How Nike Made Track Spikes For Oscar Pistorius’s Carbon Fiber Blades
THEY CALL HIM BLADE RUNNER, OR THE FASTEST MAN WITH NO LEGS. BUT HOW DO YOU BUILD SHOES FOR SOMEONE WITH NO FEET?
Oscar Pistorius is a world class Olympic sprinter. He’s also a double, below-the-knee amputee. What allows him to compete is a grit that most of us can only imagine, along with a pair of Össur’s Flex-Foot Cheetah legs, J-shaped carbon fiber prostheses that fill in for feet and calves.
By now, you’ve surely heard of Össur legs and Pistorius’s watershed Olympics qualification. But what you may not know is a design problem that had to be solved first. Whereas every sprinter competes on spikes, Össur legs are smooth carbon fiber bands. So how do you affix spikes? By hand. Roughing up the surface, strong fixatives, and lots of brute force.
Even for a famous athlete of Pistorius’s resources, his spikes were a logistical nightmare that took two hours to replace. His trainers were worried about the ongoing impact of the Össur legs on his knees. And, because the spike work was totally manual, there was a lot of inconsistency on the fit of the tread (and thereby, the traction Pistorius could expect, especially during wet races).
Luckily, Pistorius is sponsored by Nike, and one of the perks of a Nike sponsorship is access to the first wave of technologically superior equipment. Tiger Woods can use prototype Nike drivers–clubs that hit farther and more controlled than others–because the top athletes in their fields get the really good stuff. For Pistorius, that meant Nike designer Tobie Hatfield chased the athlete down around the globe to create a newer, better Cheetah spike called the Nike Spike Pad.
“We were certainly able to take the learnings of spikes on shoes for 22 years, but obviously the difference is that we’re affixing it to a more immovable object, the carbon fiber blade,” Hatfield tells Co.Design. “It doesn’t articulate like a human foot does, so it was really really important for me to understand where he hit, his initial contact on the blade. Because it’s so stiff and rigid, we had to be very exact.”
So in Össur’s Iceland lab, Hatfield, along with Pistorius’s prosthetist, made Pistorius sprint again and again using Spike Pad prototypes on a pressure-sensitive treadmill–while also filming his foot strike at 500 fps. With Pistorius obviously unable to feel his feet to comment on the fit, they could only use Pistorius’s form as feedback, meaning these measurements were especially critical.
“We did that over three hours. He was pretty tired by the end,” laughs Hatfield. “I think the treadmill was fixed close to 20 mph. He’s a sprinter, not a marathon runner.”
In February, Hatfield visited Pistorius again–this time at his home in South Africa–carrying all sorts of Phylon (Nike’s branded EVA) to lessen the loads on Pistorius’s knees. Hatfield wanted the most shock absorption possible, but didn’t want Pistorius to lose launch power to a spongy pile of foam. So the resulting Spike Pad itself was fully realized then. It’s formed of a midsole–two machine-molded pieces of foam with two different densities (softer is in the back where the Pistorius lands during his stride and harder density is in the front where Pistorius begins his stride)–along with a carbon fiber Spike Plate that attaches to the bottom. But to affix it quickly for testing, Hatfield went super low tech.
“We decided to use just contact cement. We thought, anyway, that was going to be very temporary,” Hatfield explains. “I was wondering how many runs he was going to get in before starting to peel off. We found out that, it actually not only stayed on a few practices, he kept using it for months.”
As a further bonus, contact cement had another advantage over more industrial affixatives. With just a bit of heat–a mere hairdryer–the Spike Pad can be peeled from the Cheetah foot. This cut down spike replacement times from two hours to roughly fifteen minutes per leg. And Nike’s consistent production process brought much-needed predictability to Pistorius’s feet.
“Before they were shaving foams, doing all kinds of different things to get to the right thicknesses and hardnesses,” Hatfield explains. “It was arduous, took a long time and was never truly the same.”
Now, every time Pistorius launches from the starting line, it’s with an inherent confidence that his foot will always land in the same way. But the best part of the story is one easily lost in all of the tech.
“I think the cool thing about this is, it’s different than what Nike is even used to, where we make something special for our elite athletes, then we let them use it for a while before spreading it around,” Hatfield explains. “Oscar didn’t want any of that. He wanted to make sure his fellow competitors had this available to them. So we’re starting with some Nike athletes that we know–one of Oscar’s arch rivals–Jerome Singleton.”
