When the most decorated 100-meter 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 honor 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 colors of her nation’s flag for her final finish —&nbsp;gold-hued 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-meter 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-meters 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 track and field’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 the now 276 incredible races and finish line moments, thank you, Shelly-Ann.Below, go behind the scenes of the G.O.A.T.’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 in-house photographer to 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 sports 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 ability to work in high pressure environments for athletes.

Sofieke van Bilsen

Photo Essay

Icon Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce Ran Her Final 100 Meter 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 &amp; CEO Mark Parker to debut his Nike Zoom LeBron V "China" colorway.

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’ 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, emphasizing 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 grueling, 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 kilometers, with elevation gains of 1,200 to nearly 10,000 meters — the grit, determination, joy and freedom trail running gives you is worth every ounce of work. See for yourself.

<h3>ROSS GOLLAN</h3>Race: ETC; 15km with 1,200m elevation gain Global finish rank: 29th

<h3>MARIE NIVET</h3>Race: Experience Trail Courmayeur (ETC); 15km with 1,200m elevation gain Global women’s finish rank: 7th

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

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

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

<h3>DREW HOLMEN</h3>Race: CCC; 101km 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

NExt volume

Born of need and elevated by expertise and diligence, today the Department of Nike Archives (DNA) cares for hundreds of thousands of artifacts 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

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 —&nbsp;it 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 —&nbsp;under 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 galvanized 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 realized 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: gray, 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 U.S., 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 vacation back in the U.S., 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 oriented 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 working in a running store as a high schooler. “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 color changes — while leaving its core intact. That restraint became part of the Pegasus’ 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 —&nbsp;how 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 favorite 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

About Nike - Stories from Inside NIKE, Inc.

When South Korean short-track speed skater Minjeong Choi was 6 years old, her family used to receive a Seoul daily newspaper every morning. One day, almost by accident, she saw a flyer in the newspaper’s insert, which advertised a winter break skating program at the Korea University ice rink near her home. She progressed from the basics of skating to the discipline of short-track speed skating. The distances are comparable to those in track and field, all the way up to 1,500 meters. But the races are lightning-fast, and in the tight, oval confines of the rink, sound technique can mean the difference between first place and last place. (Her memorable anchor leg in the 3,000-meter relay for the 2022 World Championships saw her jump from third place to first on the final curve, winning by just 0.034 seconds ahead of Canada.) Now 27 years old, Minjeong has gone from trying out skating on a whim during her winter break to becoming a three-time Olympic champion, a four-time World Champion, and the world record holder in the 1,500-meter, a record she’ll defend in Milan. Below, Minjeong shares more about the unique physical challenges of short-track speed skating, the key to staying calm under pressure, and why luck and resilience exist on the same continuum.&nbsp; Moving forward again and again is what truly matters in this sport. Short-track speed skating is incredibly demanding. The athletes compete in a variety of distances, both individually and in relays. The races are so dynamic that you need to be able to recover quickly to prepare yourself for the next round or race. Mental resilience is crucial. Things unfold quickly in short track, so you can’t afford to dwell on a single mistake or failure.&nbsp;In winter sports, you can’t overstate how important it is to be able to access the right environment. My hometown is Seoul, the capital of South Korea. I was born in the very center of the city. Growing up nearby such well-established skating facilities made it natural for me to start short-track speed skating and eventually pursue it as a professional career.&nbsp;

I’ve fallen in love with skating over and over again in my life. I’ve been skating for over 20 years, and what’s guided me to this day is that moment when I first stepped onto the ice at 6 years old. I still vividly remember balancing on the unstable blades, carefully moving my feet while I felt the cold wind rush past me.The pressure of an event like the Olympics reveals the mentors who mean the most to you. I was deeply influenced by our national team head coach during the 2018 season. At age 20, I was competing in my first Olympic games in my home country. I was under immense media pressure and expectation from the public. Everyone around me kept saying I had to prove myself — except my coach. He told me to simply enjoy the moment. Even if I failed, I had my whole career ahead of me. Letting go of the pressure to “succeed” in those rigid terms put me at ease and helped me to compete with a calm mindset.&nbsp;Your defining moments summon a strength you never knew you had. During that relay at the 2022 World Championships, our team was so far behind Canada and the Netherlands, we were barely shown on the screen. When it was my leg to race,&nbsp;something came over me that I couldn’t explain. I closed the gap hard. As I came out of the final corner, I crossed the finish line first. There’s an image I’ve seen on the replay where the Canadian and Dutch skaters put their hands over their faces in disbelief. They never expected the comeback. The impossible became possible.&nbsp;

One way aging as an athlete humbles you is that it forces you to set new goals. It was in the 2024 World Tour season. Many of my European and North American competitors had significantly improved from the time I began my career, and they knew my racing tendencies. I was no longer one of the youngest athletes on the tour, but I worked hard to stay competitive physically and mentally, experimenting with different race tactics to develop a style that was truly my own. I finished fourth in the world rankings that year, but I still felt like I achieved a kind of victory.Part of the emotional power of sport comes from knowing the impact we have on our communities. I had won gold in Beijing in 2022. I donated some of my winnings from that season to a relief fund that helped victims affected by the Uljin forest fire. I wanted to give back, even in a small way, to people who were going through very difficult times. I take great pride in representing South Korea. During national moments, I feel a strong responsibility to deliver great performances as an athlete, in all different forms.&nbsp;Chance and luck are important, but they are just the starting point. As I started winning when I was a young athlete, I thought it was luck. Soon, competitors started treating me seriously, and that pressure made me stronger, helping instill in me a belief in my own ability and preparation. Before every race, I always ask myself, “Have I prepared more than anyone else here? If so, then all I need to do is skate.”

Two decades ago, the generational talent was a young girl who saw a fortuitous window to pursue the sport. She’s never looked back.

For The Win

Minjeong Choi Took a Chance on Short-Track Speed Skating. In Milan, She’ll Go for History

In June of 2024, the Minnesota Lynx won the WNBA’s in-season tournament and the Commissioners Cup. Standing at center court to accept the championship MVP was Napheesa Collier. That the all-star forward would tally another award that season was almost a foregone conclusion. She’d go on to post historic stat lines (in a regular season game versus the Aces, she became only the third player in WNBA history to individually outrebound the entire opposing team, her 18 boards to their 17), bring home national glory with another gold medal in the Paris Olympics, and win the league’s Defensive Player of the Year. What was one more award for the mantle? Still, when she was announced as the tournament’s MVP, she was visibly confused, and what could’ve been an acceptance speech turned into an honest, humble deferral to her teammate, forward Bridget Carleton, who’d go on to earn the league’s Most Improved Player award that season. “Honestly, I think Bridget deserves this. She had an outstanding game,” she said into the arena microphone.The Jordan Brand athlete, <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/jordan-brand-heir-series-2-official-images" target="_blank">who's also the face of the new Heir Series 2</a>, knows that excellence is never an accident. It’s the product of creating strong, stable infrastructures among teammates over time; building a culture that can withstand pressures of all kinds; lifting up others when they are deserving, like during that tournament victory, and encouraging one another to aspire for more than they thought possible. That’s true for the Lynx. That’s true for the W. That’s true for Unrivaled, the innovative 3x3 league co-founded by Collier. Building excellence takes a blueprint. Here, Collier shares about the people, places and values that have shaped her status as one of basketball’s great architects.&nbsp; &nbsp;My sense of home always starts with family. Jefferson City, Missouri was a great place to grow up. It’s a small town in the middle of the state, very Midwestern. But my family is the most important thing in my life. My dad’s from West Africa, but we have a huge Sierra Leonian community in Jeff City, and my mom’s whole side of the family grew up running one of the city’s dairy farms, so I had two very culturally different families. Being surrounded by so much family, I’ve always been a very family-oriented person. It gave me an early look at what healthy dynamics among groups of people looks like.Maya Moore was my Michael Jordan. She was the first athlete I really followed, and she’s actually from Jeff City, too. When I was 10 or 11, I remember watching her games when she was at UCONN. I have a snapshot in my mind of how athletic she looked, how she made everything look so easy, so skilled. Even the way she did her layups — I can’t even explain it, it was just perfect, just so unique to her. Watching her was a core memory for me as a kid.

