Barely a week after the Ultimate Championship capped a long season on the track and in the field, Athlos slipped into London on Friday poised to deliver its own ultimate victory lap.
In its third year, the all-women event delivered on its unique formula of infusing the sport with entertainment and fashion, while bringing out a stacked lineup who extended their year by a few days.
And with the discipline of the evening, Keely Hodgkinson arrived, clad in a custom black speed suit, and tipped the balance of the women’s 800 meters over in her direction with a dominant win in 1:56.40.
She completed her look with a formal crowning on stage, fashionably ended the season on her terms and posed unabashedly as the details of the six-month process creating the suit trickled out just hours before Athlos raised its curtain.
Hodgkinson navigated a season that saw the meteoric rise of Audrey Werro and the arrival of Femke Broeders-Bol, trading blows with Werro along the way and guaranteeing that the quality of the event remains must-see well through the next Olympic cycle in just under two years.
And while Werro racked up world leads and a respectable title haul this year, Hodgkinson is still the Olympic champion and chose Friday’s Athlos showcase as the reveal of her latest fashion excursion.
“This is a project I’ve been working on with Nike for a long time and what a place to bring it out,” Hodgkinson said about the debut of her speed suit. “Speed meeting style, all women’s event. This is fun.”
Hours earlier, Nike teased the suit, the months-long process of its creation, materials and the question of tailoring a kit that was scientifically stylish and efficiently aerodynamic for an actual competition.
Hodgkinson proved that it was not only achievable and behind the scenes, Nike’s team that crafted the project set out to bring innovation to push another piece of her individuality.
“Keely has an immense amount of personal confidence when she wears black,” Hannah Amis, Nike’s director of Innovation Apparel Product Design said. “It’s sleek, it’s brave, and it allowed us to celebrate her vibrant personality through color-shifting, 3D-printed vortex generators instead.”
For Athlos, Hodgkinson donned an open back, full-length piece with minimal seams that is adorned with a pattern of boomerang-shaped 3D-printed vortex accents that ran along the arms, chest, torso and legs. The suit was built to be comfortable and latch onto maximum aerodynamic mobility that Hodgkinson generated during her pair of loops under the lights on the track.
“Our team studied every detail of how Keely moves through space, ensuring the suit works with her stride, her mechanics and her race demands, creating a distraction-free fit that allows her to focus solely on performance,” Amis said.
The team added a hood as an added touch of a smooth transition through the wind and Hodgkinson was given her own flavor or the Victory Elite, which gets reduced weight, better comfort an improved traction over its Victory 2 spike sibling. The spike rides on a lighter carbon outsole plate fitted with titanium pins and is wrapped in an upper made of lightweight yarn.
Within minutes after she debuted the speed suit and cruised to the win in London, Hodgkinson supplied Athlos with another layer of narrative that buzzed through the sport’s usual social media channels and inched into legacy media platforms that usually refrain from publishing the daily happenings of track and field.
But the outfit and Hodgkinson were ready for the headlines and posts, and by Saturday the think pieces ranged from praise, a look into the technical details while others glanced back at the precedent other notable athletes set with groundbreaking suits of the past.
Florence Griffith Joyner was explicitly fast and fashionable on the track in the 1980s and at the 1987 world championships in Rome, she unleashed another look from her self-styled arsenal and sported a one-piece suit with a hood at a time when unitard kits were still uncommon. The suit, along with her other head-turning ensembles, furthered her legend as a style icon while her trove of medals and records still conjure conversation in the modern version of the sport.
At the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Cathy Freeman’s gold in the women’s 400m shined along with her green and white full-length suit that was a work of Nike’s early efforts in constructing aerodynamic kits. The company said Freeman’s suit helped reduce drag and regulate muscle temperature.
Last year, Faith Kipyegon wore a Nike-engineered one piece kit, dubbed the Fly Suit, during her Breaking4 attempt at cracking the four minute barrier and being the first woman to accomplish the feat. Kipyegon’s suit was designed to keep her “slippery” and blast through the air efficiently with lightweight materials fitted to help conserve energy.
