Tuning into the World Cup this week most will have seen the commentary and observations on the omnipresence of neon pink boots across the players on-pitch regardless of brand. What may be interesting is to go beyond the narrative of the fact that the biggest brands in the world have both landed on the same colour and lean into why this may be. Having headed up Sports Marketing Strategy for Nike in the UK and Ireland I am uniquely placed to understand the complex planning from a product and player perspective and can verify that although it is not ideal for any of the big brands, it is also more understandable when examining from a scientific lens.

The Colour Wheel

Sir Isaac Newton developed the colour wheel in 1666, and in doing so laid the foundation for everything that followed in colour theory. It is worth starting here because the answer to the pink boot question is, in many ways, a 350-year-old one. The World Cup reaches an audience of five billion people, and while television remains the dominant mode of consumption, according to FIFA figures, 2.2 billion viewers now engage through social media, which means the screen through which people experience the tournament is reduced to a handheld device. That reduction in screen real estate compounds the stakes and risk/reward conundrum wrestled by brands. Visibility at the moment of contact, when a player strikes the ball into the net, is the single most valuable impression a sports brand can own, and on a phone screen that impression needs to cut through instantly.

Colours sitting opposite each other on the wheel deliver maximum visual contrast. Pink and green are a high-contrast pairing, which means pink against natural or artificial turf produces the kind of friction that drives visibility. As Newton discovered, dialling up saturation ensures even more visibility. Placing fully saturated colours against each other creates visual discomfort by design, and it is precisely that discomfort that works in the modern attention economy, where friction drives engagement rather than detracting from it. When Nike, Adidas or Puma have future sales on the line, looking at the colour wheel and the options open for maximum effect (those in direct opposition to green), leaves only pink, purple or orange. With only three options it is not hugely coincidental to arrive at the same boot colour.

The 18-Month Reality

Where the circumstances become more nuanced is in understanding why Nike, Adidas, Puma and New Balance all landed on pink simultaneously without much visibility of each other’s direction. Boot collections for a tournament of this scale operate on an 18-month concept-to-distribution cycle. By the time competitive intelligence might reasonably surface, the product is already in production. The machine behind a tournament boot is not a bespoke atelier making 300 pairs for 300 players. Although there is a value-add for player personalisation, it is not for colourway amendments. It is a mass market engine that funds entire enterprises, and that engine does not pivot. Once the hero colourway is committed, the corporate tankards cannot turn course.

The Player Investment Side

Arriving at a World Cup with 49% share of on-pitch presence, as Nike did at Qatar in 2022 against Adidas at 34.8% and Puma at 12.1%, is no small feat for any of the top brands. It is, as I strategised for Nike, the outcome of a 12-year investment cycle, heavily hedged, that begins at youth academy level. The forecasting that underpins those contracts is weighted heavily toward national team trajectory, and the remuneration structures in player boot deals reflect that. Brands win and lose based on a three-tournament forecast investment that spans twelve years ongoing. This is where the strategic brand money is spent, acquiring the players to have the boots on foot to score the goals. Winning is the sales driver, the colour an important but relatively shorter-term play compared to the player investment.

The Standout Exceptions

One upside of the uniformity of the field is that it makes any exceptions more powerful. It allows for hero athletes to shine. This tournament Messi’s El Último Tango adidas F50 in white and light blue, Pulisic’s KidSuper collaboration with Puma in white and blue, and Ronaldo’s gold Nike boots, yet unseen but created to celebrate his final World Cup, are already garnering discussion. Shall he back himself completely and arrive on-pitch in gold before winning the trophy? Or save them for a potential winning moment. Nike athletes have precedent in the former with Michael Johnson who wore gold Nike spikes at Atlanta 1996 before winning gold, creating one of the most enduring images in sports marketing history. Time to re-up the investment return.

Where This Goes

Where do we go from here? Like any creative outlet I advocate for friction in a world that has become slightly predictable. As we have seen from the few instances of standout, a return to all-black would be a bold choice that stands out, but I don’t think it would pass the commercial test of brand identity driving youth culture and in turn creating demand through aspiration. With disruption and friction in mind I am drawn to the disruptive patterns Nike have previously produced on the Phantom and Tiempo below. Where do you think we will land in four years’ time?

Pharma, performance, and segmentation lens

Serena Williams has spent her career redefining her sport, success and the landscape for female athletes. She has transcended tennis and with it brought new audiences to the game. With her comeback to competitive play at Queen’s Club yesterday she did it again, competing and winning on an international stage four years after retirement and at 44 years old. Not the headline-maker but worth examining is the terms on which she credited medical intervention with helping her get back to peak fitness. In returning to elite sport whilst publicly having used a GLP-1 drug, she is becoming the most powerful proof-of-concept the pharma and wellness industries have ever had, whether they planned it that way or not.

For years, GLP-1 and elite performance existed in separate conversations. First Serena broke convention by publicly speaking about her GLP-1 use in retirement. This week she has moved the dial further along again. The brands that have been watching from the sidelines now have the permission they were waiting for to enter the chat.