The pressure of excellence is what makes you great. I’ve been really lucky with the teams I’ve played on, where they all expect excellence from their players. Even my high school coach at Incarnate Word reminded me a lot of Coach Geno Auriemma at UCONN (Editor’s Note: As of this writing, Incarnate Word Academy holds the all-time high school basketball winning streak). UCONN was the first time that I walked in the arena and I could feel the excellence that came before me. I mean, so many incredible Hall of Fame players who came before me. If you don’t win a championship at UCONN, it’s a bad year. You do feel that pressure to measure up. But I perform my best under pressure. It challenges you to be your best. You’ve got to decide how you’re going to step up.&nbsp;Experience is the best teacher when responding to setback. I had a great rookie season with Minnesota in 2019. But when I arrived before that season kicked off, I had a horrible training camp. I had two preseason games, and I might’ve had five points between the two games. I remember that sinking feeling so vividly, because it brought me back to my freshman year at UCONN, where I felt like I had a really bad freshman season. When I felt myself drifting back into that dark space, I told myself, ‘I’m never going to do that again.” And after my freshman year, I was working out twice a day, every day, because I resolved to never feel that feeling again. I wasn’t going to repeat the past.It’s so important for young players to step into a franchise where their veterans are supportive. You’re the top dog when you’re a senior in college, but then you get to the W, all of a sudden you’re at the bottom of the totem pole again, surrounded by hall of fame players. Seimone Augustus and Sylvia Fowles were the first ones to embrace me.&nbsp;Syl is the most motherly person I’ve ever met. The first time I met her, she’s like, “Baby, if you ever need anything, you give me a call. I’ve got you.” My vets had my back from day one, which really allowed me to blossom into my role from the beginning.&nbsp;

When you’re not worried about team dynamics, you can focus on becoming the player you need to be. When I joined the Lynx, I didn’t have to worry about team dynamics. I knew they supported me no matter what, so I could focus on what I needed to do on the court, all while trying to be a good teammate. I don’t take that privilege I had for granted. That’s why I try to pay it forward to the rookies and the young players now, making sure they feel welcome when they’re on the team, making sure they know they can come to me if they need anything, because I know how huge that was for me when I first came into the league. Vocal leadership and leading by example can exist at the same time. When I arrived as a rookie, I think my style was more to lead by how I played on the court. I was the hardest working person, but I was uncomfortable with being vocal. My coach, Cheryl Reeve, put me as a captain from the jump, and she challenged me to be more vocal, to speak up. Eight years later, I’ve gotten way more comfortable with leading with my voice, in part because I’m doing it on behalf of our league’s younger players, too. I want to give the league’s young players the knowledge they need to be successful, because everyone’s fighting for a roster spot and is looking for any advantage they can find. This is our careers and our livelihoods at stake. I’ll do anything I can to help young players grow in their game. I remember how grateful I felt when my vets did that for me. I want young players to know they don’t need to feel lost. They can find a sense of belonging, a sense that players like me will be by their side.&nbsp;

There are moments in a season that hinge on whether you can look past your own self interests. Last year, I hurt my ankle badly in an early season game against Vegas. I really wanted to come back, partly because I was a front runner for MVP at the time, and I wanted to start playing again as soon as possible so I could hold my spot. But at the end of the day, I wanted to win a championship. If I rushed back early, I could’ve hurt our team’s chances at a title. So I really tried to make sure my ankle was as healthy as possible so I could be ready for the playoffs, even if that meant sacrificing a possible MVP title for that year. It wasn’t a “win” in the traditional sense, but it was a win for our team, and that’s what mattered to me.Generational Greatness means upholding the work of those who came before you. I joined Jordan Brand because I wanted to be surrounded by greatness. It’s starts with Michael Jordan himself. He’s the standard of greatness, he changed the game forever. We’re in his brand, competing in his name, and I want to make sure I’m doing everything I can to honor the standard he’s set for us.&nbsp;

The Minnesota Lynx All Star and Jordan Brand athlete is well familiar with the blueprint for success.

The Future of Women’s Basketball is Limitless. Napheesa Collier is Busy Building It

If golfer Tony Finau had to name his Flu Game moment, it was during the 2018 Masters. He had just sunk a hole-in-one on the par-3 course at Augusta National. He celebrated by taking off sprinting toward the hole, when improbably, he took an awkward step and dislocated his left ankle (fair warning for anyone who wants to look up the video: it was gnarly). In grimacing pain but undeterred, he popped his ankle back in place himself and resumed play, where he’d complete the week with a top 10 finish. Oh, and two months later, he’d make the final group at the US Open. And he’d qualify for his first Ryder Cup. All in a year when he could put barely any pressure on his left foot.Digging deep to test his physical limits is a signature quality of Finau, who joins Jordan Brand this month as the newest member of its Golf roster. You wouldn’t know any such challenge existed just by looking at him. The lithe 6’4” athlete has one of the most powerful drives on the pro tour, able to crush the ball at over 200 mph since he was 17 years old. He was recruited for hoops out of high school, and he descends from a proud lineage of skilled Tongan and Samoan athletes, particularly in football. When his personal calling to golf was too great to ignore, he worked as hard as possible to reach the sport’s top level, rolling the dice by auditioning for a reality TV golf show, then undergoing a brutal mini-tour schedule for years that forced him to travel at a ruthless pace across the country. Was it worth it? No question. Below, Finau talks about the twists his career has taken, his moments of greatest perseverance and all things drive.&nbsp; Certain career moments cause you to flip your definition of what winning means. Take that Masters in 2018. It was an incredible moment, that hole-in-one, followed by the most embarrassing moment of my life on national TV. Fast forward to the end of the tournament. I birdied six out of my last seven holes. I shot 66 that Sunday. Walking off the 72nd hole, I truly felt like I won. I felt like somebody should’ve given me the green jacket. In life, we’re going to fall down a lot more times than we’re going to win. But does that actually mean that we lost? I don’t look at it that way.

There’ll be windows of your life where you need to gut it out just to see what you’re really made of. I turned pro in 2007, but I didn’t get onto the PGA Tour until 2013, so there was a six-year period where I had to tough it out on the Mini-Tour life and learn how to play the game, travel and take the small wins where I could. On the Mini-Tour, you’re fighting for every dollar, your literal livelihood. There were plenty of nights I slept in my car and I went without eating just so I could scrape by. Those were some of the hardest years of my life, but also some of the greatest, because I learned what I can become with a little bit of sacrifice.&nbsp;Individual sports demand a certain kind of passion. In a sport like golf, you don’t have any teammates to lean on. It’s just you out there. Some people have a hard time without that team component, but when I started golfing at a young age, I found I really enjoyed the game’s individual aspects. It was on me to figure it out, to piece together the ways I could improve. When I got on the golf course, it was a matter of locking in and learning how to focus.Composure has nothing to do with your athletic skill but has everything to do with the life of an athlete. My brother and I went on The Big Break, a reality TV competition on the Golf Channel, in 2009. I was 20 years old at the time. We were around the camera 24/7. Everywhere we went, they were recording us. It was crazy, and it took some getting used to, but I remember leaving that experience and telling myself, “You’re going to be a great golfer. This media exposure is how it’s going to be if you turn pro.” Being on the show got me to the point where it didn’t really matter who was watching me. I just needed to stay focused and play my game.&nbsp;Sport was only part of my family’s background. Being Polynesian, my mom had a luau show as I was growing up, so I learned how to play a lot of different instruments as a performer in her show. One of the first instruments I learned was the to’ere, which is like a Tahitian drum. I also did traditional Polynesian fire dancing as a kid. Music and dancing were as core to my identity as sport was.&nbsp;It’s easy to be an on- and off-switch person. But greatness means being your best at all times of the day, not just when it’s convenient. My mom used to tell me, “The way you do one thing is the way you do all things.” Golf is just one example. Trying to be great at a game that’s impossibly hard, a game you can’t perfect, doesn’t mean that you stop trying. You keep trying to reach for more out of yourself. I’m trying to be great in all aspects of my life, whether that’s on the course, in the gym, being a husband, being a father. I’m trying to push past my own limits in all aspects of my life.&nbsp;

