On the upper floor of a vast, monolithic building that Nike calls the LeBron James Innovation Center is a 200 m synthetic running track.
It is where they test their latest shoes, and where staff at the American sportswear brand pay homage to an athlete with whom they were just embarking on a new journey of athletic discovery.
Their tribute is captured in a single green light that zips around the track every 34 seconds, at a speed the majority of us would struggle to maintain for a single lap. Set at a shade over 13mph — or 21km/h for anyone brave enough to try it on a treadmill — this, remarkably, is the pace Kelvin Kiptum maintained for an entire marathon in Chicago last autumn, reducing the world record by 34 seconds with a time of 2hr 35sec.
The plan, as Nike’s running specialists knew, was for Kiptum to run faster still in Rotterdam this weekend; quite possibly breaking two hours. “Kelvin was someone who simply wanted to get the best out of himself each time he raced but clearly his performances and that barrier were becoming aligned,” says Elliott Heath, a Nike executive and former United States distance runner who worked closely with the Kenyan superstar. “It was a rocketship ride to be on.”
Tragically, the 24-year-old was killed in a car accident in Kenya in February and here at Nike’s global headquarters in Beaverton, in Oregon, staff are still coming to terms with the news. “I remember how his eyes lit up when we showed him our very latest shoes,” Leo Chang, a designer, says. “ ‘I can run fast in these,’ he said. It’s terrible, what has happened.”
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For Nike, there are haunting echoes of another heartbreaking episode. In 1974 Steve Prefontaine, a precociously gifted American distance runner who was so unfortunate not to claim a medal at the 1972 Munich Olympics, became the first track and field star to sign an endorsement deal with the company. The following year he too was killed in a car crash, again at 24.
“There really is a sad echo of Prefontaine,” says Tony Bignell, a British former middle-distance runner and Nike’s vice-president of men’s sport performance footwear. “You feel it, just walking around here. The mind boggles as to what Kelvin was capable of. It’s just horrific, made worse by the fact that he had a family, two young children.”
Nike hoped to build on their collaboration with Kiptum, in much the same way they have worked with Eliud Kipchoge to develop the products that have been at the forefront of a running shoe revolution these past few years.
As Chang explains, Kipchoge takes a real interest in product development, sending notes to the Nike designers when the double Olympic champion provides feedback on a new shoe. “When Eliud’s done with competitive running he really ought to have a desk in our innovation department,” he says.
A change in attitude: doors finally open as culture of secrecy fades
The previous time I was here, Nike was a very different place. It was 2015 and the scene of an unfolding scandal that ultimately led to the closure of the all-conquering Nike Oregon Project; an elite training group based at the Nike campus and run by Alberto Salazar. That day I was looking for Salazar (I eventually found him at his home in Portland) and a few years later, in 2019, he received a four-year doping suspension that has been followed by a lifetime ban for sexual and emotional misconduct, issued by the US Center for Safe Sport.
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Not for the first time, Nike had to rename one of the buildings on this huge complex (Salazar, like a number of former Nike stars, had had such an honour bestowed upon him) and since then there have been one or two other bumps in the road. There has been news of staff cuts to shave $2 billion (£1.59 billion) off the budget, and a sexual harassment and gender discrimination lawsuit launched by multiple women against the company that is continuing.
For legal reasons Nike is unable to discuss the case but a spokesperson made the point during this visit that the “representation of women” in its “global corporate workforce remained steady at 51 per cent”, while maintaining “a 44 per cent representation of women in leadership (VP) positions”. In a company boasting more than 80,000 employees, this push for equality is supported by their 10,000-strong Women of Nike Network. During two days at its headquarters, that balance was certainly evident.
In fairness to Nike, the invitation here did not extend to discussing controversies like Salazar and whether this massive organisation had learnt from previous mistakes. A missed opportunity, perhaps.
But if one accusation that has been levelled against them is a culture of secrecy mixed with a degree of hostility, finally opening their doors to the design team that sparked the super shoe revolution in running feels like a step in the right direction.
From when the first Nike Vaporfly was released in 2017, it has amounted to a massive success story; a technological development that has not only changed a sport, perhaps more even than the evolution of tennis rackets and golf clubs, but also sold an awful lot of trainers.
