheet of rubber to protect your feet from the road, and traction and cushioning were secondary. Bowerman wasn't willing to accept that".Inspired by the moment in his kitchen, he began pulling in a network of local resources to help refine the moulds and materials—tire shops, machinists, cobblers. Early prototypes disintegrated after only minutes of running. Others left athletes with cut ankles from exposed wire that was embedded in the rubber mixture for traction. Yet each failed attempt nudged the idea closer to the finishing line.

By November 1971, the Waffle sole had its first taste of competition when members of Oregon's cross-country team wore early versions to win the NCAA title. Through the winter and spring of 1972, more college&nbsp;and local South Eugene high-school&nbsp;athletes quietly tested pairs. By the following summer, Bowerman and Geoff Hollister were hand-cobbling a small batch of prototypes for a bigger stage: the US Olympic Trials in Eugene.They weren't perfect, especially not for the marathon level. "It was basically just an upper stitched to a thin sheet of waffle", Lower says. "So minimal it was like running barefoot". Still, a handful of brave runners laced them up. Some thought the Waffle sole footprints looked like astronauts' footprints on the moon, becoming part of the lore that gave the prototypes their now-iconic nickname: the Moon Shoe.For the fast-growing company, it was a pivotal moment. Even if the shoe wasn't ready for mass release, it was proof the idea worked and evidence that this small Oregon company could push running footwear in an entirely new direction.

The bridge to a running movement

The Moon Shoe itself never went to market, though a few pairs are believed to have been sold out of Nike's Eugene retail store, making it possible to have snagged one if you were in the right place at the right time. But the shoe's DNA spread quickly. By 1973, Nike released the Oregon Waffle. Two years later came the Waffle Trainer, Nike's first blockbuster success.Designed by Bill Bowerman and Geoff Hollister, as well as famed Bowerman collaborators orthopaedic surgeon Stan James and podiatrist Dennis Vixie, the Waffle Trainer became Nike's most popular running model. It was created at the request of runner Jon Anderson, who wanted a more substantial training shoe, but went well beyond satisfying Anderson's needs—it became the best-selling training shoe in the country. By 1975, orders had topped 100,000 units, and its blue upper with a yellow Swoosh became one of the defining looks of Nike's early years. To this day, it remains emblematic of Nike in the 1970s.

The milestone sneaker didn't just give everyday runners better grip. With a flared sole and a new cushioning sensation unlike anything they'd felt before, it changed expectations of what a running shoe could be."That shoe was the bridge", Lower explains. "It took the Moon Shoe's experiment and turned it into a global product. From there Nike's reputation as an innovator was cemented".But it wasn't the end for the Moon Shoe. After making its revival on Nike collaborator and French designer Jacquemus's runway last January, the iconic silhouette was reimagined for a new generation. Sleek and fashion-forward, the new sneaker, coming soon, bridges performance heritage and style with speed, capturing the same restless drive that defined its earliest incarnation. What was once vaulted as Nike's racing DNA is now primed for the future.

Long live experimentation and innovation

The waffle iron tale might have stayed legend if not for a discovery decades later. When Bowerman's son Tom renovated the family property in Coburg, Oregon, he unearthed a long-forgotten rubbish pit near the carport. Inside were discarded prototypes, moulds and the rusted shell of the waffle iron Barbara Bowerman had tossed after Bill glued it shut.&nbsp;Today, that iron rests in the Department of Nike Archives at Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., acting as a reminder of the kitchen tinkering that became the blueprint for Nike's approach and long-term success: experiment boldly, keep refining and never stop pushing forward.

Created from the experimentation and ingenuity of Nike's co-founder Bill Bowerman, the Nike Moon Shoe's unique design would shape the future of running for decades.

Feature

From waffle iron to world stage: the true story of the Nike Moon Shoe

25 January 1964. Saturday.The Beatles registered their first number-one hit song in the United States: "I Want to Hold Your Hand".And on a cold, rainy day in Portland, Oregon, a coach and his former athlete met for lunch at the Cosmopolitan Hotel to discuss a possible business partnership.One hour later, Phil Knight and <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/bill-bowerman-nike-s-original-innovator" target="_blank">Bill Bowerman</a> stood, reached across the table and shook hands. Blue Ribbon Sports was born.To understand how two Oregonians arrived at that moment—and why it held—we have to go back a decade, to a teenager who had just been cut from baseball.

The Beginning

Phil Knight grew up in Southeast Portland and went to Cleveland High. As he tells it, he was the last cut on the sophomore-and-under baseball team—a decision that stung."I was heartbroken but my mum said, 'You are not going to mope around the house. You're either going to get a paper route or go out for track'. Well, that was easy. I went out for track".That decision set him on a course that would change his life, and, eventually, the sports world.Knight tried out for athletics and quickly found his stride. While he was physically smaller than his teammates, he was fast, competitive and willing to work.At one early meet, his father, William, a labour lawyer who would later become publisher of the Oregon Journal, introduced him to Oregon athletics coach Bill Bowerman. The two older men had attended the University of Oregon together. That day was his first introduction to the coach who would later shape his life.By then, Knight was already starting to win and place in local races, enough to earn a name in Oregon's competitive prep scene. During his junior year, he spotted a headline that stuck with him: Bill Dellinger, a runner from the University of Oregon, who had just won the mile at the national championships under Bowerman's coaching."It was startling", Knight said. "It was a huge headline in The Oregonian and that's when I became aware of Bill Bowerman and what a phenomenal programme he had".

The Hamburger of Runners

Although small and lean, Knight never let size hold him back. In 1955, he played on Cleveland's city-championship basketball team, finished second in the league 880-yard (805-metre) run and took fourth at the state meet. By autumn, he'd earned a spot on Bowerman's athletics and cross-country teams at the University of Oregon.Long before his first practice, though, his father had already turned to Bowerman for guidance—an early glimpse of the connection that would define both men's careers. Curious to get the coach's perspective on whether Phil should attend university or join the military, William Knight wrote to him that autumn.Bowerman replied with his trademark mix of bluntness and care."My first concern is for your young man's education", he wrote. "All will not be fun and frolic. It takes hard work for success in anything … it is a privilege to have your son here, also a responsibility for me, for you and for him".