The segmentation opportunity for pharma follows a playbook that the sports industry knows well. Innovation enters at the sharp end, at elite performance level, and filters down. The training methods, the nutrition protocols, the recovery technologies that professional athletes use today become the consumer wellness products of the next decade. GLP-1 providers now have the opportunity to follow the same path, and Serena is at the sharp end of it. Producing 120-mile-per-hour serves is no token wildcard. She is here to play.

One in ten adults in the UK (the Health Foundation), and one in eight in the US (Forbes) have used a GLP-1 drug, with an additional 10% (UCL) considering it in the near future. Women represent 80% (BMJ Public Health) of current consumers. For the tens of millions already using GLP-1 drugs weekly, and those on the fence, the questions Serena is answering on court matter well beyond the result.

The basic science

Basic, because I am not a scientist, but curious enough to examine what will move the needle for consumers and brands here.

GLP-1 stands for glucagon-like peptide-1. Prescribed GLP-1 agonists (Serena is using tirzepatide) work by suppressing appetite, slowing the rate at which food moves through the stomach, and regulating blood glucose. Originating as a diabetes support drug, the results in weight loss brought it to a much wider audience. For initial users and early adopters the weight loss was the entire story. Slowly a wellness narrative has been woven into its use case, heralded by public advocates like Oprah and then Serena in her retirement life phase.

Serena’s return to sport brings a new dimension into focus. The caloric deficit that makes GLP-1 effective for weight management is in direct tension with what a competitive body needs: fuel to perform, protein to build and repair muscle, and enough of both to sustain training load and recovery simultaneously. The fact that Serena has managed all of this while preparing to compete at the highest level is one of the most interesting case studies at the intersection of sport and wellness right now.

There are four areas where the wellness and pharma industries should be leaning in. Each represents a genuine challenge for the GLP-1 athlete and an open commercial opportunity in a wellness industry already valued at $2 trillion, before pharma adoption gains are even added to the equation.

Fuelling and nutrition: a fine balance

Every athlete who has followed a structured nutrition plan knows that eating for performance has very little to do with appetite. An athlete fuels because activity calls for energy, in the quantities that measurement and personalised protocol specifies. GLP-1 may act to remove the mechanism that makes that compliance feel natural. It tells the body it is full before it has eaten enough, while simultaneously slowing digestion so that food sits in the stomach longer than normal.

The pre-competition meal has been one of the most studied variables in sports nutrition for thirty years. The two-to-three hour eating window before competition, the carbohydrate loading, the precise timing of fast and slow-releasing sugars, all of it assumes a digestive rate that GLP-1 disrupts. A pre-match meal timed according to standard protocol may still be sitting undigested when Serena walks onto court, creating heaviness throughout play or, at worst, the kind of gastrointestinal distress that ends matches early. Either way, adaptation and planning are required.

The commercial gap this opens is real and currently unoccupied. Maurten built its reputation on delivering high carbohydrate loads with minimal gut disturbance, the closest commercially available product to what the GLP-1 athlete may need on competition day. Innovation in the sports science category takes years, but positioning an existing product explicitly around fuelling correctly when your digestive system has been pharmacologically slowed is the opportunity here. This is a first-mover advantage at the moment.

Protocol: the timing question nobody has published

GLP-1 medications are currently prescribed at fixed doses on fixed schedules. Moving away from these guidelines has not been recommended, but the anecdotal conversation around micro-dosing (taking smaller amounts to manage side effects and reduce cost while retaining benefits) is already gaining traction in wellness communities, following a pattern familiar from other peptide categories.

The more immediately interesting question for elite sport is periodisation. Tirzepatide has a half-life of approximately five days. In a two-week tournament, an athlete might rationally skip a dose until competition is complete and resume in the recovery window, placing the drug’s peak appetite suppression effect during the period when caloric flexibility matters least. No provider has published a protocol for this. The team around Serena will have a plausible first-use case if this is a strategy she is adopting, creating ownership and individualised journeys catering to varying wellness needs. Serena and her team have the opportunity to own this conversation and, by default, the commercial opportunity that follows it.

Muscle wastage: the real flex is to be strong

In a world where it is now possible for those with disposable income and medical intervention to be thin, the real flex is to be strong. There is no shortcut to strength and perhaps this will be the great leveller in a world of widespread GLP-1 adoption. Not solely a cultural observation, it is a shift in function that GLP-1 creates for the current fitness industry landscape.

The concern around muscle loss on GLP-1 is the most discussed of the four caution areas. What is broadly agreed is that weight loss on these medications includes some loss of lean muscle alongside fat. For a general patient, that trade is acceptable. For an elite athlete, any meaningful muscle loss is a performance liability. Serena’s return is a live test of whether it can be not just managed but avoided in order to perform at the highest level. It is becoming clear that it is possible, but requires deliberate programming. Adequate protein intake, structured resistance training, and targeted supplementation can meaningfully protect lean mass even in a caloric deficit. What does not exist yet is a product category explicitly built around muscle preservation for the GLP-1 user: not a generic protein supplement, not a weight loss product, but something positioned precisely at the intersection of pharmaceutical weight management and performance maintenance. Gym programmes play a significant role here and already many wellness facilities are adding weightlifting and resistance training to complement their Pilates offering. A leading athlete such as Serena being the face of these would increase awareness and adoption for large global operators like Equinox, Peloton or Les Mills.