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• Inside the Croydon factory behind Nike’s ‘super shoes’ revolution
Some of the background we know. In The Times in December it emerged how one of the biggest design breakthroughs came when a manufacturer in Mitcham, Surrey, tried to develop a foam for a specific application in the medical industry only to realise its energy return properties might work better in running shoes. When Nike eventually tested the material in the 2016 Rio Olympic Games and male athletes in its shoes finished first, second and third in the marathon, Kipchoge claiming gold, a multimillion dollar deal was struck with Zotefoams, which remains the exclusive providers of the product Nike markets as its ZoomX foam.
When, however, it came to explaining how a shoe that originally combined an unusually chunky midsole with a carbon plate — and in more recent versions now includes these extra-responsive air bags that provide even more bounce — the detail from Nike was limited against a backdrop of panic from rival brands concerned that certain rules were not being followed. Beyond claiming that the shoe provided a 4 per cent improvement in running efficiency, Nike said very little.
Now, however, there seems to be a change in tone and attitude. Now it is allowing access to its quite astonishing research laboratory, an 84,000 square feet facility opened in 2021 that boasts 400 motion-capture cameras, environmental chambers, gender specific sweat-testing dummies and a robot it calls Forrest (after Nike-sneaker wearing Forrest Gump), who puts shoes through their paces by completing 300 miles inside 48 hours.
Now Nike is also allowing the team of very clever people who invented them to tell the story of the supershoe from their unique perspective, and explain in detail how they helped to make the seemingly impossible possible with the astonishing times that are being recorded; not just in the marathon but over shorter distances too.
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John Hoke is Nike’s chief innovation officer and someone with a particularly keen eye for design. If you’ve seen the Twilight movies, and recall the stunning modern home belonging to the vampire family of Robert Pattinson’s character, that is Hoke’s old house.
He recalls the sense of excitement when the biomechanics experts, material scientists and design geeks who work under him came up with the ingredients that left them thinking they really were on to something. Crucially it involved a guy called Denis Schiller, a scientist who “scours the globe” for new materials, who had the wit to engage with those foam people in Mitcham.
“What I felt was that we had magic in a bottle,” Hoke says. “We had something. It was in its early state. It was kind of rough, it didn’t look the way it was going to look, but the testing and the feedback was convincing us of our hunch — the hunch being that we could make a better shoe, and with the shoe plus the athlete we could do things we didn’t think were possible.
“When you get a hunch like that, there’s a fever, an optimism. I think you get possessed. It was a fundamental reset that made the industry reappraise. It was a game-changer. It literally changed the paradigm.
“We’re born from runners and I’m very proud of how we injected this excitement into the world of running. That felt really good, although we’ve only just started.”
The research lab: ‘If you open an orange box, there’s a 4 per cent benefit’
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The revolution started in 2014 says Dr Matt Nurse, a biomechanics expert, Nike vice-president and head of its research lab.
“In all great step changes there are lots of versions of the truth, and probably some revisionist history,” he says. “But we started a project, probably in 2014, and we said we know that shoe mass, for every 100g, you get about a 1 per cent change in shoe running economy.
“Then there was work around cushioning, and we looked at what cushioning can do. And again we thought it was about 1 per cent.
“And then plate stiffness; the work on track-and-field spikes had shown what you lose [in terms of energy] in your metatarsals, the ball of your foot. It’s more of a leaky faucet. With a plate you’re just shutting off the leaky valve and, again, it amounts to about 1 per cent.
“So we started a project to see if one plus one plus one could get us to three. And in our hearts we said if we get to two we’ll be super happy but we got to four. It’s why the shoe was called the 4 per cent.”
Nurse insists it was no marketing gimmick. “There are very stringent legal guidelines,” he says. “It’s like putting an age on a whisky.
“Four per cent was the lowest we measured on any athlete, and we had to have a broad spectrum of athletes across a broad spectrum of speeds to even be able to call it 4 per cent.