Like many freshmen before him, Knight soon learned what that meant, struggling under the bombastic Bowerman. "After my freshman year, I had to sit down with myself and ask if I was going to go back to that crazy man, or not", Knight recalled. "I realised if I go back, I'm just going to have to do things his way because he's not going to change. So, I went back".That decision proved pivotal. Bowerman saw potential in Knight—not&nbsp;as a star runner but as an ideal test subject. "I wasn't one of the best runners on the team", Knight admitted. "Bowerman knew he could use me as a guinea pig without much risk".He called Knight the "hamburger" of runners—hearty stock, forgiving, determined—and began using him to test early shoe prototypes. In August 1958, Bowerman sent Knight a letter outlining his summer training plan and added a postscript, "If you have a pair you think would make good flats, send them down. They'll be ready when school starts".The pair Knight received that autumn featured an experimental white, rubber-coated fabric—"the kind you'd use for a tablecloth you could sponge off", Bowerman later said. They were crude, functional and a glimpse of what was coming. The coach was still years from finding a manufacturing partner, but his drive to build a faster, lighter shoe had already found its first willing tester.

From Athletics to Business

By the time Knight graduated from Oregon in 1959 with a degree in business, his competitive drive had shifted from athletics to the classroom. The next stop was Stanford, where he enrolled to pursue his MBA.At first, his path seemed uncertain. But during his final year, a class called "Small Business Management" caught his attention. It was a class that would quietly spark the idea of a lifetime."It was the only entrepreneurship class, so it was one of the classes that I was most interested in", Knight said.&nbsp;He developed a strong rapport with his professor, Frank Shallenberger, who assigned the students a simple but open-ended project: invent a new business, define its purpose and create a marketing plan to support it.Knight had recently overheard a conversation among photographers at the Oregon Journal, where he'd worked summers during university. They were talking about a surge of inexpensive Japanese cameras that were starting to rival the more powerful and costly German models."Electronics was a popular topic at that time and the smart kids chose to write about things like that", Knight said. "But I didn't know anything about electronics, so I wrote about something that I did know about—shoes".Drawing from his experience as one of Bill Bowerman's wear-testers, he built his hypothetical company. By 1962, German sports shoes were on the rise in the US—high quality, yes, but expensive. Knight saw an opening.He turned the idea into a paper he wrote almost literally overnight with a single bold hypothesis: Can Japanese sports shoes do to German sports shoes what Japanese cameras did to German cameras?Knight argued that Japanese-made running shoes could compete on both price and quality with the dominant German brands. Knight received an "A". When the assignment was over, he couldn't shake the idea. "I wrote a letter of enquiry to virtually every Japanese shoemaker that I could find".Only one company replied: the Kow Hoo Shoe Company of Hong Kong. The letter, written in imperfect English, was polite but discouraging."It is with regret to inform you that due to lack of [such] equipment and material, we can hardly manufacture [such] type of shoes and trust that every shoemaker in Hongkong (sic) fails in doing so. We are expert in manufacturing golf shoes, skating boots and bowling shoes, etc.".It wasn't the answer Knight had hoped for, but it didn't matter. A seed had been planted that would soon take root.Shaken but not deterred, he was about to face the opportunity of a lifetime.That story—and more—will come in future Department of Nike Archive features on The Record.

Go behind the scenes of the famous business deal between Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman—co-founders of Nike.

The Handshake That Started It All

At the base of K2, the world's second-highest peak, two American climbers sat among their gear, snow-streaked ridgelines rising behind them. Their faces were lean from 68 days on the mountain. Both wore yellow Nike Long Distance Vectors (LDVs)—one of the brand's top long-distance running shoes at the time—which looked as battered as the climbers themselves. A picture was needed to mark the moment; one of the men raised a thumb towards the camera. The photograph, taken by mountaineering photographer Dianne Roberts in 1978, would go on to become one of Nike's most unexpected origin stories.

An Unlikely Sponsorship

Months earlier, Nike had quietly supplied the expedition with those lightweight trainers, a last-minute gift meant for the 110-mile approach to basecamp. "A lot of it was off-trail", recalled Rick Ridgeway, one of the climbers in the photo and a leading American alpinist of the era. "You can imagine they were pretty trashed by the time we got there".In those years, most climbers relied on stiff leather boots built in Europe. The LDVs were the opposite: soft, breathable and fast. "They were just more flexible and more comfortable", Ridgeway said. "What was really cool about those LDVs is that you need to hop around on rocks. This was a rough hike so you could boulder hop. They breathed better. They were functionally superior to the more rigid traditional trekking shoe".

Internally, Nike referred to the model as the "Long Distance Vixie" because Eugene podiatrist Dennis Vixie made the last. Externally, it was known as the Long Distance Vector.At the time, Nike hadn't yet stepped into the outdoor business—the shoes had simply been a goodwill gesture for the expedition. No one could have predicted that they would plant the seed for an entirely new category.

By the time the team descended, the fabric sneakers had nearly fallen apart. Ridgeway and Roskelley held them together with tape and glue for the long walk back to the roadhead. "Being up that high for that long without oxygen, it was hard", Ridgeway remembered. "But we made it. And on the way out, we started talking about how the shoe could be modified to make it into a usable trekking shoe".When they returned home, the climbers mailed their blown-out LDVs to Nike along with a short list of suggested improvements, including a tougher sole and more rugged upper, while still keeping the shoe lightweight and flexible. Those notes would help spark Nike's first outdoor footwear line and, eventually, the category that became <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/nike-reintroduces-acg-all-conditions-gear" target="_blank">All Conditions Gear</a> (ACG).

From Climb to Concept

Nike's design team took the climbers' feedback to heart. The field-worn LDVs had proven that lighter footwear could thrive where only heavy boots once ruled. The idea that "light is right" began to ripple through the brand's ranks.By 1981, that thinking produced three shoes that merged the best of Nike running with durability for rough terrain: the Lava Dome, the Approach and the Magma. Nike's first shoe to use a GORE-TEX lining; the design shape would later inform early thinking behind the Air Force 1. "It became very apparent that world-class athletes [were] going really lightweight", recalled product manager Monte Mayko, who helped lead the project from Nike's Exeter, New Hampshire factory. "It made total sense".

Inspired by the K2 photograph and the climbers' first-hand notes, the Nike team reimagined what a hiking shoe could be. The result was a category shift toward performance minimalism. "The whole notion of light is right and less is more and functional minimalism—climbers really get that at their core", explained Kirk Richardson, a lifelong mountaineer who would later lead ACG. "Nike intuitively got it. Bowerman and Knight were absolutely right". The new designs, built in Exeter and Saco, Maine, featured lightweight uppers, Waffle soles and durable midsoles derived directly from Nike's running heritage. For climbers and trail runners, they felt revolutionary: fast, flexible and protective enough to take the punishment of rock and scree. "Turning a training shoe into a trekking shoe. Nobody had done that", Ridgeway later said. "It was kind of revolutionary".

As those early designs hit the market, Ridgeway continued testing prototypes and corresponding with Nike designers. "They'd send me a prototype of the shoes to try out so I field tested them", he recalled. One of those early ads—the first print campaign for Nike Outdoor—used Roberts' K2 photograph of Ridgeway and Roskelley. The caption read: "Not everyone was willing to wait for our hiking boots".

