How Olympic Air Pistols Took Over The Timeline

PLUS: WTF happened to Nike?

Thanks for subscribing to SatPost and it’s great to be back writing.

I just spent a good chunk of July travelling through Europe (Munich, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Dubrovnik) with the family. I have a lot of notes from the trip — including a ridiculous amount of schnitzel consumed — and will be sharing them in weeks to come.

For this newsletter, let’s ease back into things with:

• How Olympic Air Pistols took over the timeline

• A theory on Nike’s recent decline

• Did On make the “craziest” shoe ever?

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How Olympic Air Pistols took over the timeline

The Paris 2024 Olympics kicked off with a very strange Opening Ceremony. It had an animated headless singing Marie Antoinette (weird). It mocked The Last Supper (unnecessary). It had no cameo from Daft Punk even though the legendary electronic duo is from France (weird and unnecessary).

However, it did close strong with soccer legend Zinedine Zidane handing the torch to Rafa Nadal, a Spaniard who is so good at the French Open (14x Champion) that Paris 2024 had to give him top-ish billing.

Then, Celine Dion crushed the final song from the Eiffel Tower. A performance which would have been unthinkable two years ago when she announced that she had Stiff Person Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that causes painful muscle stiffness and spasms. But Dion — a god damn Canadian national treasure — powered back and reminded people why she’s the GOAT.

We all know that the Olympics has issues with sports-washing, corruption and fiscal irresponsibility. I wrote on these topics here. A more recent controversy about women’s boxing popped off, which you can read about here.

Now, on to the most viral story of the first week of the Paris 2024 Olympics: two Air Pistol athletes (Kim Yeji from South Korea and Yusuf Dikec from Turkey) that blew up the X timeline.

Memes of the pair went so viral that the official Olympics account got in on the action:

The whole moment was kind of a perfect storm.

There is the entertainment world’s glamorization of guns including massively popular games (Call of Duty, Fortnite, PUBG, Apex Legends) and films (John Wick, The Bourne series, The Equalizer, Die Hard, James Bond, Taken, the guy wearing glasses in Sicario).

Combine that with the Olympics (the pinnacle of athletics with over 1 billion people in the world passively watching) and a very understandable sport objective (hitting a target).

And then drop two polar opposite characters in the right order for a hilarious internet joke to take off.

Let’s start with the 31-year old Kim Yeji.

She won the silver medal at the Women’s 10m Air Pistol event.

Prior to her win, I had spent a total of 7 seconds in my life thinking about 10m Air Pistol events.

Her internet stardom stems from a 27-second video posted by a Korean X account with less than 3k followers.

It is so baller. She’s rocking these cyborg sci-fi anime glasses, hat backwards and the calmest demeanour in the world. She looks like someone that belongs in a Bourne or Bond flick. Her aura was absolutely next level. Dripping swiggity swag.

The video was re-shared — and viewed over 100m times — in viral posts with captions like: “this girl is a movie character, like how is she real”, “the most main character energy I’ve ever seen in my life” and “no matter what you do in life, you’ll probably never look this cool doing it”.

Here’s the twist, though.

That video isn’t from the Olympics. It’s from a May shooting competition in Azerbaijan.

But it worked out because during every Olympics, the media rights owners do an aggressive crackdown on unofficial video content circulating on social media. The networks that bought the rights to broadcast the Olympics want people glued on the TV screens (for those juicy ads) or on the streaming apps (for those juicy subs).

I get it. But it’s annoying AF and way too strict. Half the Olympic video posts on X show a blank screen that read “this media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner”.

Fortunately, they couldn’t take down that baller Kim clip because it wasn’t Olympics-related content. It spread like wildfire and people started hunting down more information about her, including still photos from the actual Olympics event.

While Kim was rocking a futuristic get-up, she also had her daughter’s elephant doll in her pocket during the Olympics competition. Her teammate — who won gold at the event — was also kitted out (but, crucially, not with cyborg glasses).

I don’t know if this duo is actually “the hardest shit ever”, but there’s a non-zero chance it is.

Then people went buck over the sci-fi glasses.

What is this sorcery?

There are three main parts: a lens, a mechanical iris and dangling blinders.

The key to sharpshooting is aligning the target with the pistol’s front and rear sight (not just aiming at the target). A challenge is that the eye at rest wants to look into the distance and it takes effort to look into the foreground.

Here is how the special shooting glasses work:

• The lens helps the shooter's eye focus on the gunsight while aligning with a target…but the target gets blurry so…

• The mechanical iris allows the shooter to narrow the aperture of the iris, which lets the target and gunsights remain in focus (same principle as a camera lens)

• The blinders block the view from one eye without the shooter having to physically keep it closed, which would cause strain (think about when you want to focus on something with one eye).