The consumer need is arriving at scale, and the brand that names it correctly enters a market it can own rather than one it has to edge into.

Bone density and weight-loading: the fitness industry’s quiet opportunity

Less discussed than muscle wastage but no less significant, particularly for the female consumer. Weight-bearing exercise is one of the primary mechanisms for maintaining bone density. An athlete or active person who loses substantial body mass on GLP-1 is placing less mechanical stress on their skeleton than before, at the precise moment their body is adapting to a new weight.

For the fitness industry this opens a specific conversation around measurement and monitoring. A DEXA scan is a useful tool in the journey, and the surge in GLP-1 use has fuelled a parallel boom in DEXA scan providers. At around $250 per scan, the information provided gives markers and gates for physical programming. Wellness providers that can offer a frictionless service linking both will win here.

The gym offering that positions itself around GLP-1 optimisation, the trainer who builds a methodology around it, the wearable that tracks loading adequacy alongside the usual metrics: all are entering a conversation that their clients are already having, and where authoritative guidance is an opportunity to grow a category led by data, measurement and results. An integrated and frictionless data point at the intersection of medical equipment, wearable technology and in-person training is what will win consumers over. Whoop, Oura and their peers provide support and knowledge but have yet to overtly enter the GLP-1 product integration conversation. This is a miss. Perhaps as one of the early investors in Whoop, Serena’s performance will encourage them to lean into it with her at the centre.

Energy and regeneration: recovery as the orphan category

The same caloric compression that creates the fuelling and muscle challenges also affects the body’s ability to repair tissue, manage inflammation, and adapt to training load. Recovery, in other words, is downstream of everything else and on GLP-1, everything else may already be under pressure.

The sleep technology, cold therapy, and compression recovery brands that have built significant consumer businesses over recent years have largely positioned around performance optimisation for athletes eating normally. The GLP-1 user is a different physiological context. The recovery window is more critical precisely because the inputs are constrained. This is not a complicated argument to make, it is just one that nobody in the recovery category has made explicitly yet. Recovery is a buzzword in the wellness industry right now but it is due to become an essential in body support when GLP-1 use compromises traditional energy absorption for cell renewal.

The co-pilot opportunity

The volume of unanswered questions a GLP-1 user faces around timing, nutrition, training adaptation, supplementation and side effect management points toward something beyond a product. It points toward a navigation platform. In an age of AI-driven personalisation, the natural build is a co-pilot that takes an individual’s health data, training load, and medication schedule and returns a continuously updated protocol rather than a static set of instructions.

Serena and Alexis Ohanian’s active stake in Ro, one of the US platforms through which GLP-1 prescriptions are distributed, positions that business at exactly this intersection. The intellectual property, the user data, and the clinical infrastructure are already there. The co-pilot is the logical next product, and it is one that compounds in value the longer a user stays on the medication and the more their data accumulates.

The segmentation cascade

The segmentation cascade is already in motion. The training methods and nutrition protocols that professional athletes develop out of necessity become the consumer products and wellness trends of the next cycle, refined, made accessible, and sold to the serious amateur who wants to perform at their own version of the highest level. Serena is the sharp point. Behind her is the weekend athlete, the recreational marathon runner, the person who has lost thirty pounds on GLP-1 and is watching their strength and bone density quietly disappear with it.

With a consumer group already in the tens of millions and growing, what they need, and what the market has not yet assembled in one place, looks something like this.

A fuelling product built for a slower stomach: high caloric density, low volume, designed around the gastric motility of a GLP-1 user. Maurten is the closest thing that exists. Nobody has powerfully claimed the positioning.

A muscle preservation stack that names the problem directly: not a generic protein supplement, not a weight loss product, but a formulation designed specifically for the person trying to maintain strength while their appetite has been pharmacologically compressed. The ingredients exist. The category does not.

A resistance and bone-loading methodology built for the GLP-1 body: programming that accounts for reduced mechanical load as body mass decreases, with measurement tools to track what is being preserved and what is being lost. The DEXA scan is the starting point and monitoring tool. The gym or trainer who adopts a methodology around what comes next owns a growing client base and an opportunity for Serena to be the face of fitness adaptation.

A recovery protocol that treats reduced caloric availability as the primary variable rather than an afterthought, because on GLP-1, recovery is where the constraints bite hardest and where the existing product landscape is most silent. The role of holistic support in sustaining behaviour change long term is key, whether delivered virtually or in person. An extension of the Calm model, perhaps, or a bespoke partnership built around the specific emotional and physical journey of the GLP-1 user.

And above all of these, a co-pilot that connects them. A platform that takes a user’s medication schedule, training load, and biometric data and returns a continuously updated protocol: not a static set of instructions but a living document that adapts as the user does. The technology exists. The clinical infrastructure, for Ro at least, already exists. What does not exist yet is the product that brings it together in a single, intelligent, personalised interface.

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Serena did not open this market by just talking about it. She opened it by showing up, competing and winning. The brands, founders, and investors paying attention now have a window that will not stay open once the mainstream catches up. The question is not whether this market exists. It is who is brave enough to own it.