The Big Ascent

By the mid-1980s, Nike's outdoor experiments had evolved from one-off projects into a legitimate design philosophy. Yet without a unifying category, they remained scattered, a mix of hiking boots, trail runners and small-batch apparel experiments without a single name or purpose.That began to change in 1987, when a small internal team was tasked with formalising Nike's outdoor efforts. According to Tom Clarke, then vice president of product marketing, Nike had been talking about being in the outdoor business for some time and had a stable of avid outdoor people around product management.

The team saw an opening in a market dominated by legacy brands in Europe still building heavy, rigid gear for mountaineering specialists. An opportunity to create athletic gear designed for movement in all conditions.Clarke, Richardson and a small team in Beaverton and Exeter began sketching out a strategy. Footwear and apparel would live under a single collection guided by four principles: high performance, durability, versatility and functional excellence. It was the beginning of a significant shift in performance outdoor footwear that would also make its way into apparel.The idea quickly gained traction. Within two years, a full outdoor business plan emerged.

The Name Takes Hold

Nike's outdoor plan was coming together, but a fitting name was still missing. Around the same time, Nike Running had begun using the phrase "All Conditions Gear" for a small line of year-round performance apparel—gear designed to handle any weather. The overlap in philosophy caught the Outdoor team's attention. When Clarke's group discovered the term, they adopted it to define the new collection, a name that embodied Nike's commitment to performance regardless of terrain or weather, echoing the same spirit that had driven Ridgeway and Roskelley's K2 ascent a decade earlier.

By 1989, it became official. Under Richardson's leadership, ACG launched as a fully integrated line of footwear and apparel designed for athletes who ran, hiked, climbed and explored outdoors.Nike made sure its debut felt authentic. The first catalogue shoot took place at Castleton Tower in Moab, Utah—a notorious rock spire revered by climbers. "We wanted to position it as a pretty real brand", said art director Ron Dumas. "We had these guys climb this tower and so we got in a helicopter. It was just about sunset and I was sitting on the rail holding onto the photographer and he's hanging out of the helicopter. The tower was beautiful and these guys are just little dots on top. It was phenomenal".

Released in 1989 as part of ACG's inaugural product launch, the Huascaran jacket featured a nylon microfibre GORE-TEX shell.

Inspired by Mount Huascarán in Peru, its design included underarm gussets, double storm flaps, cargo pockets and a zip-in liner capability, reflecting ACG's early focus on durable, all-conditions performance.

Additionally, the warm winter jacket was constructed with a Regulator-lined interior and a snap-off hood.

A decade after the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, Nike ACG marked the mountain's irreversible transformation with a before-and-after patch showing a landscape changed forever. Instead of measuring height like other ACG "landmark" pieces, the jacket captured impact, memory and permanence.

Built as an insulation layer within ACG's late-'80s systems approach, the Mount St. Helens Jacket used thick Polarfleece, ribbed cuffs and a reversible YKK zip to integrate seamlessly with outer shells. Technical and modular by design, it showed how storytelling and function came together in early ACG systems thinking.

This Kilimanjaro Anorak K2 was worn and autographed by climber John Roskelley, one of the two Americans photographed at K2 basecamp in LDVs whose trek later appeared in an early 1980s poster and in a 1989 ACG ad.

Built with two- and three-layer GORE-TEX and a nylon microfibre shell, the anorak included reinforced yokes, underarm gussets and multiple zip pockets, reflecting the technical design ethos that shaped ACG's early years.

When the first ACG collection dropped that autumn, anchored by the Air Wildwood, Lava High and a series of GORE-TEX and fleece outerwear pieces, Nike had officially staked its flag in the outdoor market.

The photograph of two climbers at the base of K2 had become something larger: the spark that ignited an entirely new dimension for Nike.

The wild moment that sparked Nike's first outdoor footwear line and, eventually, the category that became All Conditions Gear.

The Birth of ACG: The Summit that Launched a Legacy

Words: <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="/company/people/department-of-nike-archives" target="_blank" class="ql-size-small">Department of Nike Archives</a> In 1971, Watergate was just a hotel, NASA was preparing Apollo 15 and a small Oregon company had just sold its first pair of shoes.The shoe—a football boot called the Nike—retailed for $16.95. Its defining feature was a tick-shaped stripe created by a Portland State University student for $35. Few noticed the shoe, but the mark would long outlast it.At the time, Nike wasn't yet the global sports brand it would become. Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman were still operating as Blue Ribbon Sports, a small distributor of Japanese running shoes. But contracts with their supplier were winding down, and Knight knew the company's future depended on more than someone else's product. To succeed, BRS needed a shoe of its own—and with it, an identity.That February, Knight contracted a factory in Mexico to produce a black football boot with a white sole. To distinguish it from Onitsuka Tiger models, he needed a brand mark. He turned to Carolyn Davidson, a design student he'd met while teaching accounting at Portland State.Two years earlier, Davidson had been overheard in a hallway telling a classmate she couldn't afford an oil painting course. Knight offered her $2 an hour to make charts and graphics for his side business. Over time, she created ads, brochures and catalogues. Now, he was asking her for something bigger: a stripe for the side of a shoe.

Davidson sketched half a dozen options. In an office in Tigard, Oregon, Knight gathered two employees to review them, including Jeff Johnson, Nike's first full-time hire. None of them made a strong impression. "It came down to a matter of which was the least awful", Johnson recalled.The group settled on Davidson's curving tick. She thought it suggested motion. Knight was unconvinced. "Well, I don't love it", he told her, "but it will grow on me".The stripe—not yet called the Swoosh—was rushed to Mexico so production could begin. Davidson sent Knight an invoice for $35.

Those first shoes carried the new mark into the world, but it looked different on nearly every model. On some, the line stretched wide. On others, it pinched tight. One runner joked that the curvier version resembled a "dead fish". Factories stitched it however they could, and designers adjusted the angle depending on the shoe's shape.

Yet the stripe was already making appearances in the right places. At the 1972 Boston Marathon, two of the top American finishers crossed the line wearing Nike shoes marked with Davidson's design—the first confirmed appearance of a Swoosh in a major race. The company highlighted the feat in marketing the following year.Apparel presented another challenge. On tops and bags, the asymmetry of the mark seemed awkward. Johnson experimented by fanning multiple Swooshes into a circle, creating what became known as the "Sunburst" or "Pinwheel" logo. Borrowed in spirit from the 1972 Olympic design, it gave Nike something bold to put on warm-ups and team gear.