This is some Blade Runner shit, which takes us to the next part of the meme…

…the next day, my timeline started blowing up with this guy.

This legend is Turkish Olympian Yusuf Dikec, who somehow won a silver medal while his left hand was in his pocket. He is 51-years old and a former military officer. But the viral image made him look like someone that had just woke up from a nap, rolled into the stadium and was randomly picked by the Turkish Olympic team to compete (or — as many pointed out — he straight up looks like a hitman).

The juxtaposition with Dikec and his fully-kitted Serbian competitor who won Gold was a perfect meme template for contrasting someone that overcomplicates matters vs. someone that DGAF and just casually gets the job done (Dikec says he didn’t need special kit because he’s a “natural shooter” and leaned into the joke by posting the funniest memes on his Instagram).

Soon, Kim was brought back into the meme…

…and then there were variations contrasting Dikec with this absolute unit from the Men’s Air Rifle competition:

Why didn’t Air Pistol memes go nuclear during previous Olympics? Dikec and the special kit have been around. Clearly, timing was a huge factor. The Dikec joke hinges on the fact that people were losing their minds over the cyborg sci-fi glasses before he rolled out of bed to win a Silver medal.

Either way, Olympic broadcasters should re-consider how hard they clamp down on social media clips. This viral moment wouldn’t have been as wild without that first Kim clip flying around non-stop. Photos obviously crush it but Kim’s legendary aura comes through best in the video.

Anyway, enjoy a few more Air Pistol memes:

…and here are two final Olympics-related posts:

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A theory on Nike’s recent decline

Nike is down 30%+ YTD (wiping more than $60B+ off its market cap).

A lot of the damage happened on June 28th, when Nike reported slowing sales figures and the market punished it with a 20% drawdown.

What happened?

Massimo Giunco — a former Nike branding exec who spent 21 years with the company — penned a viral analysis on Linkedin titled “Nike: An Epic Saga of Value Destruction” and blames the downfall on the strategy implemented by CEO John Donahue, who took over the job in 2020.

The TLDR is that Nike went all in on its direct-to-consumer (DTC) business, which had a bunch of negative trickle-down effects.

Donahue’s DTC focus isn’t surprising based on the fact that his background includes CEO stints at Bain (he spent 23 years at the consultancy), ServiceNow (the $150B+ B2B SAAS firm) and eBay (the $25B+ e-commerce platform where I used to use my parents credit card as a kid to buy throwback NBA jerseys).

Contrast this with Donahue’s predecessor Mark Parker, who joined Nike in 1979 as a footwear designer before claiming the CEO seat in 2006.

Nike’s digital pivot bears out in the numbers, with the DTC business growing from ~30% of sales in 2019 (the year before Donahue took over) to 44% in 2023.

(Source: New Consumer)

Giunco says that Nike’s current plight is the result of three decisions Donahue made in 2020 as the new CEO:

• Eliminate Categories: McKinsey apparently advised Nike to get rid of categories (e.g. running, basketball, soccer, hiking) and to classify every product as either “Women”, “Men” or “Kid”.

  
  The logic was that Nike was duplicating resources and a pivot to DTC would provide enough customer data to inform product decisions instead of relying on the category experts. Hundreds of such experts were fired and “Nike lost a solid process and thousands of years of experience and expertise in running, football, basketball, fitness, training, sportswear, etc.”
  
  I remember when this news came out and immediately thought it was dumb. When I go to a Nike store, I always check the basketball section first. It’s because I love basketball and want to window shop for stuff I probably won't buy (but will bother the staff to get me 10x different pairs to try on). I’m sure people are the same for their favourite sports. Don’t just mash it all together.
  
  If Nike’s products feel uninspired in recent years, I think it makes sense that taking away category experts is a root cause. I can’t confirm if McKinsey was behind this move but it sounds like the most McKinsey move ever.

  
  This was such a clear L that Nike quietly brought back categories at the end of 2023 but now call the classification system “Fields of Play” (seems like they don’t want to fully own the mistake).
  

• End Wholesale Leadership: Nike cancelled hundreds of relationships with wholesales partners and prioritized the Nike website over retail stores.
  
  The change looked genius during COVID as shopping moved online. But as customers returned to brick ‘n mortar, Nike’s product were nowhere to be found. It had burnt bridges with retail partners, who were happy to give shelf space to upstart competitors (this wasn’t covered in Giunco’s post but I think On and Hoka stepped into the running void for a lot of stores).
  