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Serena’s name was listed as re-entering the WADA testing pool from 2 October 2025. This was made public and raised early hope last December. Serena herself denied the comeback, but those in the know watched keenly as the summer season kicked off and she passed the required six-month testing minimum before competing professionally.

WADA has placed GLP-1 drugs on the watchlist. Not a forever greenlight, but under annual review. At the moment WADA have deemed the benefits not significant enough in their function to give an athlete an advantage. WADA’s main concern for future flagging is abuse or overuse by endurance sport athletes like cycling in maintaining low weight. Permitted for now, but watch this space.

Serena is one of the most recognisable athletes on the planet, scoring 70% recall amongst Americans. Through her retirement she held onto longstanding partners like Nike, Audemars Piguet and Wilson whilst gathering more health and lifestyle-centric additions including Heineken 0.0, glucose sensor Lingo and supplement brand Ritual. Her public signing with Ro and use of GLP-1 drug Zepbound through the platform has garnered worldwide attention and debate, not least because her husband Alexis Ohanian is an investor in the company. Her return to play is a groundbreaking and seminal moment for pharma. Below I examine why, and what the impact could be.

Reminder: my take is not, and never will be, a conversation about a person’s body, weight or appearance.

Sport: Cultural Influence Runs Deep

Brands and communities have long proved that sport is a culture machine. Last week alone we saw the global reach of the Arsenal win extend well beyond North London and into New York’s political landscape. The win for pharma in this case is not to prove the drug is used athletically. It is to reframe who the drug is for.

GLP-1 drugs currently carry a stigma that runs deeper than suspicion of something new. At its core it asks us to reconsider our relationship with our own bodies, and that does not sit neatly for everyone. An athlete using GLP-1 and winning does more heavy lifting for acceptance than any clinical trial or anecdotal referral, and it does it faster.

Fuelling a New Kind of Athlete

Serena will be the first athlete openly fuelling her body to compete professionally whilst using a GLP-1. Elite sport runs on calories. GLP-1 drugs are appetite suppressants by design. High muscle mass is a requirement for the power generated by athletes like Serena. Gaining and maintaining that muscle whilst on a GLP-1 is a challenge that the science has not yet fully resolved.

The body needs fuel to regenerate, recover, repair and be ready for the next match. GLP-1 drugs slow digestion by delaying gastric emptying, which creates a direct conflict with the caloric demands of professional competition. How Serena manages these challenges in real time is itself an opportunity for the health and nutrition market, which is growing at 9% year on year and is estimated to reach $2 trillion by 2033. Products and messaging built around these specific challenges will grow well beyond the sports arena, with this week’s performance serving as the test ground for a new generation of incremental fuelling solutions.

Where the Partners Stand

Whilst the world navigates the GLP-1 zeitgeist and its move into popular culture, brands are quietly asking where they do, or should, sit in this conversation. By design or circumstance, Serena’s commercial partners have been swept along for the ride. What began as the challenge of remaining relevant alongside a retired legend has, with this comeback, brought them front and centre of a genuinely new question: what does it mean to sponsor an athlete competing with the aid, or potential hindrance, of the world’s most talked-about drug?

Whatever happens at Queen’s Club this week, the commercial and cultural architecture around this comeback will be studied. I’m excited to see her human power unleashed. The deep dives follow.

Here, I lay out why the sports bra should follow the same commercial trajectory that boots and running spikes followed : from functional afterthought to high-value personal sponsorship category, carved out of team deals on the basis of individual performance need. The athletes are, in the truest sense, the rights holders. The research exists to support the functional argument. The cultural moments exist to demonstrate the commercial one. What is missing is the deal structures to formalise it, and the agents and scientists with the knowledge and conviction to push for them.

The sports bra was first used in tennis as late as 1975. Thoughts and prayers to those who came before. Hard to believe but Billie Jean King completed the Battle of the Sexes before its invention. Since then the sports bra has evolved from functional necessity to one of the most contested pieces of real estate in women’s sport. What follows is a look at the function, the ownership landscape, the sport-by-sport picture, and where the opportunity still lives for the brands and athletes willing to move to own and redefine a category glossed over due to lack of comprehension.

Performance Equipment Hiding in Plain Sight

Before looking at the commercial landscape, the functional role of the sports bra matters, because it is the foundation of everything that follows.

Breast tissue contains no muscle. It is entirely dependent on external support to limit movement during physical activity. Studies have shown that without a supportive bra, breast tissue can move up to 15cm in any direction during high-impact activity. This movement strains the Cooper’s ligaments, the connective tissue anchoring the breast to the chest wall, and once stretched, they do not recover. The result is permanent biomechanical change: pain, restricted movement, altered gait and tissue damage that accumulates over a career.

For an athlete the sports bra is a load-bearing piece of performance equipment, as integral to their ability to perform as a boot is to feel for the ball. This distinction is central to the commercial argument.

Sports bras fall into two categories, and the difference matters as much commercially as it does functionally. The most common are compression bras, which press breast tissue flat against the chest wall: pull-on, sized XS to XL, easy to manufacture at scale, and the default product for every major apparel brand. Encapsulation bras support each breast individually in a moulded cup, sized by band and cup, requiring significantly more technical development. For larger-cupped athletes at high impact, compression alone is insufficient. Compression also affects lymph function. The forces involved exceed what it can manage, and the result is pain, restricted movement and altered gait. The performance gap between the two grows with breast size and intensity.