Geoff Hollister, Nike's third employee—who&nbsp;would go on to pioneer the company's early marketing efforts—pressed&nbsp;the Sunburst onto vests and tracksuits. He also applied the Swoosh alone in unconventional ways. In 1974, Steve Prefontaine appeared at a meet in Tacoma wearing a tracksuit with a lone backwards Swoosh across the chest. That marked the first time the logo stood by itself on apparel.In those first years, the design was far from consistent. Some called it the stripe. Others thought it looked strange, even unbalanced. But on marathon finishing lines, in Olympic trials and on the chest of America's most famous runner, the mark was already doing its job: it was sticking.What began as a reluctant choice—a student's sketch rushed off to a factory—had become the emblem of Nike's earliest wins. The Swoosh wasn't yet the global icon it would become, but it was already proving it had staying power.

In the decades since that first football boot, the Swoosh has taken on countless forms. It was paired with bold Helvetica in the 1970s, broadcast to millions in Dennis Hopper's 1993 American football ads, stretched across Niketown Portland's architecture and splashed across caps at Wimbledon. It has been oversized, miniaturised, multiplied and, at times, overused. It has been guarded by Nike's "brand police", celebrated by athletes and parodied by critics.Through all those shifts, one through line has remained: the Swoosh endures. What began as a quick sketch by a college student has become one of the most recognised symbols in the world. More than a stripe, it's a global shorthand for speed, innovation and possibility.

Before Nike was a worldwide sports brand, it was an upstart company in need of an eye-catching visual identity. Here's the real story of the Swoosh.

The Nike Swoosh logo: from humble beginnings to global icon

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Story Landing

A neuroscientist, a computational engineer and an industrial designer sit at a desk, poring over the latest electroencephalography (EEG) and pressure-mapping results. Down the corridor, pressure plates respond to steady footsteps while motion-capture sensors blink to life as another round of testing begins.This isn't a scene from a NASA work room or sci-fi Hollywood blockbuster—it's a typical day at the <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/lebron-james-innovation-center-nike-sport-research-lab" target="_blank">LeBron James Innovation Center</a> and its top-floor Nike Sport Research Lab (NSRL), where dozens of scientists, engineers and designers come together to study every element of human performance.&nbsp;While many people know this facility exists, few understand the full scope of its work, or that the research extends beyond the physical and into the mind itself. Led by world-renowned neuroresearchers, Nike's Mind Science team is devoted to exploring how the brain and body interact to shape the future of athletic performance.

Their latest breakthrough, <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/nike-mind-001-mind-002-official-images" target="_blank">Nike Mind</a>, is a sensory footwear platform more than a decade in the making that aims to redefine how athletes prime for and recover from competition.&nbsp;We sat down with seven Nike Mind teammates to learn how this long-awaited technology moved from concept to reality.

THE NEURAL ARCHITECT: GRAEME MOFFAT, PHD Principal researcher, Nike Sport Research Lab As principal researcher on Nike's Mind Science team, Graeme Moffat leads the neuroscience behind Nike Mind—decoding EEG readouts, pressure maps and muscle signals to understand how sensation shapes focus and performance. With a background in brain-computer interface research, he's helping to translate the science of perception into design principles that can be felt underfoot. For Moffat, this project isn't just about a new shoe. It's about proving how the mind and body can be trained together through sensation.One of the easiest ways to get out of your head is to get into your body—to actively engage your senses. With Nike Mind, what we see in the brain is increased activity in the sensory motor network and a rise in alpha oscillations linked to relaxed alertness.&nbsp;Like your hands, the bottom of your feet have unique skin with 10 to 20 times more mechanoreceptors than most other areas. These are the parts of our body to feel and navigate the world. To complement this, each node in Nike Mind moves independently, shifting slightly to translate force through the bottom of the foot. The result is a more direct connection to the ground.We used sensory science to determine the placement of the 22 nodes. By measuring what's called the two-point discrimination threshold—how far apart touches have to be before you feel them as separate—we were able to map the density of receptors across the foot. That's why nodes are more closely spaced in the forefoot and wider apart in the heel.We used everything: underfoot plantar-pressure sensors, electromyography of the lower limbs and human EEG. Athletes walked in the shoes and comparator models while we measured their brains before, during and after. What we saw were clear differences in brain activation and oscillation patterns, signals that reflected how the sensory system in this shoe was activating the brain. This is a completely new way to make footwear, designed from the sensory system outwards. It took nearly 10 years of research and iteration to make it work.It is incredible technology. It's like a walking anti-fatigue mat built into my shoes. It's just a fantastic feeling. I don't want to take them off at the end of the day.The Mind Science team itself is unique. We have neuroscientists, perception researchers, physiologists and engineers all working together. It's a mix of disciplines that normally don't sit inside a company like Nike, and it allows us to move from deep scientific insight to real product innovation quickly. We can prototype, test with athletes and iterate at a pace no one else can. It's a capability that sets Nike apart.

THE BRAIN MAPPER: TREVOR BARSS, PHD Lead researcher, Mind Science team Working alongside Moffat, Trevor Barss helped run the early neuroscience studies that defined Nike Mind's foundation. A sensory neuroscientist specialising in neurophysiology, he used EEG and other measures to study how tactile feedback changes patterns of brain activity, the signals linking movement, focus and awareness. The team's findings revealed distinct shifts in sensory-motor activation and alpha rhythms when athletes wore Nike Mind footwear, insights that continue to shape how the NSRL explores the mind-body connection.For the first 45 years, Nike's research focused on the body from the neck down. The next 45 will include the brain.&nbsp;My role was to study unique aspects of brain activation while athletes were wearing the footwear. We measured electrical activity in the brain before, during and after movement and paired that with perception data. The goal was to connect what athletes reported feeling with what we could actually see happening neurologically.We found that this collaboration between perception and neuroscience is what gives the work its power. You might detect increased activation in one region of the brain, but without understanding the athlete's experience, you don't know whether that's good or bad. When you combine both, you get meaning.When I first arrived at Nike, I was amazed by the environment. In most research settings, if you want to talk to an expert outside your field, you email, you schedule, you wait. Here, I can walk three desks over and have a conversation with someone who is a world-class expert in biomechanics, physiology or materials science. That proximity accelerates everything.The strength of this lab is its seamless flow of expertise. Neuroscientists, engineers, designers and developers work side by side, testing, iterating and learning from each other in real time. It removes silos and sparks ideas that none of us could reach alone.We're at the starting line of an entirely new field. The methods are established, but applying them to footwear and apparel is uncharted territory. Each experiment raises new questions.For me, the most inspiring part is being surrounded by brilliant minds who share that curiosity. When you pair deep scientific expertise with creative-design thinking, you open doors to discoveries that redefine what performance can mean.Looking ahead, the possibilities are endless. We have sensory receptors all over our body. Anytime you change sensory input, you're interacting with your nervous system. Delving into that connection could open up whole new ways of supporting athlete awareness, focus and recovery.