Singleton was the 2011 100m gold medalist, consistently placing as one of the top double amputee sprinters in the world. And in a few weeks, he’ll be competing against Pistorius in the Paralympic Games–on decidedly equal footing.
Nike+ Sportwatch GPS Limited Edition
Just in time for your own backyard Olympics comes the Nike+ Sportwatch GPS Limited Edition ($170). Arriving in a special white and gold colorway, it offers all the features of its TomTom-powered brethren, including tracking of your time, distance, pace, heart rate, calories burned, and NikeFuel, and the ability to upload your accomplishments to Nikeplus.com. If you want one, you’d best hurry — like the Olympics, the 1,900 are sure to disappear soon.
Nike & Facebook Team Up to Fulfill Your Wildest Childhood Footwear Fantasies
A new app on Facebook called Nike Shoe Boxxx allows fans of the brand to fulfill all their wildest footwear fantasies, by creating a virtual platform to collect and trade 40 year’s worth of the label’s iconic sneakers.
Each user’s collection can be displayed in a virtual showcase on their Facebook page, and friends from all across the world can trade sneakers with one another if they happen to spy a pair they prefer.[DesignTaxi]
TomTom’s Nike+Sportwatch gets revamped, adds NikeFuel, subtracts price (video)
Nike and TomTom have updated the GPS-toting Sportwatch to include NikeFuel and maintain parity with its FuelBand active bracelet. NikeFuel is a universal standard that converts your exertions into a normalized score — great for when you want to want to compare your exertions against friends with different hobbies. It’s also heralding a revamped Nike Plus website where we hope it’ll integrate with the recently announced Xbox edition. The Anthracite Blue Glow (or “Black and Blue”) edition lacks a Nike+ shoe sensor so costs €150 ($190), while the other three colors will, pushing the price up to €170 ($215).
Nike’s Dimpled Tracksuits Could Help Athletes Shatter World Records At This Summer’s Olympics
Usain Bolt is Jamaica’s not-so-secret weapon for shattering track and field records. But at this summer’s Olympic games, Nike’s cooked up its own secret weapon—a track suit dimpled like a golfball—that will help athletes from countries like the United States, Germany, and Russia chase him down.
The Pro TurboSpeed, as Nike calls it, leaves no doubt as to what the suit is designed to do. Taking inspiration from what is probably the world’s laziest sport, golf, the suit is covered in hundreds of tiny dimples designed to reduce its aerodynamic drag. And after thousands of hours of testing in a wind tunnel, Nike claims it can cut 100-meter dash times by as much as 0.023 seconds compared to the company’s previous generation track suits. Which of course could easily be the difference between a world record, a medal, or not placing at all.
The suits are also designed to be as comfortable as possible to not hinder an athlete’s performance. They’re created with fabrics that are lighter than ever, and have all of the elastics and edge finishes placed on the outside so there’s nothing rubbing against their skin that could distract them.
Of course critics will point out that such events should only come down to the capabilities of the individual runners, not the highly engineered garments they’re wearing. But until the naked 100-meter dash is recognized as an official sport (I’ve almost got enough signatures) the athletes are going to have to wear something. So why not make it as minimal a hindrance as it can be? [Nike via FastCo Design]
It Takes Carbon Fiber and Kevlar to Make the Best Basketball Shoes in the World [Fitmodo]
When you look at basketball shoes, what do you see? A big swoosh. Three stripes. Michael Jordan. A billboard molded to your feet. But do you see the technology? Though maybe not as blatant as an Intel sticker on your laptop, every shoe showcases its own advanced technology. Don’t worry, you can’t miss it on these, the best basketball shoes on the planet. Because they roll with carbon fiber and Kevlar.
The Mission
Nike’s new Elite Series—the Lebron 9, Kobe VII and Hyperdunk—are the high-performance, no compromise models of shoes already on the market. Think of them as a BMW M3 to a 3 Series or an AMG Mercedes to a regular Benz. Or even the new iPad to the iPad 2, if the new iPad were built with carbon fiber and Kevlar.