The brands with genuine encapsulation expertise, Shock Absorber and Maaree are not the brands holding the major kit deals. The current workaround is that anyone wishing to use their own specialist encapsulation product must cover it with a brand-aligned compression bra on top. A male solution to a female challenge, and a significant misallocation of commercial value.

Individual and Team Rights

In individual sports, athletes negotiate their own commercial deals and can carve out rights by category: all apparel to one brand, or broken down by footwear, outerwear and underwear separately if the functional need or commercial case justifies it.

In team sports, players are bound by the team’s kit deal for anything visible. The exception is boots. Boots are treated as personal performance items, too integral to an individual’s movement and touch to be mandated by a team. That single exemption has built a multi-million-pound personal sponsorship category entirely separate from team commercial rights. A player’s boots can earn them more than their team deal. The precedent exists. The argument for the sports bra is, if anything, stronger.

Event rights holders add a further layer. Wimbledon, FIFA, the IOC: each can impose their own rules that override both team and personal deals. At their tournament, a player’s obligation is to the event first.

The sports bra currently sits in the ambiguous space between these layers. Not consistently classified, not consistently regulated, and therefore not consistently monetised. The new-ness of the category is where the opportunity lives. Brands, athletes and agents who understand the landscape can navigate to spaces not yet claimed by federations or rights holders. As always, the money follows the media moment, and the more iconic the moment, the faster the rules follow.

Sport by Sport: Where the Doors Are Open

Tennis is the most commercially evolved sport when it comes to the sports bra, Serena Williams testing and laying the foundations early. From the outset of her Nike deal, Serena maintained a separate bra partnership with Berlei, whether because Nike’s product didn’t meet her functional needs, or because she identified a category her contract didn’t explicitly cover and moved on it early. She went public with the Berlei partnership in 2015, after over a decade of quietly competing in it. Knowing Serena’s ability to transcend her sport and the increasing commercial focus on women’s categories, it is no small coincidence that Nike launched its FE/NOM Flyknit bra in 2017, its first serious encapsulation innovation. Whether that development was enough to bring Serena’s bra deal back under the Nike umbrella at contract renewal, or whether Berlei held on, the sequence tells its own story.

Wimbledon illustrates what happens when a rights holder controls the space and imposes overarching rules for individuals and brands. Its dress code is meticulous: all visible undergarments must be completely white, with a single colour trim no wider than 1cm and logos no larger than three square inches. Venus Williams was asked to change mid-match in 2017 for wearing a bright pink sports bra. In 2018 Alizé Cornet received a code violation for briefly showing her bra while turning her shirt around, a ruling the governing body subsequently overturned, clarifying it was permitted. The recent allowance of dark coloured undershorts for females did not extend to bras.

Tennis remains the most open grey zone of the three major sports, but the Wimbledon trajectory and Nike’s encapsulation push suggest the window is at the deal stage now, not the moment stage. Athletes and agents who don’t build the category carve-out into the contract before they sign will find it has already been claimed.

Football: Tight, with Moments of Exception

Players are bound by the team kit deal for all visible apparel and, in women’s football, Nike holds a significant number of both club and national team deals. The iconic Chloe Kelly celebration that spiked a sales bonanza for Nike at Euro 2022 was not a grey area play. It was a land-grab, well-laid in advance. Nike held the England kit deal and Kelly’s personal deal simultaneously. When the moment came the spread was covered and the asset delivered.

The more instructive case is where that alignment breaks down. Millie Bright’s individual deal with Maaree, a specialist encapsulation brand, diverging from her team’s kit supplier highlights the tension that exists when personal and team interests don’t match. In the US National Team there is explicit precedent: if the bra is visible, it must be Nike. Anecdotally, players caught between functional need and contractual obligation have been bound to wear the right product underneath and cover it with the compliant compression bra on top.

The grey zone in football is largely closed at team and national level, but the Millie Bright situation shows the category carve-out argument is alive at the individual deal level, particularly where functional need and specialist encapsulation expertise can be clearly demonstrated. The opportunity is in the negotiation room, not on the pitch.

Athletics and the Olympics: Closing Fast

Athletics operates on an Olympic cycle, with national committees doing multi-year kit deals that cover the Games. Outside those, Diamond League and World Athletics events, athletes have genuine individual freedom and the bra category is open subject to their individual kit and footwear deals. Like football, the athlete has total control over on-foot equipment regardless of team deals, due to its role in individual performance preferences.

At Olympic level, Adidas’s move at Paris 2024 to include the Techfit Control Bra, developed with the University of Portsmouth’s Research Group in Breast Biomechanics, was launched with the athlete performance story at its centre. The innovation is real. But being familiar with how kit deals work, it reads equally as a pre-emptive strike: get the bra into the national kit supply, and you close the door on athletes wearing their own on the podium before anyone thinks to ask. Smart, proactive, defensive. A signal the category is maturing.

Adidas at Paris was the clearest signal yet that the window at Olympic level is closing. The brands and athletes who haven’t formalised the category in their current cycle deal are likely already too late, and those entering the next cycle should expect to find the door considerably narrower.