THE ENGINEERING WHIZZ: ELIZABETH RAISSIAN Senior director, Performance Engineering Inside Nike's Performance Engineering Lab, Elizabeth Raissian's work lies at the intersection of product functionality and code. For Nike Mind, she and her team built the digital framework that made the concept manufacturable at scale, using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and simulation tools to model how each node, flex point and pressure zone behaves underfoot. Their modelling ensured a precisely tuned sensorial design that delivers consistent feel and feedback across every size and stride.The big unlock was using computational methods to crack the scale challenge. Nike Mind has many small parts within a larger system. We wrote scripts that determined where each node needed to be for athlete performance and how those placements could still be manufactured consistently.Our goal was to make sure every athlete has the same experience no matter their shoe size. We used FEA to test variables like node size, height and material. That helped us identify the sweet spot between too much and not enough sensation. Once we had that, we could scale it proportionally across sizes so the product felt consistent from end to end.For me, this has been a dream job I didn't know existed. I get to combine tough technical work with the creativity of working alongside designers, sports researchers and other specialists. After 23 years, I still haven't been bored.What excites me most is how fast the tools are evolving. We've built a strong foundation and now new technologies are coming in that let us do things we wouldn't have thought possible a decade ago. It changes how we approach products and opens doors for the future.

THE BRIDGE BUILDER: SEAN LU Footwear developer For more than two decades, Sean Lu has helped take Nike's boldest concepts from prototype to production. As a developer, he works at the crucial handoff point where innovation meets scaling the shoe production for Nike's business. On Nike Mind, that meant solving unprecedented production challenges like how to create and bond 22 independent cushioning nodes while preserving the precise sensory design that makes the technology groundbreaking.My expertise is to bring a design to life by practising project management and leadership while working closely with many different functional teams. The goal is always both team excellence and product excellence, making sure the product meets the brief, the design intent, is tested and proven.The biggest challenge was producing and attaching 22 individual nodes in a consistent way. Regular shoes might have five or six major parts. Here we had 22, each needing to be made and bonded precisely. Solving that required new methods of make very different from conventional shoemaking.One crucial breakthrough was the stretchy strobel. In normal shoes, it's stiff. But here it had to stretch multidirectionally so the nodes could move freely and transfer sensation. Without that, the whole system wouldn't work.There were moments we thought, this is too difficult, maybe we can't do it. But we always asked ourselves: are we truly doing the best we can or is there another way? Once you achieve it, the value for the athlete makes it all worth it.

THE CREATIVE VISIONARY: ERIC AVAR VP, creative director, Innovation Few designers have shaped Nike's visual and performance language more than Eric Avar. After spending decades creating some of the brand's most iconic footwear from Foamposite to Free to the Kobe line, Avar joined the Nike Mind project to help translate complex neuroscience into design. His focus: find simplicity, stay curious and create a shoe that reawakens the body's natural connection to movement.What made this project next-level was the chance to forget everything we knew about traditional footwear. Instead of chasing propulsion or flight, we asked how to create a more natural sensory underfoot experience—one that could strengthen the mind-body connection to help make athletes feel calm, focused and present.My role was to help guide the creative vision. To connect the macro and micro details of science, art and story. The best ideas happen when those dimensions align. My job was to help the team see the true north and to bring clarity to how the science should feel once it's on foot.Every dimension of this project was new—new science, new engineering, new design language. Each insight from the lab reshaped how we approached materials or geometry and every prototype fed new questions back to the scientists. That constant back-and-forth was where the breakthroughs happened.Performance design is always a balance. Too much cushioning and you lose sensation; too much sensation and it becomes overwhelming. Our challenge was to find harmony between comfort, clarity and awareness.This feels like a new frontier—a new paradigm of performance. We're proving through science but we're also discovering through intuition. The more we lean into that mix of curiosity and expertise, the more magic we'll uncover.What I love most about this new technology is that it represents the unknown. It's a reminder that performance isn't only about going faster. It's about feeling more, thinking deeper and reconnecting with the moment.

THE MASTER ORCHESTRATOR: MATTHEW NURSE, PHD Chief science officer, NIKE, Inc. With a background spanning biomechanics, physiology and performance research, Matthew Nurse has guided Nike's most ambitious science-led innovations. As chief science officer, he oversaw the Nike Mind project from a multidisciplinary vantage point, coordinating scientists, designers and engineers to keep the various parts moving in sync.Most people don't fully appreciate the importance of sensory feedback from the body, especially the feet. The foot is full of thousands of sensors that give the brain constant information about balance, position and spatial awareness. This is the first product built with the intent of influencing that feedback to help athletes stay focused, present and more aware of their environment.If the body is the engine, the mind is the driver. With Nike Mind, we're starting to think about how to make the driver sharper and clearer. Mental preparation has become just as important as physical, and we're only scratching the surface of what's possible.Science and creativity have to leapfrog each other. Science shouldn't limit dreams but it can help target them. Some of these concepts aren't new, but only now do we have the design and manufacturing capabilities to make them real. Building floating, independent nodes that compress and rotate to deliver sensory information to the brain wasn't possible 20 years ago. Today it is.Athlete feedback drove everything. We went through hundreds of iterations, tuning the number, density, flexibility and placement of the nodes to make sure the sensation was enough to feel and focus on but not so much that it became distracting. It had to be "just right" and only athletes could tell us where that balance was.The beauty of Nike Mind is that beyond feeling grounded, you are grounded. Using tools like EEG, we've measured changes in brain activity in the areas linked to focus and presence. That's the first time we've been able to show—and prove—that footwear construction can influence how the mind works.And this is only chapter one. We've focused on the body for decades. Now, as we look at the mind alongside it, the opportunities for athletes are limitless.

THE PROBLEM SOLVER: BRYAN YOUNGS Innovation programme director, Footwear Bryan Youngs brings more than 20 years of footwear expertise focused on transforming innovation into manufacturable reality. For Nike Mind, he led the scale-up effort, translating a handcrafted sensory prototype into a system that could be produced consistently and reliably. By bridging advanced innovation with global manufacturing, he helped ensure the concept could move from lab experiment to product launch.The idea of sensory footwear has been around for a decade, but the challenge was scale. For years it was an arts-and-crafts project—something&nbsp;you could hand-make but not mass-produce. With Mind, we had to move past that to create something we could build with our manufacturing partners while still preserving the complex architecture underfoot.With our manufacturing partners, we developed a system that simplified the build from dozens of individual attachments down to just a few key steps. That shift allowed us to replicate the sensorial experience athletes loved from the earliest prototypes while making it manufacturable at scale.Our willingness to wrestle with the hardest problems is something that makes Nike very unique. We'd failed to solve sensory footwear for 10 years, but each attempt taught us something. We have the willingness to keep asking the big questions and then the patience and persistence to finally crack them. With these two new products, we're just getting started.

