Man. I walk all the time around in barefoot sandals and have always viewed Nike’s offerings to non-professional athletes as really gimmicky (even when my college team was buying me free Nikes). Most of my decision to switch to barefoot sandals is they’re cheaper and there’s a strong argument to be made that wearing them at least sometimes is better for your health. But now I’m starting to think there’s an ethical argument to be made for them. Barefoot running sandals last me about a year. A pair of Nike Pegasus would last me about a month. And you know what else? The sandals require less material and less harsh materials to make. Further, I know the sandals I’m getting the workers are being paid (more) fairly for their labor because they’re made in California and Oregon.
Man… Fuck Nike. Forever and for always. They’re such an exploitative company that has built so much of their image on convincing us they make the highest performance shoes when what they really actually do well is identify talented athletes to promote their stuff. Like at this point… There’s a reason every professional basketball player is playing in Kobe IVs Vs and VIs. Basketball shoes haven’t actually gotten better since that model. But is Nike still making that model? No. They’re making a reproduction of it that a lot of athletes don’t like so Nike is making the old style sneaker for them in small batches. But they want to tell us the consumer that all the new tech makes us better at basketball. Really its just shitty tech (like Lunarlon back in the day) that let’s Nike cut their manufacturing costs while pretending they make a super advanced shoe and you should pay them more for it. Its all greed.
But its not enough for them to fuck us the consumer through bullshit marketing. Nike is ultimately a neocolonial entity making their products in southeast Asia using wage slavery conditions. And like many multinational neocolonial corporations the thing their board of directors and C-suite officers is most afraid of is us realizing that they, Nike, are taking advantage of us, the world at large. Us chumps buying Nikes have more in common with those southeast Asians building them than with the rich folks selling them. They’re scared of us developing a sense of solidarity with those workers. They’re scared we’ll start going out in the streets and demanding a society that works.
Oh. And I’m not done with how fucking much I hate Nike. There’s still at least two paragraphs to go. Do you know who else Nike chews up and spits out like they don’t even matter? Athletes. Have you ever wondered why so many athletes work at Home Depot in those Home Depot commercials. Its not because Home Depot is generously letting these athletes train on their home depot dime, it’s because for most sports the money just isn’t there. I have a friend who went to the Olympics on a bobsled crew. Do you wanna know what he did at home depot? All the usual home depot things. It was his primary source of income. He had to do that job and live with his coach to afford the food he needed to perform at an Olympic level. He was technically a Nike athlete. His deal with Nike was he got discount shoes. DISCOUNTED. He got a fucking promo code, basically. Here he was, at the Olympics, wearing their spikes and their body suit with their logo emblazoned on it, and he got a fucking promo code.
And guess what!? The IOC, USOC, and USATF are ALL in Nike’s pockets. My buddy coulda supplemented his home depot income by wearing something to promote another product like maybe the meal kits he was using or the nutritional supplements he was taking or the hydration packets he preferred. But to do this at the Olympics, based on Olympic rules suggested by Nike and Adidas, he would need to get those brands LITERALLY tattooed on his body. Imagine considering getting branded for life that you drank Liquid IV in your 20s at the Olympics just so you could afford to go. The consequences for not abiding this rule is disqualification. They enforce this rule more harshly than cheating, in case you’re curious how much competitions integrity there is at the Olympics.
God. Okay. I was wrong. I had at least three paragraphs in me back when I said it was two. Remember when the USOC and USATF booted Sha’carri Richards from the individual race for taking a performance demanding drug but was perfectly willing to use her incredible talents in the team event? Well guess what company she 1) runs for and 2) doesn’t receive mental healthcare from because she’s classified as a part time employee/contractor. That’s fucking right! It’s Nike! And did they step in for her like they did for Colin Kaepernick? No. You know why? Because they never gave a shit about Colin Kaepernick in the first place. They just wanted to be seen as supporting him so they could continue to associate their brand with him. Richards meanwhile having only received a short term suspension and being on a less expensive contract anyway, was basically thrown under the bus. Just like she could still contribute to USATF supremecy in the relay, she could wear the swoosh in that same relay. But what’s more, for Nike, why would they give a shit if Sha’carri Richards doesn’t run the 100. Guess what. Whoever else is in that 100 is probably ALSO wearing Nikes. Not to mention how they treated legend of the sport, Alyson Felix. Nike has made it plainly evident they don’t view their athletes, particularly brown women, as people so much as they view them as billboards.
Okay. That’s it for now. I still have more reasons to hate Nike but I can’t think them up right now and this is all just me saying all the shit I’ve thought about Nike since 2009, and trust me, my hatred for them has been expanding and developing through all those years
So, I didn’t read that, but I got barefoot sandals at the top. You do realise that heels are a self-perpetuating fallacy, right? As in, they write themselves into your ligaments…
I understand what each of these words mean, but have no idea what you’re saying.
Your body adapts to the footwear you grow up in. If you grow up wearing shoes with lifted heels, your tendons will shorten to compensate. The average running shoe these days has a heel lift of about 10mm (6mm lower than when I was in college). Of you wear shoes like this all the time you’ll experience Achilles tendon pain if you try to transition into a show with a heel to toe drop of 6mm or less too quickly.
You’ll see barefoot running advocates saying you can run injury free with 0mm of drop, or at the very least without more injuries than a shod runner, but people frequently misinterpret that to mean “you should start going barefoot immediately” which isn’t what any barefoot coach would recommend. In fact for most athletes what makes the most sense is a mix of shod and unshod running. Super ironically, to bring it back to Nike, they DO have a couple of really important innovations in running technology. One of those was that Oregon’s long distance coach, and Nike’s founder, created a custom pair of shoes for one of his athletes who was experiencing Achilles tendon pain on her long runs. The innovation was to take a mostly flat running shoe (as was the style at the time) and introduce a 4mm foam wedge to relieve that tendon pain so she could still get in her long miles.
Note! Even then, at the beginning of Nike, the advice to the high level athlete was “mostly run this way, but sometimes put on these other shoes.” That’s still what most serious coaches and athletes are doing. You do most of your running with a pair of shoes with some lift or barefoot, and then you do a minority of your mileage in a shoe that’s more or less minimal than your daily trainer. The real fallacy of running footwear is the notion that any one single thing is your solution to everything.
Yes. I grew up living mostly barefoot. I really didn’t suffer any of the Achilles stress of shortened tendons a lot of people have to either work through or that blocks them from going barefoot
Wow, not a fan of Nike generally, but i def learned a few new things from that burst of typespiration.
Theres a book called “Shoe Dog”, (i haven’t read it), about the beginning of Nike, maybe you should write a response book called “Dog Shoes - A Nike Exploitation story”.
This is a seething sort of rage I’ve developed watching Nike crunch up beloved friends of mine. And Nike’s not special. They’re every greedy for profit company killing the planet for nothing. And what will the rich have left when they’ve killed us all? A planet of ashes and billions of dollars they can’t exchange for goods and services because everyone who made their money is dead
Don’t worry, they’ll survive, so will the planet. Its less certain for the rest of humanity and many other plant and animal species though. /j (kind of).
Anyway, we’re doing your server and thus username no justice, commenting in such gloomy terms. Solarpunk is such a breath of fresh air into these issues. And where endemic power structures fail you already see its themes of strengthened community bonds quickly reestablish themselves and shine through.
Solarpunk also hits the nail on the head with iur societies key issue. Its the structural design of our societies elevating private ownership claims as superior to societal ownership claims, its imbalanced.
But Covid, financial crises, wars and now Climate change quickly prove the, so called, independently strong are actually only as strong as the societal strength holding them tall.
Sorry, went off on a tangent.