Golfers tend to be pretty superstitious people. One of my rituals is that I wear green every Sunday. My mom, she passed away in 2011 — her favorite color was green. Wearing green is a way I like to honor her, a way to remember she’s with me all the time on the course.&nbsp;Joining the Jordan Brand marks a new chapter in my career. Obviously Michael represents excellence at the highest level. Jordan Brand is incredible to be a part of and Michael is an incredible individual to represent. I met him for the first time when I was 17, and during the times I’ve played at his private course in Florida, The Grove, he’s always told me, “Anytime you’re in this area, you’re welcome here.” So in 2024, I’m playing a playoff event. I know I’m going to be in West Palm after the playoffs, for a shoot I was doing with one of my sponsors. My son was with me on the trip, and the thought crossed my mind, “It would be the coolest thing on Earth if I could bring my son to play The Grove.” I texted Michael on a whim and asked him. He got back to me 30 seconds later: “We’re actually closed for the weekend, but I’ll open the course just for you and your son. Please bring him and we’ll make it happen.” We played 18 holes that day and had the entire course to ourselves, just me and my son. That single experience is something I’ll never forget. That’s the effect Michael has on people. You can download more images as well as an accompanying film welcoming Finau to the Jordan Brand family by clicking <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://media-assets.nike.com/en/pitches/jordan-brand-welcomes-tony-finau-to-its-golf-roster?secret=29e440c91211da0d9af84d3e374afd15" target="_blank">here</a>.

The pro golfer and newest member of the Jordan Brand Golf roster has never backed down from a challenge.

For Tony Finau, Going the Distance is a Mindset

While most of us got through middle school trying to blend in, Jane Hedengren remembers wanting to leave her mark: Breaking her school’s record in the mile. She was 12 years old, new to organized track, and intent on sealing the record by the end of the school year. Her father John took her to a college track on a cold fall afternoon for 400-meter repeats to test her capacity. She was trying and failing to hit her splits. That’s when John, a former runner at Brigham Young University (BYU), joined her for the workout, cutting through the chilly, high desert air, pulling up the pace but staying near enough to encourage Jane as she willed herself forward. She’d eventually hit those splits, and she’d later break her school’s record that spring.&nbsp;Now out of high school, Jane Hedengren has established herself as one of the most accomplished amateur distance runners in American history. She arguably had the most dominant high school season ever in 2024, male or female, breaking nine high school records spanning the mile to the 5K. She’d be the first to say that she hasn’t accomplished these feats alone.&nbsp;Along with her family’s support, Jane’s teammates include those coaches and runners from the Nike Elite Program, which invites 40 of the nation’s top runners to experience the comprehensive training tools provided by Nike coaches all year long, culminating in some of the nation’s preeminent meets during the cross-country, indoor and outdoor seasons. All seasons in which Jane dominated.Here, in her own words, she speaks to how that support has set her up for a professional running future — and starting her own collegiate running career at BYU in the fall.

The indoor and outdoor seasons give you many opportunities to prove yourself. Nike Indoor Nationals this year was special, because I was able to run the 5k for the first time on the track. I had to put myself out there.Good coaches can turn a phrase and get you motivated. During that Nike Indoor Nationals meet, one of my coaches from the Nike Elite program, Juli Benson, told me, “I know you’re in a good spot. Let’s see if you’re in a great spot.” Then it was like the lesson my dad taught me: You’ll see once you’re in that last 2K of the race. I was able to close out hard. A lot of good stuff can come from having an open mind and getting the most out of yourself.&nbsp;This year was a season of firsts. Last fall was my first time at <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/stories/nike-cross-nationals-2024-official-images" target="null">Nike Cross Nationals</a>. It was really exciting to feel as fresh as I did on race day. The field was strong, so I wanted to stay patient, because the course with the weather conditions can be unforgiving. I kept steady early on and maintained my pace. It’s special to finish a race and not expect that level of performance out of yourself.

I love how running has different disciplines within it. Cross country and track are special in their own right, and they’re so different. I love how the competition of cross country takes place in this long, tough terrain. It embodies what running is all about: Being out in nature, competing with other runners. Track is really fun for me. It’s a bit quicker, and competition also plays a role, but there’s a certain thing to be said about trying to hit certain times. You’re also able to use a variety of distances as a guardrail to monitor how you’re feeling.&nbsp;Your performances aren’t the only part of your racing that evolves. Your training changes, too. Strength training has been a big part of my development process. Early on, I was running around 30 miles a week, doing some light workouts here and there with some cross training. As the years have gone on, I’ve upped the intensity and volume. This last season, I was doing up to 55 miles a week while doing more intense workouts and feeling good and strong. I think I realized I had a talent probably right around my sophomore year of high school. I had been working and staying more consistent. Plus, no matter how I performed, I always had a love for running. I loved the freedom it afforded me. I could get away from my life’s stresses and have this thing I could work toward and use to discover more about myself. That happened as soon as I started running, and it’s evolved as I’ve gotten older and have been more in touch with the sport.&nbsp;

You can always find a new challenge to overcome as you get older. I’m really excited for this next chapter with BYU. I’m open to trying new distances, racing against different competition. I want to try it all. It’s great that college isn’t just a one-off experience. You learn these lessons over time. I'll have time to get a hold of things, find my rhythm and routine, get to know my teammates, <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/stories/women-running-culture-mumbai-india-nike-after-dark-tour" target="null">Coach Diljeet Taylor</a> and the other staff.&nbsp;I’ve been really careful about thinking too far ahead. People will ask me about aspirations like medaling in the Olympics or finding a prominence on the world stage. Those goals are incredible, obviously, and I’m working toward them, but the truth is, I don’t know where I’ll be in a few years. What I can focus on right now is keeping myself healthy, enjoying the sport and loving those around me.&nbsp;I’m taking things one step at a time.&nbsp;

Proving her talent across Nike’s cross country, indoor and outdoor championships, Hedengren finished her high school career as one of the most accomplished middle- and long-distance runners of all time.

How I Got Here

Indoors and Out, Runner Jane Hedengren is Rewriting History

Think <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/jordan-brand-luka-4-official-images" target="_blank">Luka Dončić</a>, and your mental picture is likely his signature step-back jumper. The unthinkable passes that land perfectly in the hands of his teammates. The creativity under pressure and borderline court omniscience that cause endless headaches for his opponents.You likely know Luka as a fierce competitor who brings a trademark tenacity to each play. A generational talent, fueled by an expert basketball IQ. A force to be reckoned with, owning every possession and controlling the pace of the game.But Luka, a consummate hooper, also contains multitudes off the court. He loves the serenity of the ocean and grilling a good cut of beef. He’s <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@espn/video/7467995779832024362?lang=en" target="null">as comfortable gaming</a> as he is driving to the hoop for a Euro step, and if he weren’t on the hardwood, he’d choose running point on the gridiron. Above all else, he’s incredibly proud of his 1-year-old daughter, Gabriela, whom he considers his greatest inspiration.Here, Luka shares more about his passions away from the game and how they make him a better player, when he knew he was living his childhood dream, and the crossover skill between two of his favorite pastimes, fishing and basketball.Getting out on the water is one of my favorite things. My father had some small boats when I was young, and we started going out together when I was maybe 7 years old. Today, renting a boat reminds me of my childhood: I love being on the ocean, just relaxing, driving the boat and getting some sun.I enjoy the peace of the ocean — there’s so much space and nothing more important than appreciating the views and catching some fish. The last time I was in Mexico I caught a marlin. That was an amazing moment. Probably the coolest thing I’ve ever caught was a little shark. Once I had a very big fish on the line, battling for seven to 10 minutes, but it escaped right under the boat — a definite disappointment.Fishing betters my game and basketball betters my fishing because they both require an essential skill: patience. Mostly, I like to fish to get out on the water, relax and enjoy the sun. But fishing is a reminder of the patience that’s required in basketball and in life. You need patience no matter what.

