The technology we know as Nike Air almost didn’t happen. Marion Franklin ‘Frank’ Rudy, an aerospace engineer, had a wild idea in the late 1960s: to soften the impact of athletic shoes by embedding tiny airbags within the soles of the footwear. Rudy presented his concept to 23 shoe companies, and one by one, they rejected it. It wasn’t until 1977 that he pitched it to Nike co-founder Phil Knight. Knight took Rudy’s prototype for a test run around the company’s Beaverton, Oregon campus and, satisfied with the results and the shoe’s performance, he decided to push Nike into the future with the innovation we all know as Nike Air.
Nearly 50 years later, 40 years after the Air Max 1 – the first sneaker to visibly show Air – debuted in 1987, and a few months before the Paris 2024 Olympics, Nike unveiled Air’s latest innovations on April 12 in France at Palais Brongniart, the former home of the Paris Stock Exchange. Nike introduced prototypes for the Nike Victory 2 and Nike Maxfly 2 for track athletes, a new basketball sneaker called the Nike G.T. Hustle 3, its most advanced football boot, the 2024 Nike Air Zoom Mercurial, and the Nike Jam for breakdancers. The new Air debut culminated in a fashion show on April 13 starring several Nike athletes including American track and field sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson, American gymnast Jordan Chiles, Kenyan long-distance runner Eliud Kipchoge, French footballer Grace Geyoro, and American tennis superstar Serena WIlliams.