The Winter Olympics: Fragmentation as Opportunity

Of all the commercial spaces explored here, the Winter Olympics is the most immediately open, and the reasons are structural rather than accidental.

Summer Olympic sports are popular enough that a single major apparel brand can credibly kit out a nation, largely on the back of mass participation in core sports with some technical tweaks at the elite end. Winter sports do not have this critical mass. Speed skating suits, skeleton helmets, ski boots, biathlon kit: the technical requirements of each discipline are so specific, global participation relatively lower, and performance margins so fine, that national committees routinely prioritise getting the right specialist kit over enforcing any single brand’s presence. The result is a patchwork of suppliers, overlapping obligations, and a genuine lack of clarity at the fringes.

Team USA at the Winter Olympics navigates Ralph Lauren for occasion-wear, Nike for podium apparel, and Under Armour for race speed suits simultaneously, with bobsled as just one example of where these obligations collide. That overlap creates exactly the kind of ambiguity in which a sports bra, worn beneath a speed suit and visible only in a celebration moment, falls through the cracks. Jutta Leerdam’s Nike moment was not an oversight. It was the predictable result of a fragmented rights landscape where no single holder had thought to claim the category, and a brand and athlete ready to move when the moment came.

In 2021, Skims understood this dynamic before most. Becoming the official underwear and loungewear provider for Team USA, they secured exposure and cultural relevance in a category the bigger brands had simply left on the table. The subsequent Nike x Skims collaboration makes that deal even more interesting in retrospect: two brands with US Olympic presence, a commercial partnership between them, and yet the underwear category treated as a separate entity by both. A contractual quirk, or a deliberate separation of value? Either way, the category was there for the taking, and Skims took it.

Winter Olympics fragmentation is not going away. The sports are niche, the kit specialised, the supplier base too fragmented to consolidate. The grey zone will persist for at least the next cycle, but where media coverage and eyes on product exist, rules follow.

Three Playbooks

The case studies here resolve into three distinct strategic approaches. Each has a window.

The Land-Grab (Nike / Chloe Kelly) Control all angles before the moment happens. Hold the team deal, the personal deal, and the product simultaneously. When the celebration comes, own it completely. Requires scale and foresight, and is increasingly the default playbook for major brands in women’s football. For anyone who isn’t the incumbent, the grey zone in team sport is effectively closed unless the functional case for encapsulation can be made clearly enough to justify a carve-out.

The Category Carve-Out (Serena / Berlei) Identify what isn’t explicitly covered in an existing deal and move first. Works best in individual sports where athletes have genuine negotiating leverage and functional need can justify the separation. The new-ness of the category is the asset here. The opportunity exists deal by deal, and it requires athletes and agents who know to carve out the category before the contract is signed.

The Proactive Kit Play (Adidas / Portsmouth) Use performance innovation to close the door on competitors before the conversation starts. Build the product into the national kit supply. Frame it as athlete welfare. The most defensive of the three, and a clear signal that the category is maturing from grey zone to structured asset.

The Window

There is a fourth option, and one that respects both the function and the commercial potential of the sports bra in equal measure. It is to follow the trajectory that boots and racing spikes followed: from functional afterthought to contested, high-value personal sponsorship category, formally carved out on the basis of individual performance need. The athletes are the true rights holders. The research supports the functional argument. The cultural moments have already made the commercial one. What remains is for the agents, brands and governing bodies to formalise what has been informally true for years.

The athletes who have benefited most, Serena, Jutta, Kelly, did so because someone in their camp understood that asking a female athlete to cover a piece of load-bearing performance equipment with a brand-compliant compression bra was not just a functional compromise. It was a commercial one.

The brands and athletes who move now will do so in open space. The ones who wait will buy into a regulated market at full price.

Building a compelling and effective case to justify a carveout will require critical female athlete mass and brand good-will, perhaps this is the rally call to start the conversation? Call me…

Previously I covered Jutta Leerdam’s Winter Olympics moment in depth. Start there for the full context on unlocking the value at global events.

When Jutta Leerdam crossed the line to win 500m Long Track Olympic Gold, she created an iconic winning moment, captured a global audience, and inspired some outlandish valuation headlines. In unzipping her Dutch national team speedsuit she revealed a Nike sports bra, bringing the brand into a winning Olympic moment where it holds no official partnership rights. Within hours, media outlets were racing to quantify the value of those seconds. They got the number wrong, admitidly not the first time for Daily Mail but the discussion of why is an important one. The measurement used was one of influence, not performance.

The win itself had finally silenced her doubters: those who questioned her decision to leave the national team set-up, train independently, and build a significant public presence alongside her athletic career. She delivered on the world stage, and the image of that moment, captured in iconic photography, travelled fast. So did the commentary trying to put a price on it.

Having spent years negotiating athlete and performance sport endorsement portfolios, I recognise what the headlines missed. The moment was real. Baked into sports culture. The logo was unmistakable. But the value it represented had not materialised in those seconds at the finish line. It had been accumulating for years and will continue to.

