Technical Secrets Of Olympic Footwear And Fashion Show

The opening of the Beijing Olympic Games will soon be a breakthrough, not only for athletes who will compete in the field, but also for the Brand Company that provide uniforms and costumes for them.

As an Olympic sponsor said, "at this summer Olympic Games, athletes standing on the podium are wearing our company's clothing. What else is the 60 second advertisement that attracts more attention?"

Polo Ralph Lauren will provide the opening ceremonies, closing ceremonies and costumes for the 1500 athletes of the US Olympic delegation.

Norman Bellingham, chief operating officer of the Olympic Committee of the United States, appreciates the red, white, blue, triple colored V shirt, tie and shirt embroidered with Chinese characters "Beijing" and "Polo".

Crocs, who swept the summer streets, was not reconciled to being used as a pair of casual shoes when people stroll around the beach or hang out in the streets.

New Zealand team will wear the brand's "sueded Alice" series and "beach" series to enter the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

The New Zealand Olympic Committee official Dave Kerrii joked: "the shoes of New Zealand's team will be very fashionable and distinctive, because there are hollow holes on them."

Speedo, a swimsuit that has made the body smaller, has been working with Wakubo Rei, the world's first professional swimsuit brand Speedo for three years, and has been invited to participate in the design of a swimsuit for the US swimming team.

This style not only integrated into the Star Spangled Banner of the United States, but also invited Japanese artist Inoue Yuichi to create a silver hand-painted pattern.

The swimsuit is more special. It uses the technology of LZR RACER. In April, the LZR swimsuit first appeared in the world swimming championships in Manchester, which shocked the international swimming arena.

In just over a month after that, 41 swimming world records were refreshed, and 37 of those who broke the record wore LZR.

Although the cooperation between Speedo and Wakubo Rei is striking, but it can defeat many sports brands and seize the top position of the professional swimsuit market, its reliance on the design concept is absolutely not related to fashion.

The brilliant record of the brand can be traced back to 1972. At the Munich Olympic Games, Mark Spitz, the American athlete, was wearing the nylon spandex swimming shorts designed by the company to create a proud record of 7 gold medals.

But the company based in Nottingham, England, has a longer history of success in the Olympic swimming pool, the first world record ever created in 1932.

After that, new records are constantly being created and refreshed.

For example, in the three consecutive Olympic Games from 1968 to 1976, about 70% of the winners wore the brand, including 27 of the 29 gold medals at the Mexico City Olympic Games.

For this year's Olympic Games, Speedo challenged swimsuit rules in design.

The International Swimming Association forbids the use of buoyancy bathing suits, that is, swimsuits do not make swimmers "float" or make them lighter, and can not have bubbles or fins or winged designs.

From this Speedo developed LZR swimsuit.

By using the black jacket developed by NZSA (NASA), the body has a greater compression force (7 kg / M), which is 70 times the nylon spandex fabric.

In addition, this swimsuit not only reduces the size of athletes, but also makes them more slippery in water: through the underwater tests conducted in New Zealand and Australia, and using the fluid mechanics computer software designed by ANSYS (), we find the parts that cause the greatest resistance to athletes, and then add the smooth polyYaan ester material to achieve the purpose of compressing and adjusting the body parts (such as the buttocks, chest, thighs, etc.) that produce resistance.

Speedo claims that the new swimsuit can bring 2% speed advantage.

So there are rumors that many top athletes have abandoned their original sponsors to Speedo at the edge of the pool.

Japanese swimmers said they had reached an agreement with the sponsors, and Japanese swimmers would be able to swim in Speedo's swimsuit in Beijing.

Italy swimming coach Alberto Castagnetti claims that using this bathing suit is equivalent to "technology stimulant".

Nike, as the official sponsor of the US team, is under pressure to allow some of the top American swimmers to compete in Speedo swimsuits.

Mark Shubert, the coach of the US swimming team, said before the Olympic trials that all the athletes who wanted to participate in the Olympic Games were best dressed in LZR. Otherwise, they might only be able to watch the NBC relay on TV.

Fu Kai, the technical director of the French swimming team, also said that the French Swimming Championships were banned from wearing the record breaking LZR swimsuit.

German swimmer Thomas Rupraz even appealed to the National Swimming Association to abandon the locally made Adidas swimsuit and choose Speedo. He said: "it is either money or gold medals.

Otherwise, we will get nothing in the game. "

For Speedo, Wakubo Rei is just a beautiful ornament, and LZR is the magic weapon to win.

Speedo has already indicated that it plans to push LZR swimsuit into the civilian market in October, and imagine the amazing effect that LZR may have in the Olympics. No wonder some sporting goods industry experts have predicted that it will generate considerable profits.

Nike Flywire, running shoes are so light that Speedo is clearly not the only winner in pursuit of the universal law of sport technology.

Although Nike can be defeated in the competition of swimming market, it does not prevent it from achieving remarkable results in other aspects.

This year, Nike has invested more extensively in Olympic equipment than any other time in its history. The company will launch 68 special shoes in all 28 projects and many of them. For the US track and field teams and basketball teams, the new special high temperature suit will be specially designed and equipped for more than 120 countries and sports organizations.

Among all the technological innovations, the most commercial potential is the "Flywire" series that will be put into use at this Olympic Games.

According to the rule of motion, human beings can create products that are infinitely light or infinitely strong. Once Michael Johnson's pair of gold spiked shoes weighing only 112 grams were regarded as a miracle of the manufacturing technology of sports shoes.

But Flywire has achieved both the lightness and the firmness of the two.

The design of Flywire is inspired by the steel cables on the cable stayed bridge, but the designers of Nike change the steel cables to the same high strength but very fine polyethylene fiber.

The length of these filaments is about 3 inches, and 10 to 20 strands are woven into a sector. They are used for the key parts of shoes, such as the front feet, heels, etc., and are fixed at the end.

It is a layer of cotton and linen fabric between the foot and the silk, which does not have any effect on the structure and support of the shoe. It is only used to block foreign matter such as dust, sediment and so on.

It can be imagined that a pair of shoes made of fine silk and thin cloth must be very light. It is no wonder that NBA star Kobe Bryant described his Flywire HyperDunk basketball shoes as saying: "when I throw my shoes into the air, I am not sure whether it will fall."

Flywire's chief designer Jay Mechtel's genius idea is that shoes are no longer seen as made, but as printed.

When the two threads were connected, Mechtel thought of the embroidery machine. He realized that the embroidery machine was using color lines instead of ink to print lines and shapes.

If you can build a three-dimensional cable frame like a cable stayed bridge, and form it into a shoe shape, he can create a very light sports shoes, which takes time just as simple as embroidering a name to a shirt.

No longer requires painstaking and time-consuming production of design models.

No longer need to pick materials that are strong and light.

Now, if we want to improve a pair of shoes, we only need to add a layer of silk screen on the design, and press the print key to produce a track and field running spikes less than 100 grams, and not lose the durability, integrity and support function of the running shoes.

Such shoes, I believe, will not only change the way shoes are made, but also change the Olympic record, and it will become a dream for every sport loving person.

Of course, not only Speedo and Nike have found new discoveries in the Olympic competition, but many other brands are also excited to try to rewrite the universal law of sports technology.

In this August, let's wait and see how they can create new Olympic records in another spectacular competition, so as to recover their investment and make profits.