When I sat down with Nike to talk about the process of designing the Elite series, what Nike Basketball Design Director Leo Chang and Senior Designer Jason Petrie stressed to me was that “the shackles were off.” That they weren’t pressured to hit a certain price point to move units, but rather to make the best basketball shoe they could. They were told to make a better best. And they had to do it in time for this year’s playoffs.
The Shoes
In person, the Elite Series kicks are impressive but also understated. Black or white and sprinkled with gold, the shoes stay true original intent of the regular model—with a few notable improvements. It’s not that hard to make a good shoe better. Slap on a nice colorway and I’m already interested. Make it shine with a bit of gold and I’m hooked. But it’s the technology behind these shoes that make them interesting. The changes aren’t just aesthetic. Chang and his team stripped the original shoe down, re-imagined it entirely, and then started from scratch.
The first step: better materials. While carbon fiber has become something of a cliche, it’s still an unique material with the two most important properties for athletic shoes: it’s light, and it’s strong. Replacing plastic or glass fiber shanks (the part of the shoe under the arch of your foot) with carbon fiber and throwing carbon fiber on the heel counter (the part that wraps your heel) makes the shoe much lighter and sturdier. Outfitting a shoe with that much carbon fiber is a significant structural improvement.
As for the Kevlar, Nike used incorporated that into its existing Flywire technology. That’s the very thin upper of a shoe that looks like a tight mesh, and supports the foot in key spots. Flywire is typically made with nylon and Vectran fibers, which is sturdy enough for everyday use but not nearly as strong as Kevlar. As Chang and Petrie pointed out, nylon has 30 percent stretch to it while Kevlar has only 1 percent. You can notice the difference immediately; Kevlar-infused Flywire isn’t as flimsy as the original, but it’s still plenty flexible. Nike likes to say that it’s stronger than steel. If Flywire is a suspension bridge, using Kevlar with Flywire is like a modern Calatrava, while its nylon counterpart is a creaky wooden river passage guarded by trolls.
The finishing touches? Nike’s Pro Combat—those cushiony pads football players wear—material on the tongue, a special sock liner for better internal traction, and Kevlar shoelaces. Yes. Kevlar shoelaces.
The Bottom Line
All that carbon fiber and Kevlar adds up to a lot of money. The Kobe and Hyperdunk cost $200 a pair, while the LeBron will set you back $250. But Nike’s ultimate goal with the Elite series isn’t to sell a bunch of shoes. It’s to create a shoe that’s more akin to a concept car. Except it’s a concept car you can drive. Er, wear. [Nike Elite Series]
Nike Is Killing Midnight Releases and Creating a New Twitter RSVP System to Sell Shoes
The hype machine behind Nike shoe releases is only rivaled by Apple product releases, which is usually a good thing! But recently, riots on shoe release days have caused The Swoosh to re-think its launch strategy. So much so that Nike has killed off midnight releases at its stores and will be using Twitter to sell its shoes.
It’s a crazy bold move that’ll definitely change how popular, high-demand shoes are sold for Nike (for shoeheads, at least). For one, there won’t be any week long line ups at Nike Stores. Also, Nike is putting the strain of its demand onto its Twitter accounts now and using these releases to make Nike Stores accounts must follows (again, for shoeheads).
Here’s how the new Twitter RSVP system works:
On the RSVP date, our store will send a tweet at a random time to begin our Twitter RSVP process, including a product specific hashtag (#tag).
Once registration is open, you must Direct Message (“DM”) the store within 60 minutes. The DM must include:• The product-specific #tag tweeted by the store
• The last 4 digits of your State/Passport/Military/School ID number
• Your shoe size (limit one).Confirmations from the store will be sent via DM to those who have successfully secured their requested size. Shoes will be awarded on a “first respond, first serve” basis.
Once confirmed (or more likely, if confirmed), you’ll have to pick up the shoe from the Nike Store on launch day. If you don’t, the unclaimed shoe will go back into the Twitter RSVP system. This policy only effects Nike Stores (Foot Lockers, for example, can still do what it wants) but it’s sort of amazing/bizarre to see a company try an unproven method of selling its product while losing the free publicity that line ups provide.
Oh, and I guess the next time you see a Nike shoe trend on Twitter, you’ll know why. Check out the full details on how the Twitter RSVP system works at Nike. [Nike]
Image Credit: Daniel Reese
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