Nike has done it again. It is in the news for all the wrong reasons.
Nike has made some pretty woke and dumb decisions through the years. It resigned has-been Colin Kaepernick, not for athletic prowess but for his anti-police zealotry and racial bigotry. Meanwhile, Nike cut Tiger Woods, the aging GOAT who sent the golf brand hyper-nova. If you doubt those examples above, then just look at any iteration of the University of Oregon fluorescent yellow uniforms. Make sure you have eye protection.
Now this.
Nike won the gig to create the athletic uniforms for the U.S. Olympic track and field team this year.
Janett Nichol, vice president of apparel innovation at Nike, told CBS Sports that they submitted all the data and "athlete insights" and used that "algorithm" to come up with...a revealing swimsuit. Nichol swears that the outfits "perform at the highest level" and that real live athletes tried them on and everything. I think Nike needs to tweak their artificial intelligence or whatever they used in the creation of these duds.
In track, men get to wear clothes and women are wearing what "the algorithm" came up with.
And here is what the track and field athletes will be wearing at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
— Jasmyn Wimbish (@JasmynWimbish) April 11, 2024
The men’s USA uniform is a special uniform that will only be worn for final track events. pic.twitter.com/oZQpHuLRln
As one person noted about this year's uniform, "I hope [U.S. Olympics officials] is paying for the bikini waxes." Yes, well.
This weekend Nike revealed the unis in the City of Light—and HOLY HOO HA!
Nike was, as you know, originally a shoe brand. Indeed, more care has been taken with the shoes the athletes are wearing than the uniforms. It appears the shoes cover their feet better than the clothes cover their bodies.
"For our sprinters and our track athletes, they need something that is stable and that they can control, but they want all that energy back on the track," Elliott Heath, Nike's global running footwear product manager, enthusiastically told CBS.
"This comes to life in a dual-chamber pod system that helps create stability as well as capture that force and return it to the athlete...that's what makes Air Zoom different than the other types of Air from Nike is that you're able to put high pressures and really shape that bag to design around it and deliver the performance that athletes need," Heath said.
There's no such dual-chamber pod system of anything in the Nike Swimsuit Edition, not even on the men's uniform, where one might think it belonged.
As retired athlete Lauren Fleshman and others wondered: If these were designed for excellence then why aren't the men wearing these get-ups? “Professional athletes should be able to compete without dedicating brain space to constant pube vigilance or the mental gymnastics of having every vulnerable piece of your body on display,” she said in Instagram post (above).
Women’s kits should be in service to performance, mentally and physically. If this outfit was truly beneficial to physical performance, men would wear it. This is not an elite athletic kit for track and field. This is a costume born of patriarchal forces that are no longer welcome or needed to get eyes on women’s sports.
As any artist, designer, or even prosecutor can tell you, it's easier to take something apart than to create it. We appreciate the point, but this costume is almost impossible for even the finest, perfectly proportioned, and well tuned athlete to pull off.
As long jumper Tara Davis-Woodhall commented, "Wait, my hoo haa is gonna be out."
She's right. Nike might want to re-train the "algorithm" to include "no hoo ha."
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