My mentality away from the game is much more relaxed. I think off the court I’m more chill — staying home, enjoying time outside, not talking too much. On the court, I like to talk more and be aggressive; it’s&nbsp;working hard and having fun.I was born with an intense competitive drive. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been competitive in almost everything I do. That’s why it’s important for me to compete hard on the court and then to recharge with other hobbies and have time with my family and friends.If I had to pick a position in another sport I’d love to play quarterback. When I was younger, I played a lot of sports. Basketball was obviously my favorite, and I played outdoors almost every day after school. I also tried tennis and soccer —&nbsp;just being outdoors was fun for me. I’ve since really grown to like American football, and I have a strong arm and great vision, so I think I could QB pretty well.When I’m not training or competing, I like to go out and grill, usually a good steak and some corn. I normally cook out when it’s sunny, which helps me relax with my family and recharge for my training and busy schedule during the season.My daughter brings me the most pride of anything in the world. She’s my greatest supporter in life, even if she doesn’t know it yet. That drives me every day. She’s 15 months old, and I love spending time with her and playing with her.I remember when I realized I was living my childhood dream. I left my home when I was 12 years old to go alone and play for Real Madrid. I was just settling in during my first year with the team. But in my second year, I started to come into my own. Playing for the best basketball club in Europe, that’s how I knew I was making my dreams a reality.I don’t usually get nervous before games. But when I do feel some nerves, like before my first home game with the Lakers, I tell myself to remember that I’m good at what I do — I just need to go through my routine and do what I do best.The best advice I return to is simple: Have fun, especially on the basketball court. When something doesn’t go as planned, I just remember: “You’ve been doing this your whole life. You know how to do it. Go out there and have fun.”

The Los Angeles Lakers guard goes deep on fishing, grilling and the secret to staying sane on the court.

Luka Dončić Is More Than Just One of the Best Players in the League

Five games into his professional career, on his third straight road game, Victor Wembanyama was already at home in the NBA. He scored 38 points, grabbed 10 boards and put up two blocks by the end of the night. At season’s end, he’d average nearly four blocks a game, leading the league.&nbsp;Victor is all unreal numbers. The 20-year-old’s&nbsp;7’4” frame swallows every square inch of the court. Offensively, he’s fluid and mobile. Defensively, he’s a one-man zone, able to turn away opposing fast breaks through his size and his stare. Evaluating rookies in the NBA is usually a challenge of evaluating their floor. At a minimum, what can this player become? He entered the league, and instantly, the question was how high his ceiling might be — or whether there was one.&nbsp;Here, Victor answers our questions on what it takes to win — from transcending his own limits to banishing fear from his life. I knew from an early age the kind of professional I wanted to be. There’s a lot of things we have to do as pro athletes that people in other jobs don’t need to worry about, like getting enough sleep after you play a back-to-back and fly to a different time zone. I decided I need to get better sleep. When I start my dinnertime meal, my alarm for the next morning is already set on my phone, and I’m not going to use my phone for the rest of the night.&nbsp;I’m lucky in that I can say I’m competing for multiple places. Wearing the France national jersey is one of the strongest feelings I know. In the NBA, I’m attached to the city of San Antonio. I’m a part of it. They’ve welcomed me.&nbsp;

All my life I’ve been much taller than everyone on the court. So, when coaches saw me doing dribbles through the legs and doing fadeways and stuff, their first reflex was to tell me not to do it. All my life there’s been this pressure to put me in a box. It’s been the toughest battle I’ve fought my whole life. Now, I do have more freedom than before, but I'm convinced that my freedom wouldn't be here without my efforts to go against those stereotypes.Here's what I’d tell any kid who’s struggling with something:&nbsp;When I was 12 years old, I went through a discouraging period. I was having trouble with my shot during my games. I obviously was growing a lot at that time, and I was even skinner than I am now, so I had trouble getting my shot off consistently against defenders. My coach told me, ‘When you’re a professional, you’ll be working on the present. But right now, you’re working for the future.”&nbsp;Seeing a kid wear my jersey is special. Any time I catch highlights of our games, I like watching the reactions in the stands, and you naturally see the kids who are wearing your jersey. It’s not the first thing you think about when you become an NBA player, but you realize you can positively influence the next generation through something you love. It’s beautiful.&nbsp;It really saddens me when I see a lack of ambition from people. Usually, it comes from being scared and thinking ‘I’m not enough.’ Assuming that things are too big or too ambitious are things I’ve decided to banish from my life.At the end of the day, it’s on you to define what your goals are in life, what you want to become. Winning is accomplishing those things that matter most to you.&nbsp;

I want to help create a new era of dominance for French basketball. That involves promoting the sport and making it more popular in the country for our youth. For professional basketball in France, I think our potential doesn’t match our current investment. How can we improve our facilities? How can we train the best staff? We just need to match our potential and foster our pool of talent that’s already here. France has the brightest future of any country in the world for basketball.Someone asked me how I make sure my name doesn’t grow bigger than the Spurs organization. That will never happen. The team wants me to succeed and be the best I can be. They’ve made a lot of sacrifices for me. I want the whole organization to know how much I understand all that they’ve done. Sometimes it’s a little thing, like sending a text or welcoming someone new to the organization. I try to show people their worth in all they do. I’m not scared to grow bigger than them, because I want to make the Spurs as big as I can. I want to give back to them as much as possible.&nbsp;I don’t think anyone could have a higher expectation for me than I have for myself. So, it’s really no big deal when I hear people call me a once-in-a-generation player. The only people to whom I have something to prove is my coach and my team. Even my parents don’t have expectations for me, they just want me to be happy. When I don’t want to see all that pressure, I turn off my phone. It’s simple as that, but there’s really no pressure or expectations. I never felt like I had something to owe to the world. I’m just playing basketball.

The 20-year-old phenom speaks to transcending his own limits, banishing fear from his life, turning off his phone and more.

The Legend of Victor Wembanyama is Growing

If there was ever a moment that showed <a href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/nike-sabrina-2-official-images-sabrina-ionescu" rel="noopener noreferrer">Sabrina Ionescu</a>’s ability to see the game differently than the rest of the world, it was on November 9, 2019, when her Oregon Ducks played an exhibition game against the greatest dynasty in sport: The USA Women’s National team. The night before the game, Ionescu texted her teammates. We have nothing to lose, she encouraged them. Go out and play our way. Don’t let another team come to our home floor and dictate our system. This was in response to an opponent that hadn’t lost to a college team in 20 years, longer than some of Sabrina’s teammates had been alive.&nbsp;But where other players saw crushing odds, Sabrina saw opportunity. She would lead her team to an improbable victory, 93-86, posting a 30-7-4 statline. Defeating a global powerhouse. Securing college basketball’s triple-double crown. Becoming a No.1 draft pick in the WNBA. Helping lead the New York Liberty to its first Finals appearance in over two decades. Every time Ionescu sees an obstacle, she sees right past it.&nbsp;Ionescu’s ability to process the game at an elite level results from a lifetime of dedication to her craft. For her, perfection is found in the smallest of details: the angle of the foot during a jab step, the arc of a stepback jumper, the spin on a crosscourt bounce pass to a teammate. To see what she sees, we asked Sabrina to share about her focus and determination and her pursuit of excellence.&nbsp;&nbsp; ﻿Craft is a lot bigger than what’s seen in a stat sheet or on the scoreboard. It’s about mastering a process, not necessarily just one aspect of a game, or one technique. When you master a process for how you see improvement — maybe its scoring, maybe its facilitating for your teammates, maybe it’s doing the little things — you end up encompassing everything on the court.&nbsp;Mentally, practice is sometimes more exhausting than a game. In practice, I try to put myself in specific moments and situations over and over again. Whether it’s where a defender would be or a buzzer-beater shot, I'm always using my imagination to create situations when I'll be under pressure. And that takes a lot of work. But if I’ve put in the mental preparation, the work in practice actually sets me free during games, because I’ve already lived that moment in my head.&nbsp;The offseason is the time to work on those aspects of your game that you want to elevate. I’ve worked a lot out of one-on-one situations lately.&nbsp;I know I’m a great passer, but I think finding ways to create space on my own and not needing a screen or needing my teammates to get me open is a next step for my game. I’ve also focused on being able to attack downhill and make decisions and finish around the rim.

