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On 26 June, Kenyan athlete Faith Kipyegon broke the women’s world record for running one mile. At Paris’s Stade Charléty, the middle-distance Olympian ran a mile in 4:06:42, breaking the previous record (her own) of 4:07:64.
It wasn’t the number she was looking for: Kipyegon’s goal was to run a sub-four-minute mile. But it was still considered a win — for her, and for Nike. She broke the record decked out in Nike gear, on a blue and purple track with bright-red ‘Breaking4’ lettering, followed by the Nike Swoosh. Kipyegon said after the race that she expected only the Nike team and “my two fans” to be in the audience. Instead, approximately 4,500 people showed up to watch the attempt, cheering loudly as she sped four times around the colourful track, flanked by 12 pacers (all top-tier athletes in their own right).
At the press conference, Kipyegon was steadfast. “I’ve learnt many lessons from this race, and going forward I will go back to the drawing board and see where I can still improve to get it right,” she said. “I gave it [my] all — and next time I will give it all again.”
Nike — which has worked with Kipyegon for 16 years — hosted a series of Breaking4 events in celebration of the attempt. The brand also brought forward some new product innovations, which are not yet ready for public release. The FlyWeb Bra, for example, won’t launch for some time (the plan is by 2028), but Kipyegon wore a prototype on Thursday evening. The bra features a 3D-printed TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane) material that has a lighter weight and is more breathable than typical sports bras. Kipyegon’s “speed suit” and Victory Elite racing spikes also made use of new tech.
Last time Nike hosted a Breaking event, it was 2017’s Breaking2, when Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge (a mentor of Kipyegon’s) sought to break the two-hour marathon barrier. He didn’t achieve a sub-two-hour marathon then — missing the mark by just 26 seconds — but he did it three years later, with a 1:59:40 finish in October 2019. For Nike, the event was a success nonetheless, launching the now-infamous Vaporly shoe that, these days, is impossible to miss at any major marathon.
If the original Breaking event was about a singular product launch, this time around, it’s a more holistic endeavour: to illustrate Nike’s (re-)commitment to innovation and sport. In particular, women’s sports. “Nike is traditionally a more male-dominated company,” says chief innovation officer Tony Bignell, who was promoted into the role earlier this month after 28 years at Nike. “That doesn’t mean it’s where we’re going in the future.”
It’s an important play for the company, which is still in pursuit of a turnaround. Yesterday, Nike reported a 12 per cent drop in revenue for its fourth quarter. Though down, the performance beat analyst expectations, and CEO Elliott Hill said he expects that the worst is behind them.
A rethink
Thursday’s event was a major spectacle — a one-off showcase of an athlete at the top of her game. But it was also a signal of what’s to come at Nike, execs on the ground said. The goal now is to balance the innovation that makes endeavours like Breaking4 possible with simple, clear messaging about products that Nike customers — professional athletes or otherwise — want to wear.
To do so, as Hill told investors on the earnings call, Nike will work on breaking down internal silos. Bignell is adopting this approach for the brand’s innovation projects, which he says are ultra-siloed by nature of the work — there are mechanical engineers; ‘foam people’ (those who develop the foam in Nike sneakers); people who do airbags. He plans to unite them around one central locus: the athlete.
“I’ve worked in innovation before [Bignell was most recently VP of footwear innovation, following several other roles at the company] and generally people you hire are on the extremes of everything: the extreme designer, extreme engineer, extreme scientist,” he says. “But that doesn’t often lead to good teams. The artist has no respect for the scientist because they’re just different — left brain, right brain. But whenever you put an athlete in the middle, it works out perfectly.”
Bignell offers LeBron James as an example: when he dunks, Bignell says, designers see flames and smoke. Scientists see the kinetic chain that goes down his body. “But they’ve got this common bond — it’s hard to have an ego when you’ve got athletes in the middle,” he adds.
Breaking4 works to the same logic. At the end of the day, it was up to Kipyegon, Bignell says — no matter what the scientists, artists and engineers said or did up until that point. “Nike used to be good at that [placing the athlete at the core],” he says. “We go through phases. My goal is to bring athletes to the centre; to be our decision-makers.”
Nike Women
Bignell is carrying this logic forward, with ambitions to boost Nike’s offering for women. He notes that many of Nike’s specialisations (basketball; football) have traditionally been more male-dominated. The Breaking4 project made this gap clear. “Even the research coming into this for Faith [Kipyegon], there just wasn’t any,” he says. “We’ve done loads of basketball, men’s research, we’ve done a bunch of that. We’ve overindexed.”
He points to Amy Jones Vaterlaus, VP of Nike Sport’s research lab, as one of the people at the company who has pushed the needle on women’s innovation. (She, alongside Janett Nichol, VP of apparel innovation, was a lead on the development of Kipyegon’s Breaking4 gear.)
Thursday’s event — and the preparation and development that went into it — was a testament to this re-commitment to innovation for female athletes. Kipyegon’s sports bra exemplifies this best. Nichol calls the sports bra “the single most important piece of equipment for any female athlete”. It’s also changed very little since the ’70s, she adds.
The FlyWeb development made it clear to Nichol how much work there is still to do. Traditionally, sports bras are made of lycra, meaning sweat can get trapped. The 3D-printed TPU is breathable and wicks moisture. “When we were doing a lot of the testing, we realised how much women have been compromised for decades,” she says. “It was eye-opening. When I saw the imaging of an athlete in a traditional sports bra and then the athlete in this bra and you saw the sweat permeating through — that was literally the body’s ability to be able to do what it was supposed to do. The athlete is able to perform much easier because they feel cooler, as their body is able to cool.”
The bra was five years in the making before the team accelerated the project for Breaking4. This version was custom-made for Kipyegon, but the goal is to commercialise the bra. “Let’s just say Faith won’t be the only person who wears a Nike FlyWeb,” Nichol says. This will take time, though, given the accelerated development was custom to Kipyegon. To make this sellable requires more phases of R&D, due to the nascency of the technology. “We’re looking at things we can do to disrupt — that actually could bring about something that’s very new, not just in the way that it looks, but in the way that it feels and performs the benefit it delivers for the athlete.” The athlete being anyone from an Olympian to a regular Nike customer, whether they’re training for a marathon or going for a run around Hyde Park.
Under Bignell, Nike will up the ante in women’s innovation. The groundwork is there, he says. “We’ve done a lot of work with basketball — Catlin [Clark], Sabrina [Ionescu], A’ja Wilson — so that’s really exciting,” he says. “[It’s about] being there and celebrating it and being part of the journey. And also getting them to tell us when things aren’t right and truly listening.”
To date, Bignell says, Nike has been a better men’s company than it has women’s. The goal now is to keep men’s where it is, bringing women’s up to meet it.
Perhaps Kipyegon will wear yet another iteration of Nike’s product developments for her next attempt at the sub-four-minute mile. “I think the [Nike] team is really working for the future of the next generation of sports,” she said.
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