Rachel Cavanaugh is a Portland-based freelance writer who covers food, lifestyle, travel, fitness, adventure and the outdoors. Her work has appeared in Men's Journal, Outdoor Life, GearJunkie, MSN, Yahoo, The Independent, The Hollywood Reporter, Digital Trends, Bustle, Elite Daily, Mic, Travel Oregon, Matador Network and others. She has a background in digital production and brand storytelling and holds a journalism degree from the University of Montana.

Rachel Cavanaugh

It took more than a decade to crack it: shoes that can connect your body to your mind to help you stay calm, focused and present.

Zach Doleac's work is as eclectic as he is, a tasteful blend of polish and grit. His imagery forges honest connections with real people—from boxers in Goma to refugees in Beirut, clowns in Cairo and cowboys from Polson to Houston.&nbsp;When not on assignment, Zach is rarely still, pedalling around the Pacific Northwest, grooving to a beat or sliding on snow, usually in the company of his pup, Frida.&nbsp;You can find more of Zach's work on his <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.zachdoleac.com/" target="_blank">website</a> or follow him on <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.instagram.com/zachdoleac" target="">Instagram</a>.

Zach Doleac

Innovation

Inside the Nike Mind Team That Turned Neuroscience Into Footwear

Answering this question requires paying special attention to word choice, says Blaise Williams, senior sport scientist with the Nike Sport Research Lab (NSRL). How Nike primarily evaluates "better" in running is in efficiency—or the degree to which someone can spend less energy doing the same movement. That's how teams inside the NSRL measure what being a better runner looks like. And in that regard, yes, anyone can become a better runner

<h3>How We Approach It</h3>Nike researchers use a range of tools to measure biomechanical efficiency. One of them is <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/stories/nike-nsrl-form" target="null">Nike Form</a>, a proprietary movement analysis tool that's available for athletes to trial right now at select Nike stores. With a two-minute run on the treadmill, Nike Form collects 150 data points across your body, from the tilt of your head down to the angle of your ankle, to give you a custom readout of your movement pattern. The tool's algorithm is designed to study how to optimise the way the entire body—not just the lower half—moves through space."NSRL Form isn't just a runner's tool. It's a running tool that gives athletes the power to know themselves", says Williams.This is where the power of self-awareness comes in. After your 2-minute treadmill run, NSRL Form produces a report with guidance for you;&nbsp;a few simple tweaks to your gait pattern can be all you need to become a more efficient runner. For example, let's say your step count is below the recommended 160 steps-per-minute cadence. By focusing on slightly quickening your step turnover, your other body positions will adjust accordingly, such as creating less of a forward lean, or repositioning your foot strike to better hit under your body's centre of gravity, which can lead to a more efficient gait pattern. Small adjustments are all a runner needs to help them cover more ground using less energy.&nbsp;

The beauty of a proprietary tool like Form, says Williams, is how its methods are applicable to human movement as a whole, not just running. The cues that can help a runner move more efficiently are the same cues that can help a basketball player or a footballer cover ground more efficiently.Some recommendations prescribed by NSRL Form can drastically change how a runner moves, like changing your degree of forward lean. Other factors of a runner's gait pattern are truly part of their biomechanical DNA, like the length of their levers. But no matter your body shape, the activity you do or the shoes you lace up, Williams says there are gains to be made from understanding your current form.&nbsp;"We're empowering athletes through information to make decisions based on how they move, regardless of the shoe they wear or even the sport they play".

One simple way, says our expert, is by finding out how efficiently you're running.

Sport science

Ask a Sport Scientist

How Can I Become a Better Runner?

This is where listening to the athlete is made manifest. The LeBron James Innovation Center is the home of the Nike Sport Research Lab (NSRL), where Nike continues to set the pace for breakthroughs in sport science.

What It Does

<h3>What It Does</h3>The NSRL is built with nearly every training environment imaginable for Nike researchers to study sport performance. Its facilities include a state-of-the-art basketball court, a 200-metre endurance track, a 100-metre straightaway and an artificial-turf training pitch. All in service of capturing athletes in motion at full speed, the NSRL houses the world's largest motion-capture installation. Nearly 100 force plates help scientists study an athlete's interaction with their field of play, while four advanced climate chambers simulate the thermal environments experienced by athletes at temperatures from -20 degrees to 50 degrees Celsius.&nbsp;"This is the epicentre of where we work with athletes of all abilities, all backgrounds, all skills and all sports", says Matthew Nurse, PhD, VP, chief science officer at Nike.The NSRL has many goals. Here, Nike can understand the unique needs of athletes, contextualise challenges and advance breakthroughs across a spectrum of athletic, no matter the playing field.

What It Helps Us Do

<h3>What It Helps Us Do</h3>While athletes within the NSRL are being observed at play, other people are at play, too: testing, prototyping and innovating inside the LeBron James Innovation Center to help shape the future of sport. The community of Nike experts who work in the building are diversely talented, from biomechanics researchers to robotics experts, from computational designers to patent pros, all working together to uncover new frontiers in sport performance.&nbsp;Teammates work across disciplines, forming an expertise greater than the sum of individual talents."In the Innovation space, we take information from the NSRL, and we're able to look at different ways to solve an athlete's problem. It gets extremely interesting", says Janett Nichol, VP of Apparel and Advanced Digital Creation Studio. "In a conventional way of building a product, we would just go straight to a material, get a pattern, sew it and then that would be it. Here, we can go to anything from biology to chemistry to pushing the limits of a machine to create a very different experience with materials".Practically no corner of Nike is untouched by the creativity that's stoked in the LeBron James Innovation Center. And no design feature was an afterthought. Keeping sustainability at the forefront, the building features 908 solar panels on its roof, is powered by 100% renewable electricity and uses over 21,000 lbs of Nike Grind for the NSRL flooring. Other details are subtle callouts to Nike history. The entryway to the LeBron James Innovation Center mimics the dimensions of a shoebox. A replica Winnebago, housed inside the building as a meeting space, nods to Nike's early days of selling shoes.At over 750,000 square feet, the building is a beacon for athletic performance, just like the athlete for whom it's named. The mission of the researchers, scientists, designers, engineers, makers and artisans who work here is to make athletes better and make the world better for athletes.&nbsp;

This is where listening to the athlete is made manifest.