Competitiveness has always been one of my superpowers. I’ve always been a competitive and intense kid. I used to fight with my brothers all the time during games growing up. The older I’ve gotten, the better I’ve been able to harness my desire to win and use it for my advantage.&nbsp;Not everyone has the same driving force for success. I became a better leader when I realized that some people are more competitive than others and have different desires. For me, that realization hit in middle school. I saw that some of my teammates were just playing for fun, or to see if they liked the game. But I knew I still had to relate to them for our team to be the best it could be. And that meant knowing that not everyone is motivated the same way I am. I had to learn to accept that. Now, I’m on a team that demands excellence from one another, and we hold each other accountable. Everyone in my circle is aligned to the same goals I have. Second place isn’t an option.In college, I loved being able to help put a program on the map. I had the opportunity to go anywhere in the country I wanted coming out of high school, but I wanted to go to a program that wasn’t as established yet, because I knew the reward would be greater. We sold out almost every game my senior season, and we were competing for a national championship.The coaches who know you the best are often able to push you the hardest. I had the same coach from fourth grade to my senior year of high school. He coached me harder than I think he ever coached anybody else. If my jersey wasn't tucked right, if my socks were different heights, if my shoelaces were tied differently, I was running laps. He would act like I was putting myself above the team, but he was really showing me how I needed to act as a leader and how I need to be pushed. The higher up you want to go, the higher up you want to be, the higher the expectations.

I’d tell my younger self to have a kind of tunnel vision for her process. What that means to me is to focus on your own journey, rather than allow someone else to tell you what you can or can’t be. While I think I did a good job of that, but when I was drafted first overall and turned pro, I could feel a different pressure to speed up the process and succeed. I wish I would’ve reminded myself more to keep my tunnel vision, no matter what.&nbsp;As a player, you remember the people who saw the potential that was within you. I don’t just want to prove people wrong who doubted me. I want to prove people right who believed in me.&nbsp;

The all-star guard on her incredible focus and determination, and her relentless pursuit of excellence.

How Sabrina Ionescu Sees the Game

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Athletes don’t compete in a vacuum, but having them train in a controlled setting can help Nike researchers design the most innovative apparel to help them compete. Introducing the environmental chambers in the Nike Sport Research Lab (NSRL), which can mimic nearly any environment an athlete might face. <h3>What They Do</h3>Thermoregulation, or the study of how you regulate your temperature when you're moving, happens in your body through a natural, physiological response: sweat. When your sweat evaporates, your body can cool down.&nbsp;Nike's environmental chambers help researchers study thermoregulation up close and personal with athletes. The NSRL has three different chambers for athlete testing, each named after a different Olympic venue (Rio, Sydney and Athens) and each studying the crossover between thermoregulation, apparel design and athlete performance. The chambers allow scientists to test how different variables impact either the heat load on an athlete's body or the regulation of an athlete's body temperature through sweat evaporation.In the chambers, researchers can dial the temperature anywhere from -4 degrees F to 122 degrees F. Radiant heat with special bulbs can match the intensity of the sun's rays (there’s variance within perceptions of “hot”; anyone who does a summertime road run in Los Angeles will tell you it’s a very different setting from running in the streets of Miami). Scientists can also generate wind speeds up to 11 mph.“In the chambers, we can fine-tune our regulation of temperature, humidity, airflow, and radiant heat so we can re-create the conditions in which athletes perform,” says Grant Simmons, PhD, Sr. Principal Researcher, Thermoregulation. “These tools help us understand athlete challenges, their interaction with clothing, and the benefits of product solutions designed to make them better."

The Nike Sport Research Lab’s environmental chambers help Nike researchers study the interaction between athletes, their apparel and their environment.

Ultrarunner Drew Holmen testing the new Nike Radical AirFlow top in the Sydney environmental chamber.

At the end of a session in the Rio chamber, scientists measure the athlete’s weight, the weight of the sweat in their apparel and the weight of the sweat in a pan underneath them to isolate the exact amount of sweat that’s evaporated.

In the Sydney chamber, athletes wear body sensors as they run on a treadmill that cover a range of data: skin temperature, heart rate, core body temperature and more.

After an athlete works out, they drape the sweaty garment they wore over a manikin and a thermal camera displays where the sweat is accumulating in the product.

<h3>What They Help Us Do</h3>In the Rio chamber, scientists study athletes in the heat to identify new opportunities for Nike DriFIT innovation. Here, the NSRL uses custom methods, developed specifically for the LeBron James Innovation Center, where the NSRL is housed, to study an athlete’s sweating efficiency, or the percentage of your sweat that evaporates to cool you during exercise. If you have sweat pouring down your forehead or dripping down your back or soaking your shirt or bra, you’re not sweating efficiently. The more efficiently you sweat, the slower you dehydrate, and the longer you can run, dance, play basketball, or compete in your chosen sport. As an athlete works out on a stationary bike, scientists use several different weight scales and custom engineered equipment to break down their sweating response into separate parts. By isolating the evaporated sweat from the sweat that drips off the body, beads up on your skin, or is absorbed and retained in clothing fabric, scientists can map the outcome of every gram of sweat secreted during exercise. This allows them to study the sweating response like they’d study a household budget; identifying areas of waste and opportunities to be more efficient by reducing excess sweat that dehydrates the athlete, but doesn’t cool them down.Nike scientists also need to pinpoint where athletes tend to sweat so apparel designers can embed sweat-wicking properties in high-need areas. This is the kind of detective work that happens in the Sydney chamber. Recorded by surface-mounted cameras, athletes wear a range of body sensors as they run on a treadmill. The sensors cover a range of data: skin temperature, heart rate, core body temperature and more. The goal of these studies is to understand the distinct needs for individual athletes during exercise, revealing preferences based on different metabolic states and environments. After an athlete works out, they drape the sweaty garment they wore over a manikin and a thermal camera displays where the sweat is accumulating in the product (the sweat is cooling the apparel fabric as it evaporates). Nike scientists ask athletes to drape the apparel over the manikin, versus evaluating it on body, so they can get past the complications in variations in skin temperature, which can influence the thermal imaging. Apparel designers use this info for computational design to “zone” a garment with the right kinds of sweat-wicking materials, tuned for areas of high or low sweat. The Sydney chamber helps scientists see sweat in a new light, literally.When scientists need to control even more variables, they tap the Athens chamber. It houses two of the NSRL’s primary tools to study sweat: a pair of thermal manikins named Hal (male) and Haley (female). These adult-sized manikins have a copper shell with a precisely-regulated temperature; the shell measures heat loss across 30 different zones over their body surface. That measurement helps Nike scientists assess the thermal properties of specific apparel worn by the manikins as the figures swing their arms and legs. For example, data collected across the chest helps scientists zero in on the ideal material properties for a sports bra. Scientists can test apparel in a matter of days using the thermal manikins, reducing a timeline that would take weeks with human volunteers.

NSRL Climate Chambers

The science of regulating your temperature is serious business in the Nike Sport Research Lab.

Sport Science

Next Level

The NSRL Environmental Chambers

There are few firsts left for marathon GOAT Eliud Kipchoge. The New York City Marathon is the near equivalent of his last frontier.&nbsp;This November 2, 2025, will&nbsp;be his debut in the race, the only world major he has yet to run.&nbsp;Typically&nbsp;<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/eliud-kipchoge-wear-testing-nike-running-zoom-fly-6" target="_blank">a first tester</a>&nbsp;for Nike’s latest footwear innovations, Eliud will take on NYC with a tool borrowed from a different toolbox: a&nbsp;custom&nbsp;<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/what-is-nike-radical-airflow" target="_blank">Nike Radical AirFlow</a> top, a material innovation introduced in this summer’s trail running season through All Conditions Gear (ACG). The origin&nbsp;for the one-of-one top is&nbsp;simple. In July of 2025, a team of Nike product experts were preparing to fly to Eliud’s training camp in Kenya to show him new product. What if he tried a Radical AirFlow top,&nbsp;they thought? The same kind worn by&nbsp;<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> athlete Caleb Olson&nbsp;for the&nbsp;2025 Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run, where he ran the second-fastest course time in the race’s history.What&nbsp;happened next is&nbsp;familiar to anyone who’s followed Eliud’s relationship to product. He ran in the top. He liked it enough to scribe pages and pages of his signature handwritten notes, drawings and annotations on how it performed. And he believed in the top so much,&nbsp;he&nbsp;said&nbsp;he’d wear it for one of the&nbsp;few remaining firsts of his career.“The journey of how this project went from prototype to race-day ready for Eliud was very much in the spirit of just doing it,” says Scott LeClair, VP/GM, Nike ACG. “Serve the athlete and don’t let anything get in the way.”

