Helen Aubrey, Kenyan long distance runner Two-time Olympic silver medalist Mary-Louise Perez of Australia will make history at the 2024 Paris Olympics with her shoes.
Obiri will be wearing a new pair of sneakers from sportswear company On, but they’re far from traditional sneakers.
The On Cloudboom Strike LS is a spray-on shoe.
“LS” stands for LightSpray, the brand name for a technology used in shoemaking. The technology works by placing the shape of a foot on a robot arm. The entire upper part of the shoe is sprayed. From a single continuous thread – in just three minutes, According to Fast Company.
The robot arm carries the outsole to the sprayer while the arm rotates the shoe and releases the sprayer. Thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) – a material with properties of plastic and rubber – the currents swirl in a spiral. They descend as a single continuous thread and adhere to the outsole and itself without any glue.
The robotic arm then passes the shoe to another robot that sprays it with color. It takes just three minutes for the shoe to dry and be ready to wear immediately.
This technology is revolutionary because the upper of a shoe is the most difficult part to produce. While the soft outsole is made in a mold, the upper handles all the intricacies of traditional garment production such as stitching, glue, fabrics and tension wires.
“Modern footwear is not very modern,” Ilmarin Heitz, senior director of footwear at On, told the newspaper. “It only uses two-dimensional patterns… and we are trying to connect them to a very complex three-dimensional shape.”
He added that the material used in LightSpray technology is so body-friendly that athletes often choose to wear it without socks.
Now, the shoes will make their world debut at the Paris Olympics — although Obiri was initially hesitant.
“The first time I saw the shoes, I said, ‘No,’” Obiri told The New York Times“I can’t run with these.”
“In the locker room, even my teammates were saying, ‘It’s a joke,’ and they were saying, ‘You can’t use these shoes in the marathon,'” she added.
I decided to try wearing them while training and eventually running the Boston Marathon in April – which won.
“You won’t get them back,” joked Niels Altrog, director of innovation, technology and research at Aon.
“When you trust the shoes, you have that mindset, like, ‘I’m going to run fast,’” O’Brien shared.
On claims that the technology not only reduces production time – it also reduces 75% of the carbon footprint of overhead production.
“One vision was to imagine you go to a race, and you have one of these robots with you, and on race day, if it’s wet or dry, the robot sprays the perfect shoe for you at that moment,” Heitz explained. “And at the end of the race you take the shoe off, recycle it and go on to the next race.”
Oddly enough, the idea for this type of production came four years ago on Halloween from a senior member of On’s innovation team, Johannes Volchert.
Voltshirt had seen a video of someone pressing a thin strand of hot glue into the fluff of a spider web and wondered if it was possible to make a shoe the same way.
Hitz was in favor of that.
“My mission was, ‘If you go crazy, or insane, I will make you pay.’”
The Cloudboom Strike LS was the first appearance of LightSpray technology. It first launched for a limited time in April, but will be available again this fall for $330 — just in time for the New York City Marathon on Sunday, November 3.
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