  There was also a lack of feedback from retailers, which led to inventory issues because the shoes put on the market did not sell as well as expected (the “data-driven” insights from online sales proved to not be a silver bullet).
  

• Prioritize Digital Marketing: Nike changed its marketing budget to focus on driving users to Nike digital properties and membership platforms.

  
  For decades, Nike spent 10% of sales on brand advertising to create an aspirational halo. The prioritization of direct response programmatic ad spend meant Nike went from “create demand” (new customers) to “serve and retain demand” (re-targeting existing ones).

  
  The strategy meant Nike wasn’t attracting new people and probably annoying existing customers with non-stop promotions. It’s poor stock performance has a lot to do with slowing sales.

  
  As Giunco puts it, “Because of that, Nike invested a material amount of dollars (billions) into something that was less effective but easier to be measured vs something that was more effective but less easy to be measured. In conclusion: an impressive waste of money.”

Of course we should take Giunco’s diss track with a few grains of salt. He knew a lot of Nike people that were fired and clearly has quasi-beef with the new management. He’s also a brand guy, which competes with direct response ads if the marketing budget is largely fixed.

But every point that Giunco makes sounds reasonable. Nike’s digital focus seems to have commoditized the product, impacted the brand perception and created an opening for competitors.

I recently wrote about how Starbucks’ over-reliance on its app (31% of US sales) was compromising the in-store experience and the parallels with Nike’s slump is pretty clear. Both brands — founded in the Pacific Northwest — built their empires nurturing an elevated brand. Leaning too much into digital takes away from the halo.

Hilariously, both stories involve McKinsey (Starbucks current CEO Laxman Narasimhan is a former consultant from the firm) and Linkedin (former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz cooked Narasimhan on the professional social network).

Giunco believes it’s fixable if Nike can re-balance its business, bring back some old school Nike brains and re-discover its marketing prowess. He thinks this will take years, though.

One sign that Nike is moving in the right direction is the much-talked about Olympics ad (“Winning Isn’t For Everyone”). The commercial talks up traits that are common among winners but are often socially frowned upon (selfishness, obsession etc). It’s edgy, risky and more memorable than anything Nike has done in recent years. It’s also narrated by Willem Dafoe, so you get a visual of the Green Goblin from Spider-Man while watching the ad.

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Did On make the “craziest” shoe ever?

As mentioned, On is one of the shoe brands that has been eating away at Nike’s market share.

I own a few pairs and have always liked its unique design (aka fat treads on the bottom).

Now, the $10B Swiss brand has gone completely off the rails with a new spray on shoe. The New York Times asks “Is This the Craziest Sneaker You Have Ever Seen?” and I’m inclined to say “yes”.

The manufacturing method is inspired by glue guns and could be a game-changer for how footwear is created:

• It takes 3 minutes to finish the upper part of the shoe vs. 3 hours with stitching

• A single person can operate the machine vs. 100 people on a normal shoe assembly line (and it only has 7 parts vs. ~150 to 200)

• “Rather than being put together by patternmakers, it is created using parametric design principles, and computational engineering.”

How?

A robot arm sprays “a single semi-translucent synthetic monofilament almost a mile long” on to a shoe mold to finish the upper (which is then “heat-fused to a foam rubber and carbon fibre sole”).

Here’s a full explainer video from On Running:

The shoe is very light at 170 grams and has 75% less environmental impact than the normal shoe-making process because:

• It can be made near the final selling destination (instead of in Asia, where it is then shipped around the world)

• There is very little filament waste and the material is a thermoplastic (which can be melted down and re-used after the shoe is done)

The lace-less (and form-fitting) shoe is officially called Cloudboom Strike LS and has already proven itself: Kenyan runner Hellen Obiri won the 2024 Boston Marathon wearing them (time = 2:22:37).

Obiri will be wearing them at the Paris 2024 Olympics, too.

“It happened in 1979 with Nike Air Tech and in 1982 with the Air Force 1,” writes NYT’s Vanessa Friedman on the history of shoe innovation. “It happened with the Adidas Yeezys in 2015. And it happened with the Nike Vaporfly and the introduction of carbon plates in 2017.”

I have no idea how scalable LightSpray actually is and there are fair questions about how much “labor saving” you actually want to do because light manufacturing is a huge jobs creator in developing markets.

LightSpray is clearly an advance, though. It will be commercially available in the Fall for $300+. That’s pricey AF but I’ll prob get a pair for my long distance…300 meter walks to Starbucks.

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Finally, some other baller links:

• “Zyns, Vapes and the Very Weird Market for New Nicotine Products” (Odd Lots podcast)

• “Expert Explains the Hidden Crowd Engineering Behind Event Venues” (WSJ on YouTube)