Listen to Eliud

Eliud’s reputation as a devout wear tester&nbsp;is storied across Nike Running. Designers call him a product line manager on the ground. His humble sketchpads turn into maps that lead to goldmines. From unboxings to post-workout debriefs, Eliud is always ready to share his direct experience with&nbsp;the innovation at hand.

After a week of running in the top, Eliud was shocked at the perceptible cooling effect over his body, and he liked how the knit material moved freely across his skin without chafing. He offered one suggestion that might increase the cooling effect: an additional side vent at the garment’s ribs, betting on the chance for even more ventilation.

Eliud Kipchoge on His Radical AirFlow Top

Make Adjustments

Designers back at Nike’s <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/nike-philip-h-knight-campus-announcement" target="_blank">PHK headquarters</a> got to work creating an updated prototype. 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>, experts from Nike’s NXT Apparel teams used Eliud’s digitized body scans from the Nike Sport Research Lab to hit&nbsp;exact measurements for his 5’7” build. Along with creating the side vents, designers made&nbsp;more adjustments to get the top race-ready. They reverted the hemline to a normal height&nbsp;(the trail version of Radical AirFlow is cropped to allow room for a fuel belt). Based on Eliud’s feedback, they also adjusted the drape to make the top fit a little tighter to&nbsp;his&nbsp;body, to prevent it from&nbsp;swinging excessively from side to side.&nbsp;“Every alteration we made for Eliud was based on his feedback,” says Emily DeLess, Apparel Innovation, Product Management. “Thanks to our research history, we already have a language of development with him,&nbsp;so we can give him exactly what he needs.”

Let the Running Talk

When&nbsp;Eliud received his top in August, he&nbsp;put it to the test on roads&nbsp;outside his training camp in Western Kenya.&nbsp;His comments after these long runs kept returning to the notion that the sweat across his body was, somehow, being turned into a cooling agent, not a distraction.&nbsp;“The magic of this top,” says Eliud, “is how it evaporates the sweat.”

Putting Radical AirFlow to the Test

Soon, Eliud had the validation he needed. In a text thread with Tony Bignell, Chief Innovation Officer, Eliud remarked that his 40-kilometer run that day was the right time to close the feedback loop on his prototype.&nbsp;I think the top is ready to go, he texted, adding a flex emoji. Then:&nbsp;ACG has a great future.

When Eliud Kipchoge ran the 2025 New York City Marathon, he did it in a one-of-one Radical AirFlow top, bridging a material innovation from trail running to road racing. He was just as methodical with his feedback as you’d expect.

Making It

A Radical Solution for the World’s Greatest Marathoner

Melitta Baumeister has built a reputation for turning the everyday into something extraordinary. Her work blurs the line between fashion and sculpture — exaggerated silhouettes, hand-shaped materials and unexpected textures that seem to hold movement inside them.Since launching her namesake label in 2013, the New York–based fashion innovator has become one of the most distinct voices in contemporary design, earning recognition from the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund.Now, she’s bringing that sculptural approach to Nike. On October 29, Baumeister will debut an experiential performance and installation in New York City, the first chapter in a long-term collaboration with the brand. Taking Nike’s Vomero Premium as her starting point, she reimagines the shoe’s color — and so much more, creating an expressive study of movement and perception. The result is part artwork, part experiment and fully human in its perspective.For Melitta, the concept “Run Like No One” became the collaboration’s emotional core. It’s a message about rediscovering joy in motion; about moving for yourself, not for applause or perfection. Each sneaker in the series carries that same philosophy: subtle variations, layered color and evidence of the maker’s touch.As she explains, the project isn’t about creating heroes, it’s about exploring honesty in motion, an idea that mirrors her own practice of experimentation and process. Here, Melitta shares how her Nike collaboration came together and why imperfection, realism and play may be the most powerful design tools of all.

How did you approach reinterpreting the Nike Vomero?When Nike asked me to come up with a new colorway for the Vomero, my first reaction was: We need to find a different way to work with it other than simply exchanging one color for the other. The performance aspect of the Vomero was an additional inspiration. We needed movement and something unexpected — a shift away from the intimidating perfection of a pristine sneaker toward one that engages people on multiple levels in surprising ways.My team and I have taken the idea of “built for movement” seriously, and instead of being stuck behind screens, we worked on it as we would on our sculptural dresses, using our hands and working directly with real materials. The outcome is a hand-painted sneaker, each one slightly different from the other. That’s what the audience will notice first when encountering the Vomero: the layers of graphics and storytelling that reveal themselves on closer inspection. I love this aspect of engagement from different distances and angles. It gives depth and more space for the audience to explore and experience it.&nbsp;

What first drew you to fashion as a form of expression?&nbsp;For as far back as I can remember, I had a feeling that clothing can affect our lives and the way we feel. I was always drawn to people that used clothing not only to express their personality but also to help build that identity. This is where my love for fashion took root.I knew from a young age that I wanted to make clothes for a living, probably around 14. I grew up in a small city where there wasn’t much fashion around. My mom introduced me to a fashion designer who was visiting, telling me that she was “changing lives by dressing people.” That stuck with me. Growing older, I understood what she meant. Changing someone’s identity or being part of someone’s identity was fascinating to me.&nbsp;How did your own experience with running shape the concept for this performance?Movement has always been essential in my daily and creative life, but finding the time and motivation while running a growing business has become a bigger challenge than running faster or farther. Knowing that this is the reality for most of my customers made it a good starting point for this collaboration in general and the performance in particular. What I love about running is the way it changes your perception of time and space. It’s like exploring familiar surroundings in a new way. Places start connecting to thoughts, which then become memories, and the rhythm is in your body, not the stopwatch. Running is a powerful tool for creativity.From the very beginning, the performance gives a good insight into how we approach projects. Instead of arriving with a rigid idea that needs to be squeezed into any space, we visit different locations and look for their specific character, which we love to integrate into our concept. It’s like running on a treadmill versus through the city. I prefer the spontaneity and unpredictability to the preplanned and controlled. For our performance in New York, this meant utilizing all the “hidden” parts of the location that would usually be used only as storage or back of house. In fact, that’s how the performance starts, and how we enter the building. What follows is a succession of moments that meander between humorous surrealism and surprising realism.

First look at "Run Like No One"

You grew up in Germany and built your label in New York. Do those two places show up in your work today?Definitely, especially when it comes to work ethic. I think growing up in Germany, there’s this constant drive to improve, to not settle, to always push something further. There’s a kind of built-in restlessness. Germans are often not easily satisfied, and I see that in how I approach my work. It’s always about questioning, refining, evolving.What story or feeling did you want this performance to capture?We wanted to create an experience that feels intimate and honest, stepping into the inner world of someone who doesn’t identify as a runner and watching that shift happen. It’s not about perfection or becoming a hero. It’s about the private, sometimes quiet journey toward movement.I hope people feel something familiar when they walk through it. It’s about running for yourself, not for anyone else. That’s what “Run Like No One” means to us.

Melitta Baumeister has built a reputation for turning the everyday into something extraordinary — blurring the line between fashion and sculpture with pieces that seem to hold movement inside them. Now, she’s bringing that sculptural approach to Nike.

Explore Nike, Converse and Jordan footwear and apparel design stories featuring Nike Air Force 1, Nike Air Jordan, Nike Air Max and more.

Design

Welcome to the Family

5 Questions With Fashion Designer Melitta Baumeister

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 hall, 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.

Nike Mind Nodes 1

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 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 outward. 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 Sciences Team Working alongside Moffat, Trevor Barss helped run the early neuroscience studies that defined Nike Mind’s foundation. A sensory neuroscientist specializing 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 forty-five 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.