Much of the coverage treated the moment as though it were influencer marketing: a brand insertion embedded into an organic cultural event. But elite athlete agreements are not typically structured around social posts, deliverables, or real-time conversion metrics. Recent athlete contracts do detail digital obligations that deliver value to shareholders, but the main focus is the performance cycle, one that stretches across years, not scheduled posts or deliverable reels.

An influencer deal is typically transactional and episodic. Compensation is tied to content outputs and measurable engagement. An athlete deal, by contrast, is aligned to a performance cycle, an Olympiad or World Cup cycle. Four-year terms are common, with a base payment supplemented by performance bonuses triggered by specific competitive outcomes: world titles, records, Olympic medals. The athlete’s primary obligation is not to publish content. It is to train, compete, and, ideally, win.

Nike and Leerdam’s partnership announcement on December 16, just ahead of the Rule 40 activation deadline, was not incidental. That date ensured the deal could be activated during the Olympic window, a regulatory nuance that rarely enters public discussion but materially shapes campaign eligibility. Timing like that reflects planning, not opportunism. It signals that the partnership was conceived with the Games in mind, long before the finish line came into view.

Importantly, Leerdam signed as an athlete. Not as an influencer or entertainment personality. That distinction affects structure, compensation, and expectations. Athlete contracts distribute risk differently. Brands commit significant capital in advance of guaranteed outcomes, absorbing the uncertainty inherent in high-performance sport. In return, they gain alignment with the credibility that only measurable competition can produce.

Having negotiated endorsement portfolios with annual values in excess of $250 million, I have seen how these decisions are evaluated internally. Performance brands such as Nike, Adidas, and On construct athlete rosters like investment portfolios. Some categories are strategically central. Others are niche but culturally resonant. Speed skating may not be a dominant global growth category, but Leerdam brings attributes that extend beyond her discipline: elite performance credibility, a substantial and engaged digital following, and cultural relevance that aligns with Nike’s broader emphasis on female athletes. Her inclusion in the Skims x Nike campaign in October 2025, pre-signing, was likely a test-run on consumer sentiment.

In that context, the Olympic moment is not an isolated spike in visibility. It is the maturation of a long-term thesis. Winning matters.

Jutta’s celebration reminded me of another iconic sporting image. When Chloe Kelly scored the decisive goal in the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 Final, she pulled off her match shirt in jubilation, running to celebrate, the Nike swoosh centre-story. What the image captured, and what the ensuing spike in sports bra sales confirmed, was not a marketing moment. It was something structurally different. Her celebration was an organic mirroring of Brandi Chastain, who had done the same thing at the 1999 Women’s World Cup Final, dropping to her knees in a black Nike sports bra after scoring the decisive penalty against China. Chastain’s photograph became one of the most reproduced images in the history of sport. Twenty-three years later, Kelly recreated the moment. Six years after that, Leerdam added another frame to the same lineage. Nike at the centre of women’s sports technical equipment in all three iconic moments.

Three athletes. Three defining moments. One consistent brand asset. A category delivering in real time, across generations of women’s sport. Nike invests in performance sport to ‘Win When the World is Watching’. They were watching.

Nike understood this faster than anyone. Within hours of Leerdam crossing the line, their Instagram account, with close to 300 million followers, had posted the moment. No campaign briefing, no content calendar, no scheduled activation. Just the speed of a brand that had already done the work of being in the right place, on the right athlete, before the result was known. As Nike was not an official Olympic sponsor the only possibility to celebrate was to purchase images from the official media pack, no access to shoot was permitted to them. The stars aligned and their long-game investment in the athlete and the moment paid off with the in-game celebration containing essential equipment permitted to personal choice of the athlete, her sports bra.

The sports bra is not merchandise. It is performance equipment, worn in competition, underneath everything else, in the same ‘personal choice’ exception to kit sponsor as a boot or a racquet. When a woman wins and celebrates, the sports bra is the layer that remains. It occupies the most credible real estate in sport: the body of a champion, at the moment of victory. And it has no direct male equivalent. Brands have understood equipment placement in men’s sport for decades. The women’s game has quietly created an asset they are only beginning to fully price. Some regulation has come around the visibility of the mark through the shirt, but not under.

Leerdam’s moment operates in the same register. She has not posted product links or activated direct-response campaigns tied to the image. Nor would her compensation structure necessarily require it. In most athlete agreements, payment flows from the pre-agreed terms of the contract and the achievement of performance milestones. Unless there is a signature product line with royalty participation, incremental exposure does not automatically generate incremental compensation.

This is why media equivalency calculations, while they catch the public’s attention through headlines, often miss the larger point. They reduce a four-year investment cycle into a five-second advertising slot. They assume the value lies in logo visibility, rather than in the credibility conferred by victory. Assigning a simple number to that visual devalues the thousands of hours it took to get there.

Winning alters the context in which a brand, and its product, is perceived. It embeds the logo within a narrative of excellence. That effect cannot be reliably engineered on a content calendar. It can only be prepared for by backing athletes capable of delivering under extraordinary pressure.

Leerdam’s journey to that finish line included independence, scrutiny, and risk. Nike’s journey alongside her required commitment without certainty. When she won, both trajectories converged in a single image.

The bra was visible. The logo was unmistakable. But the underlying value did not materialise in that instant. It had been accumulating across training blocks, contract negotiations, regulatory windows, and years of shared bet-taking.