Next Level

The LeBron James Innovation Center

All of Nike's record-shattering, convention-breaking&nbsp;shoes began as prototypes. Many of them were disguised the same way: shrouded in black.American marathoner Conner Mantz remembers when he received the first prototype of the Vomero Premium in December of 2023. The upper was blacked out. The Air Zoom units sandwiched in the midsole foam, the shoe's most identifiable feature, were masked with tape.&nbsp;Holding the prototype, he points to a light outline across the midsole. "You can still see the tape lines", he says. "It was to keep people from seeing the Air Zoom units while I went on my long runs".This step in the prototyping process, called "blinding", is one of many ways in which Nike researchers and sport scientists set the table for testing new shoes with an athlete. Part of the goal is to keep the shoe undercover from the public for as long as possible. Scientists will hide stand-out attributes of the shoe, like its midsole profile or its upper, whenever it's tested in a public setting. But shrouding the prototype in mystery is intended for the athlete, too. The goal when designing these test studies is to minimise any confounding factors that could affect how an athlete performs. That includes getting past any hesitations about how odd, distinct or flat-out wild a prototype might look. Researchers work hard to isolate an athlete's physical response when they use a new piece of tech. They don't want any quality of a shoe to prematurely influence an athlete's feedback. Undistracted, the athlete can focus on the straightforward experience of wearing the shoe, getting a taste for how this mysterious new tool can give them a competitive edge.

Much like its final design, the Vomero Premium's earliest prototypes drew plenty of knee-jerk reactions at first sight. It nearly falls into a different category of maximalist footwear altogether. To a degree, that's where it belongs. The Vomero Premium is ineligible for World Athletics competition thanks to its 55mm stack height in the heel, a full bed of ZoomX foam and two exposed Zoom units borrowed from Nike track spikes in the forefoot and the heel.&nbsp;Mantz was in a deciding moment in his competitive season. He was battling a bone injury to his femur, but the 2024 US Olympic Marathon Trials were fast approaching, and would determine who travelled to Paris later that summer to compete for a medal. Training was painful at times. He couldn't get in the mileage he needed. In his transition back to road running, he needed a bold solution to help build back his stamina. What he got was a bold, new prototype to test out. But the leap from a prototype's presentation to its adoption is easier said than done."What I needed in my training shoe was something that could get my confidence back up", says Mantz. "When my team showed me this new Nike prototype, it was unlike anything I'd seen before. It was a lot. You see this, and you think it's going to be clunky to run in".

Testing innovative prototypes with new cushioning systems like that of the Vomero Premium is a thorough process. It includes hours of exchanges between athletes, designers and scientists about which qualities of the shoe need to be turned up and which should be toned down. Just as important in the process, though, is another tall task: to channel positive belief in a product that might look and feel different from what an athlete is used to wearing.Sometimes a prototype must fight against historical preconceptions if it contains technology that was never thought to "belong" in a particular sport. Take the Nike Maxfly sprint spike. Introduced in Tokyo in 2021, the spike was the first to bring Air Zoom to the 100 metres. Seeing the pronounced Air unit in the forefoot was unusual, particularly for an event that suggests a less-is-more approach for footwear. Weren't simpler, more minimal spikes better? Fast forward to Tokyo's conclusion, and athletes wore the Maxfly and medalled in both the men and women's 100 metres—and the 200 metres, the 400 metres, the 800 metres and the relay events.&nbsp;A clear premise, to fine-tune the plated airbag design for sprint biomechanical loads, was achieved both through adoption and through race performances.How do you convince athletes that, while what they're currently wearing may work,&nbsp;this&nbsp;prototype they're holding in their hands has the makings of something special?"Our main focus is trust", says Tobie Hatfield, Nike senior director, Athlete* Innovation. "If athletes don't know that you're looking out for them as individuals, they'll never trust the product you make for them. Everything we do has to be built on earning their trust".Encouraging an athlete to adopt a new shoe depends on stoking that trust—emotionally, psychologically and, in the case of a shoe, biomechanically.

Trace all shoes back to their first prototypes, and you'll find that most designs are intentionally made as visually subdued versions of the final silhouette. This allows for controlled research; the more basic a shoe looks, the less likely an athlete will form a biased opinion about it. Emily Farina, sr principal, Running Footwear Research in the NSRL, recalls the earliest testing of the Vaporfly 4% prototype in the mid 2010s. She says the shoe's initial field research went relatively unnoticed, thanks in large part to the anonymous-looking prototype. The early design would be the starting point for the groundbreaking Vaporfly 4% Elite worn by Eliud Kipchoge in Breaking 2. "If you saw the early prototype in 2015, it was hard to really know what you were looking at", says Farina, referring to its stack height and rocker shape, two outlying qualities which have become standard for that new era of cushioned running shoes. "Validation relied on what you felt and how you performed, not what you could see. Nike brought the prototype to Eliud's running camp in Kenya. A lot of the runners had trouble understanding how the design could make them faster. That is, until they took the shoes for a tempo run, looked down at their watches and realised they'd cut their pace by 30 seconds or more while exerting the same effort".

The stopwatch is one of the simplest signs of biomechanical efficiency. Are you able to run faster for the same effort? If the answer is yes, persuading an athlete to continue testing a new prototype becomes a lot simpler, no matter how extreme it looks. Often the athlete comes to this realisation of their improved performance in a kind of epiphany, like in the scene Farina describes, when a runner is able to accomplish something they weren't expecting and feel great while doing it. For Conner Mantz, his came during a long run in Utah, where he laced up the Vomero Premium prototype for a 22-miler with his training partners, still building up his base fitness due to the injury. He ran four of those miles at a snappy 4:30 pace. Mantz was shocked by how good he felt."That's when I started thinking to myself, maybe there's something special here", says Mantz, laughing how the prototype's stealthy design drove his teammates nuts. "They'd ask me to just tell them what this new shoe was. I'd tell them, 'Don't worry about it'".Other athletes need more information to trust a prototype. That's why Nike scientists test athlete responses to a range of stimuli, dubbed "signals". In footwear research, signals are different ways to evaluate a shoe's effect on performance.When world champion Faith Kipyegon visited the NSRL in September 2024, she underwent a number of tests that gave Nike scientists a quantitative launching pad for how to serve Faith in preparation for her four-minute mile attempt the following year. She underwent a VO2 Max test to explore her personal capacity. Another signal that's typical of NSRL visits from elite runners is a submax VO2 test, in which the athlete runs on a treadmill and swaps in different shoes while they are hooked up to an oxygen mask. The test results measure the body's use of oxygen to perform a task. Here, in comparing one shoe to another, proof of improved performance comes through improved physiological stats.

Along with creating Faith's one-of-one track spike, Nike provided her with a whole range of Nike tools to supplement her training for Breaking4, including the not-yet-released Vomero Premium for her recovery runs.

"The Vomero Premium was a key part of my training journey", says Faith. "It's so soft, cushioned and comfortable, and it helps me train harder with less impact to allow me to recover faster and stay focused on my goal".

