Masters of the Games

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the winners?podium of the Beijing Olympics... Nike, Adidas, Speedo and suchlike. Even as athletes at the Games fight against fate over the golden, silver and bronze lure of medals, global sports brands will not be pawns in the hands of destiny. All these aforementioned companies will make it to the medals podium; all of them will win. And that a foregone conclusion.

Cut to the future. From tennis ace Roger Federer to NBA star Dwight Howard to swimming sensation Michael Phelps, anybody who is a somebody at the Beijing Olympics will compete in Nike, Adidas or Speedo sportswear. And everybody, irrespective of country or event, will stand on the medals podium sporting the gear of Adidas, an official partner of the Games. Between them, these brands and their cousins will have a presence in every single second of telecast time, every single photo clicked on camera, every single frame recorded on video, every single byte of memory stored in public mind space. Athletes nae enough to believe that sport biggest extravaganza is all about them, in actuality, don stand a chance; one never does against the inevitable.

Adidas has coughed up millions of dollars in cash and merchandise donations to be an official partner at the Games ?an arrangement whereby those who scale the podium will sport its hree stripes?insignia. In return, the company will outfit athletes (around 3,000 ?roughly 30% of the total number participating), volunteers and officials, apart from bankrolling interactive Internet games to mark its presence in Beijing. Nike, while having as its endorsers some of the most high-profile names in sport, has deals with 40 national sports organisations, including 22 of China 28 sports federations, and will provide sportswear bearing the signature of its trademark woosh?to these athletes.

In the world war on the sports field that is the Olympic Games, at stake is a quadrennial opportunity to be beamed into TV screens worldwide at prime time. Ergo, no sports brand worth its multi-million-dollar budget will settle for anything less than a bigger slice of the global sports industry.

Citius, Altius, Fortius. Much as the Olympic motto evokes in us images of athletic excellence in sport and such human obsessions as victory and defeat, athletes are cruelly incidental to any sports brand grand scheme of things. Nonetheless, athletes being the medium through which these business majors must post their message, there is a mutually-beneficial fallout for all concerned.

Sports companies, out to secure a competitive edge for themselves and, in turn, for athletes endorsing their products, will equip Olympians in Beijing with advantages that range from a running shoe lighter than a watch to a NASA-tested swimsuit that repels water.

Tech this for granted

In this, the biggest ever Olympic Games for technological innovation, tectonic improvement in sportswear and equipment will not only alter the physics of aerodynamics to enhance human performance, but also the dynamics of winning medals. The direct consequence is that the chasm between the haves and have-nots will be split even further apart: he who is aided by the hi-tech gear of Nike, Adidas and other high-end sports goods manufacturers stands more than an equal chance of winning; unfortunate as it sounds, those with equipment of lesser pedigree are unlikely to win anything more than a pat on the back.

Analyse this. Nike digitally programmed Zoom Victory Spike, based on Flywire technology revolutionary enough for the footwear to be described as space-age Roman sandals, will hit the ground running in Beijing. Who will rule the track is in the realms of speculation for now; the only certainty is that the lightest pair of running shoes ever crafted will have the medals podium as the ground beneath its sole.

With the cheese at the end of the rat race being irresistible ?the numero uno position among sports brands in what is an ever-growing industry ?Nike has close on its heels Adidas. One among many innovations this German powerhouse will unleash at Beijing is Lone Star: shoes with asymmetrical spikes that accelerate to the left ?the direction in which runners need to turn. Athletes who perforce stick to the straight and narrow of normal equipment might be able to match the competition stride for stride, but they are unlikely to be able to keep pace with Adidas technology.

In the case of Speedo, the compression exerted by its hi-tech LZR Racer swimsuit reshapes swimmers into hydrodynamically compact mermaids and mermen. With around 40 world records to the swimsuit credit since its launch in February, there is little doubt that Speedo address in Beijing will be the podium.

For Gill Athletics, the company tightrope walk between weight and strength has yielded the OTE Composite FX javelin ?a spear qualified by such adjectives as lightest, strongest and safest, and programmed to go as far as it takes to script history. Net result: for all the strength and skills of spear-hurling competitors in Beijing, the real contest is confined to Gill Athletics and its competitor in the javelin market, Sandvik AB.

Blood sweat and tears are no longer enough to win Olympic medals; technology, research and development are mandatory add-ons in today world. If Olympic athletes do not have to dwell on polyaromatic amides and phase diagrams while caught in the madding crowd of the Beijing gold rush, it is because the likes of Nike, Adidas and Speedo have reason to burn the midnight fluorescent lamp, studying polymer chemistry and materials science. ?

The games within the games

The ghosts of the ancient Greeks of Olympia might not approve but, at the Olympic Games, the cutting edge of technology that aids the performance of athletes is but an offshoot of the bluntness of commercial bottomlines.

While the economics of investing millions of dollars in R&D, manufacture, advertising and marketing of shoes meant to be distributed as giveaways to a micro-niche audience might not convince the theorist, the ends clearly justify the means. Running parallel to the exponential growth in Olympic-specific shoe technology is a neaker war?between Nike and Adidas over the 1.3 billion pairs of feet in China. For both companies, China holds the potential to be their second largest market after the US. As a direct consequence, being conspicuous at the Olympics is critical to both players in that recognition of their products will help subsequent sales of consumer versions (derivatives of high-tech athletic wear) at sports goods stores.

When the clock ticks away between August 8 and 24, Beijing standard time for the world will be payback time for those who see the Olympics as the ultimate marketplace in sport. In what is a race against time, Adidas intends to open around 5,000 stores, most operating on the franchise model, across China by the end of 2008; for Nike, the figure is a similarly XXL-sized 4,000 stores. For both companies, the decision to go supersize in China is motivated by the year-end sales target: $1 billion-plus apiece.

When it comes to the Olympics, global sports companies mean business. Literally.

It Nike versus Adidas. Let the games begin.

And let innocent athletes blissfully unaware of this truth concentrate on training for the Olympics.

siddharthamishra@epmltd.com

Beijing brandwagon

Nike Zoom Victory Spike: The lightest spikes on the track combine an ultra-thin exterior with analog stitching to transmit to the runner the ethereal feeling of spikes growing out of his feet. At 93 grams per pair, the Flywire technology-based innovation is significantly lighter than what was once considered the last stop for shoe engineering: Michael Johnson Nike Golden Shoe spikes, a heavyweight at 112 grams per pair.

Adidas Lone Star: Driven by the knowledge that races are more often than not won on the turns, and that runners never need to turn to the right because of the shape of the track, biomechanical engineers, industrial designers and electromechanical experts have crafted for Adidas ultra-light shoes with asymmetrical spikes that redirect inward the force on the outer part of the right foot; in plainspeak, the right foot accelerates to the left.

Speedo LZR Racer: Its NASA-tested sheath compresses the body with force that is 70 times more than nylon-elastane (the standard material used) is capable of; swimmers are consequently rendered smaller, sleeker and more hydrodynamic. Born of computational fluid dynamics software, the swimsuit effectively reshapes the human body to eliminate the turbulence and drag effected by the shape of the normal human body.

Gill Athletics OTE Composite FX javelin: Transcending such fundamental necessities of a javelin to be light and aerodynamic, this 800-gram aluminum shaft encased in a spirally woven carbon sheet prevents energy from being directed back to the thrower and, because of this path-breaking flexibility, reduces the spear vibration by 10% ?a margin expansive enough for it to be billed as the safest javelin around and, of course, a safe bet for a place on the podium.