Nike Mind Top View Scan

THE ENGINEERING WIZ: 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 modeling 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 practicing 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, 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 Program 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 —&nbsp;something 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, refugees in Beirut, clowns in Cairo and cowboys from Polson to Houston.&nbsp;When not on assignment, Zach is rarely still, pedaling 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

Feature

Innovation

Inside the Nike Mind Team That Turned Neuroscience Into Footwear

At Philip H. Knight Campus, in Beaverton, Oregon, the day doesn’t start at dawn. On this crisp autumn Tuesday morning, employees arrive before the sun, jogging around campus or grinding through reps in the weight room. In Studio 4 of the Nike Sports Center gym, a crew of about 20 are warming up for a 7 a.m. HIIT class.&nbsp;One of the class-goers is CEO &amp; President <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/company/people/elliott-hill" target="_blank">Elliott Hill</a>, both regular patron and proselytizer of the campus’s facilities. This morning, he’s front-row, dead-center of class, two dumbbells at his feet. The workout playlist is straight bangers, and Hill is matching the music’s energy and chatting up his neighbors, asking about their Portland Marathon finish times, trying to distract them from the last 10 seconds of a plank. He’s gregarious and in high spirits despite the early hour, as upbeat and encouraging as a cheerleader and coach rolled into one. After class, an employee takes the opportunity to reintroduce herself. She and Hill had met once before, she explains, while she was working in retail in Louisville, Kentucky. He’d given her some career advice: If she wanted to advance at Nike, she needed to look two jobs ahead, assess what skills were needed, and commit to learning them. Now, 12 years later, she’s a product line manager for Nike Pro training apparel. Hill shakes her hand and says he still stands by that advice — success, in his eyes, is about filling out your toolbox, not just waiting for people to hand you the tools. Both of them are proof of what happens when one does.

One of Hill’s proudest accomplishments on campus is getting more employees back in the gyms, he says. “We’re a sports company, a movement company, and I want people to feel and see that.”

On any given weekday morning, you’ll find Hill in the Philip H. Knight Campus gyms, living the company’s mantra to make sport a daily habit.

"I think we have one of the most beautiful, simple and aspirational mission statements that exists," Hill says. "'To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world.' I really love the word 'athlete*' with an asterisk. There's a statement behind it. 'If you have a body, you are an athlete.' It challenges us to serve every human being. All 8 billion people are athletes."

Hill’s time at NIKE, Inc., from intern to company leader, has been so distinctive and remarkable that <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliotthillnike/" target="_blank">his career ladder</a> was the rare LinkedIn page to go viral. This October, he’s hit one year in the CEO role. It’s been a good year, in Hill’s eyes — Nike’s <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/faith-kipyegon-nike-breaking4-journey" target="_blank">shown up for athletes</a>, debuted <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/nike-vomero-plus-vomero-premium-official-images" target="_blank">fresh product</a>, reignited its marketplace relationships — but more than that, it’s been a promising stepping stone. The best is yet to come, Hill says; as much momentum as Nike’s had, he still gives the company a 6 out of 10 for fulfilling its potential. “I do celebrate the wins, and I make sure people enjoy them — but I am quick to move to, ‘Okay, what could we have done better?’ Or, ‘Okay, great job. Now, let's get going,&nbsp;’cause we got so much more work to do.” As any CEO would be, Hill is highly attuned to the dogged complaints in recent years that Nike has stopped innovating, and he’s eager to disprove them. He thrives on a challenge, he says, and knows that true innovation is born from tension, not stability. Sitting outside the <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://lebronjamesinnovationcenter.nike.com/" target="_blank">LeBron James Innovation Center</a> after his HIIT class, he notices two employees walking into the building. He beckons them over — hollers, actually — and asks about their progress working on new cleats. Restoring the pride employees have in the company was important: If they didn’t believe in themselves, no one else would either. “If we're gonna make baseball cleats, make the best baseball cleats,” implores Hill. “If we’re gonna make football cleats, make the best football cleats.” Eager to flex on their work, they invite him to judge it for himself: Alpine conference room, next week. Hill repeats the location and time back to them. It’s a date.&nbsp;

One year in, Hill, 62, has made it his mission to <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/elliott-hill-nike-interview" target="_blank">reignite Nike’s reputation</a> as a trailblazing sports company and a leader of innovation — not merely a product company, but an ideas company. And he’s adamant that those ideas be rooted in sport, with athletes at the center. He says he’s bullish for the future, and each day seems to give him a new reason to be. Take today’s employee chat on cleats. “They were so proud to say, ‘Look at what I got coming.’ That’s what I want,” says Hill. For people to not just work hard, but to also have the steely conviction that what they’re making is good, worth bragging about. To know winning is winning together. “I want people to feel a sense of pride in their work, in their craft, in their service to the athlete.”&nbsp; He sees this charge as a group activity, something to which he holds himself and everyone else at the company accountable. Motivation, for Hill, is something of an extreme sport: He leads with an enthusiasm so contagious, it makes even the naysayers devout. He recruits you into dreaming bigger and better, insisting that winning as a team is the only way to win — while still recognizing and celebrating the team players. It’s the forest and the trees. “The way he makes everybody in the room feel special is just unbelievable,” says Dan Lanning, the head coach of the University of Oregon football team. “I remember walking away from our first interaction, telling my wife, ‘This guy's gonna make it tick.’”

He brings that same personable attentiveness to Nike athletes. You can’t serve the athlete if you’re not connected to them, and Hill stresses the importance of building genuine relationships. “It’s important to know that we’re watching,” he says, punctuating his words with gentle karate chops atop the table outside the LeBron James Innovation Center. “Great relationships are built on mutual trust and respect, over time, from showing up. So first game, you get in the ring and you want me to go? I’ll be there.” No need to take his word for it. He picks up his work phone — not to be confused with his personal phone, also on the table, in an identical case — and pulls up a text thread with the New York Liberty’s <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/magazine/sabrina-ionescu-exclusive-interview" target="_blank">Sabrina Ionescu</a>. (When a GOAT athlete called him earlier in the morning, it was on his personal line.) The thread is several scrolls long; they’re sending each other photos, Hill is checking in after games. Most of their chatter is about the <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/nike-sabrina-3-official-images-sabrina-ionescu" target="_blank">Sabrina 3</a>, the WNBA player’s latest Nike signature shoe, released earlier this year. He opens a photo from May 17, the day of the Liberty season opener against the Las Vegas Aces. Hill; his wife, Gina; Ionescu; Tom Peddie, GM/VP of North America; and his wife, Sharon, put their feet together, showing off a circle of Nikes. “I really value Elliott’s approach," says Ionescu. "I always feel my voice is being heard when I share with him what is important to me to grow my business. He knows how to connect with people on a human level, and I couldn’t be more grateful for him to be back in the Nike family.”

Hill regularly reaches out to Nike athletes, congratulating them on their wins. When the New York Liberty took the WNBA title last year, Hill immediately congratulated Nike athlete Sabrina Ionescu, one of many exchanges in their scrolls-long text thread.

Circle up: clockwise from top, Sabrina Ionescu in the turquoise Sabrina 3, Elliott Hill in the Kobe 7, Gina Hill in the black-and-white Sabrina 3, Tom Peddie in the white A'One, Sharon Peddie in the pink A‘ja One.

Hill wants athletes to feel not only seen, but also supported, and certain that they are in good hands. At the Nike Football Summit, in June, Brazilian football legend and 31-year Nike athlete Ronaldo (R9) found himself with the other top footballers of all time: Vinícius Júnior, Kerolin, Didier Drogba, Matheus Cunha, Edgar Davids — plus Hill, who gave them a rousing pep talk. “Elliott giving us a rallying speech on how important we were to the company and how significant our contribution to the team was — it made us feel special, valued and inspired,” says R9.In Hill’s mind, those feelings needed to cascade to restoring external relationships too. So this past year, he’s been working the phone. Almost immediately after becoming CEO, he called NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to ensure the extension of Nike’s licensing and uniform deal through 2038. Next up were calls to retail partners like DICK'S Sporting Goods&nbsp;and JD Sports, partnerships that had weakened during the company’s focus on direct-to-consumer. No longer: Those wholesalers, Hill says, are a crucial element not only of sales, but of product feedback.&nbsp;This outreach matters, says Ed&nbsp;Stack, Executive Chairman&nbsp; of DICK’S Sporting Goods&nbsp;and Foot Locker, who’s known Hill for more than 25 years. “Elliott tells it like it is, and his transparency builds trust that fosters a great business relationship," says Stack. "Elliott’s greatest impact to Nike is that Nike now believes it can be Nike again, and I can guarantee that its wholesale partners now share the same belief.”&nbsp;