The real economics of sport, for athletes and performance brands alike, are measured in Olympiads.

But there is a larger argument underneath this moment that a single article cannot contain. The sports bra as a competitive sponsorship asset, its equivalence to equipment, its unique position in women’s sport, and why it remains structurally undervalued in most brand portfolios, deserves its own examination.

If you work in sport, sponsorship, or brand strategy, or you simply want a clearer view of how value actually moves in elite sport, wellness and human movement subscribe.

The Olympic Games are not just a sporting event. They are a protected territory.

Every Olympic cycle, billions are spent by broadcasters, sponsors and nations to occupy the world’s attention during a single, concentrated window. The result is one of the most tightly controlled commercial environments in global sport. The International Olympic Committee enforces strict limitations on the use of Olympic marks, host terminology, image rights and even indirect association.

For brands without official rights, the perimeter is high and heavily guarded. And yet the world tunes in, not only to mainstream sport but to disciplines that rarely command global attention. Athletes perform at the most awesome human levels possible, and because of this it is critical for sports brands to navigate a way into, or around, the fortress that is the Games.

The Winter-Sports Challenge

Authenticity is something that this generation’s consumer can sniff out at a distance, particularly in a typically anti-establishment culture like outdoor sports. Being on the ground during the Games in Cortina without ‘skin in the game’ would elicit the consumer equivalent of side-eye. For performance brands, credibility is technical before it is cultural. Winter sport demands category-specific innovation that does not easily scale to mass-market production. You cannot short-cut fluency in alpine performance or ice-hockey heritage. The blank apparel market is not driven by skis or bobsled helmets.

So brands face the question: how do you enter the Winter Olympic conversation with respect for its ultra-technical heritage?

Nike - ACG

All Conditions Gear, (ACG), a Nike sub-brand, has its origins in the late 70s when Nike gifted two K2 climbers some sneakers. Smaller, more experimental and culturally agile than Nike’s core business, it provides the brand with an exploratory edge. It offers Nike a credible platform to reassert its outdoor positioning and play into the city-centric consumer who finds themselves now needing and wanting to touch grass.

In the context of Milan–Cortina, and being relevant to the Winter Games, that flexibility becomes strategic. I was inspired to write about this work after visiting The Games and experiencing the store and products first-hand.

Cortina Ice Hockey

By partnering with Cortina SG, the local ice hockey club in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Nike had the foresight to develop a real footprint in local sports culture. Extending this to its outdoor-focused brand revival, ACG was the perfect tie-in to weave local stories into the DNA when ACG was also showing up on the podium at the Games with Team USA.

The deal was announced in December 2025, ahead of the Rule 40 deadline under the Olympic Charter governing pre-existing commercial relationships. This allowed Nike and ACG to reference “Cortina” authentically and within regulation.

This pre-existing participation was rooted in community culture.

The distinction matters.

Product Engine

Control of competition-grade manufacturing is not glamorous, but it is a power move.

The technical apparel categories, rules and exceptions ecosystem at the Winter Olympics deserve a PhD-sized deep dive, but in short Nike has the rights to produce international federation jerseys for ice hockey at the Olympic Games. It’s a niche carve-out that doesn’t translate to home games for most nations. Having this also means Nike has the product engine to the most credible canvas in winter sport: the match jersey.

Leaning into this opportunity and opening the door for smaller projects, for example to leverage an ACG relaunch, is where the giant can use its manufacturing power for creative good.

From there, limited cultural projects become possible without being tied up in product timelines of 18–24 months.

Creative Assets - Cultural Cachet

With the match jersey as an authentic canvas, Nike and ACG could satisfy the consumer’s desire to participate in the moment.

The jersey itself is a masterclass in how to celebrate heritage and local culture in a fun and irreverent way whilst displaying a deep understanding of the sports, culture and local nuances.

The creative executed on-jersey draws on Italian sporting typography reminiscent of mid-century signage in Cortina’s village centre. References to the 1956 Winter Olympics nod quietly to heritage without appropriating protected assets. Topographic details show up in a way to reflect the surrounding Dolomites, grounding the garment in landscape rather than event.

It is playful but respectful.
Local but exportable.

Extension beyond The Games

The jersey was showcased for sale at the ACG pop-up in Cortina that also features displays of the USA podium kit and other ACG product for sale. Its execution created a meaningful ripple among the audience most critical to ACG’s re-establishing awareness of its DNA in outdoor sports and credibility.

The project makes me excited to discover what’s next when considering hyper-local storytelling across other global sporting events in an authentic and nuanced way. Looking to the World Cup, where Adidas is the official tournament partner, there are opportunities for creative execution locally. For example, Mexico City, Vancouver and New York subculture would be perfect subjects when it comes to the outdoors and sport in those territories.

The fortress model of protecting global sport rights is heavily protected, but the tightest constraints and regimes breed the most creative artists and expressions of innovation. So, when the world turns its attention to a city for a month, the brands that do the work to understand its living, breathing sports subculture will already belong.

Oh, and of course I bought it because I’m a sucker for a limited edition :)

This newsletter will discuss and highlight how global sport intersects with local culture, and how joyful and creative an outlet this can be.

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