“But we’re very proud of that. The times athletes have achieved provide the evidence. There have also been more than 200 scientific articles published in peer review journals, and every single one of them has come to the same conclusion. If you open an orange box, there’s a 4 per cent benefit.”
They even understand how it translates to performance. “If I can change running efficiency by 4 per cent, it’s not one to one but maybe one to 0.8ish,” Nurse says. “So a 3 per cent improvement over larger distances.”
Dr Emily Farina is another biomechanics expert, and recalls those first tests. “I was behind the computer, running the running economy test for our first athlete,” she says. “And I’m looking at something . . . I’m watching this in real time and I’m looking at my boss and initially thinking, ‘Something is not right.’ There were obvious percentage differences that were beautiful to see.”
She explains the benefits of the technology, from energy return in the foam and the air bags to the protection that means athletes suffer less fatigue in a race as well as in training, enabling them to feel fresher towards the end of a race and to cope with greater workloads and achieve higher fitness levels.
“We’re giving them performance,” she says. “As well as restoring energy for return later, protection is a further factor in that you’re helping an athlete crash into the ground. If the shoe can comply, the leg doesn’t have to do as much, and the load going up through the body can be reduced. Mile 20 doesn’t feel like mile 20.
“Then there’s less mass and a stiff plate. What we did differently there was curve the plate, so you don’t have to flex and push off with every step — which is also really hard at the end of a marathon.
“We were already working with a really light shoe. Taking 100g off a 195g shoe probably wasn’t going to be possible, especially if we want to add more cushioning. But that’s where Zotefoams comes in. We hit 4 per cent with exactly the same mass, with the gains coming from the cushioning and the plate acting together as a system.”
The latest shoe, the Nike Alphafly 3,which was worn by Kiptum to break the world record, represents a further improvement on the model worn by Kipchoge to set the previous record. For a start it is lighter. It boasts the triple Zoom Air units that Farina says are even more responsive than the foam. Indeed for its elite athletes Nike can even set the PSI inside the bags.
“We are able to calculate that they are pushing 95 per cent in terms of energy return,” she says. “We will never be able to actually achieve 100. There is always going to be some loss if it’s a passive system and we’re not actually adding anything. But we are trying to get nearer.”
Chasing records: ‘Is someone going to run faster than Bolt? Absolutely’
So what next? This week Nike launches its latest range of road and track shoes for the Paris Olympic Games but Nurse and Bignell also envisage shoes that will fall outside the regulations World Athletics introduced to set some parameters for sportswear brands. Among the key criteria is a limit on stack height (the thickness of the sole) but Nike says it will produce shoes that ignore those rules if more people are able to enjoy non-competitive exercise.
“We don’t believe in cheating, in producing a racing shoe that gives you more than 100 per cent,” Bignell says. “But there’s competition and then there’s running or walking.
“I was running this morning [as a man in his 50s] and my mum walks the dog. I don’t care if we produce a shoe that gives you 150 per cent if it enables people to get out and exercise. It’s a bit like electric bikes. They’re two different things for me, like church and state. Of course there need to be rules for competition. But if we could do something that gives 200 per cent back, absolutely. We’re talking about the benefits of moving, healthy lives.”
Nurse agrees. “We’ll abide by the rules, of course,” he says. “The way the Alphafly allows you to run, it’s still human power. There is no energy going into the system. It’s 100 per cent your energy driving it. And it’s not just about race day but about preparation, because of recovery and the ability to train harder. But we can make shoes that do make it easier, more enjoyable, to exercise.”
As a scientist, Nurse nevertheless likes to challenge the status quo. “Personally I have issues where rules may have been introduced based on fallacy and speculation,” he says.
“One we hear a lot is that higher stack heights lead to higher injuries. It’s a common misconception. The only way to fight that is to show up with evidence and research. So we’ve done a ton on that, and so far we have uncovered no evidence that higher stack heights lead to any kind of increase in injuries.”
He says if it leads to further records being broken, on the track as well as the road, so be it. “Is someone going to run faster than Usain Bolt? Absolutely,” Nurse says. “You can’t rely on shoes alone. But with the right athlete in the right shoe . . .
“Bolt was incredible and he will always have his place in the record books. That said, he might have been a little faster with us.”