Later that morning, Hill walks around campus, pointing out changes he’s implemented. Coming out of a 2020 retirement to take the helm last year, he says he knew employees needed a cultural change. To feel it, he thought, they needed to see it. He got the fountain that runs along the Sebastian Coe building turned back on, “because it signals that the water’s running, that we’re back in our flow.” Company adages have been turned tangible: giant-letter installations of Nike Maxims like “DO THE RIGHT THING” and “WIN AS A TEAM” are displayed throughout campus, as well as a sleek digital clock that counts down to major sports events like the 2026 Winter Olympics and the World Cup. Sport is always imminent, and Hill doesn’t want employees to forget that. Any second of any day, athletes are somewhere training. Cities are preparing. Fans are anticipating. “We gotta get focused, so we’re always preparing ourselves,” he says. All change has to start from within, and one of Hill’s primary focuses has been establishing a fresh <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://about.nike.com/en/company" target="_blank">senior leadership team</a>, many of whom are NIKE, Inc. veterans. Most notably, Hill’s restructured the company to organize by sport (running, basketball, global football and more), instead of by women’s, men’s and kids. The reorganization and strategy reset — the “Sport Offense” — allows teams to garner specific insights about athletes and use them to drive innovation and storytelling. “We have small teams who are, in each of those segments, trying to understand their core consumer,” says Hill, pointing out the difference, say, between where a Nike basketball consumer shops and where a Jordan one does. “That’s a way to take $47 billion of revenue, break it down by sport, and then hold each of those sports responsible for revenue, margin and market share.”Hill moves briskly, even after the vigorous class, equal parts anticipation of what’s to come and satisfaction with what’s come so far, fueled by passion and the overnight oats he packed himself for post-workout. One of his proudest campus accomplishments, he says, has been getting more people in the company gyms. It isn’t uncommon for employees, on their way to a meeting or taking a kombucha break, to run into Hill, who is likely to encourage them to get a workout in. When he started as CEO, he realized that the company’s state-of-the-art gym facilities were largely empty, in part because employees weren’t allowed to bring their children. He invited families in and started working on bringing back extracurriculars for kids, like the erstwhile swim program and intramural sports. With his push, the gyms are filling back up. Case in point: That morning, before class, he walked through rows of treadmills and barbell and weight spaces, in use. Nike’s ethos doesn‘t end with the consumer: Sport should propel the lives of employees too.&nbsp;

Elliott Hill presents a custom Nike Breaking4 jacket to world champion runner Faith Kipyegon, who, with Nike’s help, attempted to break the 4-minute mile in June.

Ann Miller, EVP Global Sports Marketing, Elliott Hill and three-time WNBA champion and Nike athlete A’ja Wilson

Converse athlete Shai Gilgeous-Alexander with Hill and the new SHAI:001 signature shoe.

Hill catches up with South Carolina Gamecocks coach Dawn Staley at Philip H. Knight Campus in Beaverton, Oregon.

Hill and football legend Ronaldo connected on campus last summer.

Celebrating sport with employees is a huge priority for Hill, pictured here playing a game between a Nike employee team (the Nike Knights) and Hill’s Austin Moontowers baseball club this past summer.

“Sports — playing them, watching ’em, reading about them — have always been a part of my life," says Hill.

Hill ringing the bell for the final lap of The Nike Mile, a competitive race he brought back to crown the fastest employees at the company's Just Do It day in June.

For his part, Hill is an avid bicyclist and hiker, says his wife, Gina — but really, he’s a fanatic about any sort of dynamic movement, be it bobsledding or tai chi. “He’s super curious, and he’s an open book: I’m vulnerable, maybe I won’t succeed at this, but I’m going to give it a shot,” she says. “Which is a great model for the greater Nike group, not being afraid to try new things and not being afraid to ask questions.” Hill and Gina — who met at Nike — usually spend their mornings working out together, but today's HIIT class was a particularly special occasion. It was Gina’s first day cleared to go back to exercise after remission. This past April, six months into his tenure, Hill got a phone call he’ll never forget: Gina had breast cancer. Hill was in New York and was due to meet with investors in 10 minutes. He informed the two leaders he was with; he cried. “Then you wipe your eyes and go and get your shit together,” says Hill. Both he and Gina aren’t ones to dwell or ruminate; they are doers, people of action. “We are big believers in control what you can control and try not to waste energy on the stuff that you can’t control,” he says. Gina had a double mastectomy, and Hill was by her side, driving her to appointments and procedures. Creating a culture where that balance can and should happen is a point of pride, says Hill. “I think it’s good for the boss to say, ‘You know what, I’m going to go take care of my wife. You guys get out there and roll.’”

Hill doesn‘t have the typical CEO pedigree. He grew up in a “blue collar, hard-working, culturally and racially diverse” neighborhood in Austin, Texas, a latchkey kid with a single mother who was school teacher. Before Nike, he graduated from Texas Christian University with a degree in kinesiology. “I don't want to be stereotypical, and I probably go to the extreme to break that — making fun of myself to get people to be able to connect with me on a personal level,” he says, sipping from a cup of black coffee. (Once, he offered to shave his head if his team made budget for that fiscal year — and when it happened, he fulfilled his end of the bargain on a stage in front of them.)&nbsp; The method works: Gina says her husband is particularly attuned to making people feel comfortable, which comes from his bottomless curiosity. “He’s just so open and so approachable that people of all levels feel like they can reach out to him.” Growing up, sport was a way to shake the stigma of being the kid in the neighborhood without a dad. “I always felt like I had something to prove to everybody, and that gets ingrained in your head,” he says. He became an overachiever: student class president, president of his fraternity, Phi Delta Theta. “I was always the guy who was pushing myself, not just in sports.” That competitive nature shepherded him through increasingly senior roles at Nike, and, along the way, his tenure dictated the course of his life.&nbsp; Including his second start. Even after four years of active retirement, Hill knew he wasn’t completely out of the Nike game. He’d kept busy, serving as a business consultant and launching the Travis County Parks Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports parks in Austin, Texas. But his attention to the brand persisted, a mental muscle memory. He couldn’t help himself from noting which brand of sneakers he’d see on people walking down the street. “Even when we were traveling for fun, he was like, ‘Do you mind if we just walk through the Foot Locker and see what’s going on?” recalls Gina.

Which might be why his return has been so smooth. Retirement was nice, but: “I’m meant to grind. I’m meant to work,” he says. “I’m meant to be part of a team, hopefully competing. And not just competing — winning.” The task ahead — reestablishing the brand’s cultural and market dominance — only excites him. It also keeps him quite busy: After he wraps up this interview, outside Nike’s building dedicated to innovation, Hill’s off to the Department of Nike Archives, a repository of more than five decades of company history. There, he’ll look through a curated exhibit of Nike’s presence at the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics — the sporting event that put Nike on the map — and get inspiration for how the brand can come out in force for LA28. He’s the type of leader that knows you can’t get where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been. The past unlocks the future. Hill’s got the key.&nbsp;

Jazmine Hughes is a writer, professor and public speaker. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, VOGUE, the Washington Post, and New York magazine, among many others, where she has profiled people such as Viola Davis, Whoopi Goldberg, Usher, Lenny Kravitz, Questlove, Sarah Paulson and Julianne Moore. She has two National Magazine Awards. Jazmine has taught writing classes and workshops at Cornell University, The New School of Social Research, and the Lower East Side Girls Club, and moderated panels for American Express, Netflix and the Tribeca Film Festival. She lives between New York City and Mexico.&nbsp;

Jazmine Hughes

Showing up for athletes, igniting employee pride, restoring relationships, stoking innovation. Elliott Hill's accomplished a lot in a year. He says there's far more to come.

One Year In, the CEO of Sport Is Taking Nike Back to Its Roots

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.

<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-meter endurance track, a 100-meter 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 C to 50 degrees celsius.&nbsp;“This is the epicenter 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, contextualize challenges, and advance breakthroughs across a spectrum of athletic, no matter the playing field.

<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.

The LeBron James Innovation Center

Answering this question requires paying special attention to word choice, says Blaise Williams, Sr. 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">NSRL 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, NSRL 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 optimize 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 center 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.

Ask a Sport Scientist

How Can I Become a Better Runner?

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 Zoom Air 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 Zoom Air units while I went on my long runs.”This step in the prototyping process, called “blinding,” is one of many ways that 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 standout 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 minimize 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 U.S. Olympic marathon Trials were fast approaching, which would determine who traveled 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.”

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?

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