Breaking the Mould for Breaking4

New doesn't always mean perfect. In the case of Faith's attempt, designers listened to every bit of her critical feedback to get her Victory Elite FK prototype just right, like expanding the width in the forefoot or adding spikes for better traction at toe-off. Mantz's review of the Vomero Premium prototypes were just as honest. The first prototype needed a more supportive upper, he told Nike designers and developers. After a few weeks, he had an updated version on his feet, though the second prototype felt less like a recovery shoe and more like a speedy, Alphafly-esque shoe. He relayed his feedback to the design teams. Another one of the updated versions had gone almost too extreme on the cushioning. It was too soft, said Mantz. The teams adjusted the midsole to find a happy medium between too soft and too race-y."Conner would always give us straight, honest feedback, which is vital to our process", says Rachel Nichols, lead developer, Nike Running. The feedback loop encompassed a variety of teammates across product design, working together to address Mantz's detailed review of each prototype.On and on the dialogue went, up to a fifth version of the prototype, and this one was … just right. He was back to logging 120+ mile training weeks, and what's more, he was feeling confident again, equipped with a training shoe that was working with his body through the high volume.

You know where the story goes from here. Mantz would go on to win the 2024 US Olympic Trials, where he secured his spot for Paris, finishing eighth. Now, Mantz is using every tool in his arsenal, including the Vomero Premium, to chase a new personal milestone at the 2025 Chicago Marathon: the American record of 2:05:38.&nbsp;"The Vomero Premium became this incredibly important shoe in my career. Training in the shoe helped me feel like myself again", says Mantz. "I'm really excited for people to be able to experience it. Going through the process of testing those early prototypes, helping make the final shoe as good as it can be, meant a lot to me".

Unflinching athlete feedback makes all products better. If a prototype has any chance to take off, incomplete versions need to be dismantled and built back up. Trust with athletes is formed not just through the successes, says Hatfield. It's formed through the failures, requiring the willingness to acknowledge when a product fell short. Shoes are never tested in a technological vacuum. Spreadsheets of positive data, oxygen masks and shrouded midsoles are all part of the magic. But trust in a new prototype begins and ends with the ordinary, relational act of listening to what athletes need."We never want a shoe to be disguised as a solution that was looking for a problem", says Hatfield. "That's backwards. A shoe should start by considering a problem that needs a solution. Listening to athletes gets to the heart of their needs, and that's where trust is formed".

Davis Jones is the senior editor for about.nike.com. His areas of interest include sport science, performance product design and the history of sport.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Born and raised in Oregon, Davis attended the University of San Diego. Upon graduating, he worked as an editorial intern for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He was a writer and editor for Surfer magazine before returning to the Pacific Northwest to work for Nike in 2018.&nbsp;

Davis Jones

Conner Mantz Feature Loop

How do you convince athletes that, while what they're currently wearing may work, the prototype they're holding in their hands has the makings of something special?

How We Partner With Athletes On New Prototypes

On 29 May 1975, Steve Prefontaine crossed the finishing line for what would be his final race. In a 5000m victory where he was just a second and a half away from beating his own American record, Pre was wearing what would eventually be called his "signature" spike, in that it was created for Pre and applied his scrupulous product feedback: the Pre Montreal, a name inspired by the summer games happening in Canada the following year, in which Pre was scheduled to compete in the 5000m.&nbsp;Lore has it that, prior to the Pre Montreal, <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/stories/how-steve-prefontaine-set-the-pace-for-nike" target="_blank">Steve Prefontaine</a> was reluctant to run in Nike athletics shoes because he couldn't find a shoe that felt just right, including the prototypes created for him by Bill Bowerman. The Pre Montreal might have been the first Nike shoe that Pre truly loved, and its history is grounded in equal parts innovation and sombre memory for its legendary endorser.&nbsp;

How we made it

The Pre Montreal was the first competitive racing spike to have a toe box without seams or stitching. It went into production in 1973 but didn't become available to the masses until the following year.While visiting Japan with Phil Knight in 1971 to order a new batch of Nike samples, Jeff Johnson, one of Nike's first and foundational employees, tinkered with spike plates he picked up from a distributor in Germany.

It took until 1973 to develop, but Johnson was looking for a way to combine a six-spike toe plate with a seamless toe piece upper. To do it, Johnson used reverse leather in the forefront of the shoe and a standard shoe seam in the back of the shoe, joined by two pieces of nylon."The idea of getting rid of the seam was to reduce the risk of blisters, because some people have a long first toe and some people have a long second toe", Johnson told Nike DNA historians. "So, where the toe is going to strike the stitching and overlay is unpredictable".

How it took off

Prefontaine had yet to find a Nike spike that he felt comfortable in during competition. That included Bowerman's novel prototypes."They were pretty rough and they were inconsistent because of the lasting machinery", said Johnson. The shoes that Bowerman was cobbling during Pre's days were stuck in an older era, still solid shoes but not the freshest spikes on the track. As Johnson explained, "You wore them out of respect for Bowerman".&nbsp;But times were changing. Pre graduated from the University of Oregon in 1973 and quickly signed on with Blue Ribbon Sports as the company's self-proclaimed national director of public affairs. He even printed his own business cards. Pre's endorsement of Nike shoes, which often meant sending a pair of shoes along with a hand-written recommendation to a young runner, would become the cornerstone of Nike's marketing efforts for years to follow.Pre was never shy about giving input on his shoes to Johnson, who used Pre's feedback to help craft the Pre Montreal. Prefontaine expressed to Johnson that a seamless toe would provide comfort to a runner's foot."We had Pre as an endorsement but we had nothing specific to give him", said Johnson. "This was the most interesting shoe, so I said 'Why don't we give it to Pre?' What can we call a shoe that we can somehow name after Pre? Pre Montreal!"The spike's final design earned Prefontaine's seal of approval. Amateur Athletic Union regulations of that era prevented athletes from officially endorsing products at the risk of losing their amateur status altogether. Still, it was impossible to disassociate the runner from his colourful new spike. Nobody could stop Pre, and Pre was everywhere. He would race from 1973 until that final race in May of 1975 while wearing his Pre Montreal spikes.&nbsp;

What's next

The legacy of the Pre Montreal continues with the <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/nike-international-running-pack-official-images" target="_blank">Nike International Running Pack</a>. The collection's Vaporfly 4, the latest evolution of Nike's original super shoe, embodies the spirit of the Pre Montreal through the spike's memorable red and blue colourway, its visual treatment inspired by the spike upper's combination of nylon and suede.

The 1973 Pre Montreal racing spike was an innovation worthy of its rising-star endorser, Steve Prefontaine.

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