Sports Are Having the Opposite of a Crisis
A few weeks of impossible sports moments, and the branding opportunity hiding inside every one of them.
Josh Kerr called his shot. Back in March, in a season with no Olympics and no world championships to point at, he told everyone he was going to break the mile world record on a specific day, in a specific place, and named the project after the barrier itself. Project 222. Then on July 18 at London Stadium, he ran 3:42.66 and did exactly what he said he would, taking down Hicham El Guerrouj’s 3:43.13 that had stood since 1999. Twenty-seven years, erased on schedule, by a guy who announced it to the world months in advance and then had his sponsor build him custom spikes for the occasion.
I don’t write much about running. I leave that to my friends Cole Townsend and Raz Rauf, who cover it better than I could. So understand that I’m not here to break down splits or spike plates. I’m here because Kerr’s mile is the loudest note in a song that’s been building for weeks, and the song is about something bigger than any one sport.
Look at what just happened. The New York Knicks won their first title since 1973, ending fifty-three years in the most-watched building in basketball, in a Finals that kept coming down to the final possession. The World Cup is one match from finishing, Spain against Argentina, and as of this writing I’d almost guarantee we look back on this tournament as the greatest of all time. The Tour de France ran so hard that the peloton averaged 50.9 kilometers per hour for an entire stage, shattering a speed record that had also stood for twenty-seven years. The Formula 1 championship is led by a nineteen-year-old, Kimi Antonelli, with forty-one-year-old, seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton now up to second, chasing him in the best form he has shown in years. Even baseball got in on it, when Jordan Walker hit six home runs on his final six swings to steal the Home Run Derby 12 to 11 from Kyle Schwarber, in Philadelphia, which is roughly the most hostile place on earth to try to steal anything. And underneath all of it, women’s sport keeps setting the kind of records that used to be unthinkable, with the WNBA posting the biggest audiences in its history.
Sports are having whatever the opposite of a publicity crisis is.
And if you build shoes for a living, that sentence should stop you cold. Because I have spent years in this newsletter talking about how cyclical this industry is, how the energy sloshes back and forth between performance and lifestyle, athlete and celebrity, the court and the feed. Right now you can see the wave forming in real time, and you can see exactly which brands are already standing where it’s about to break.
Here’s the part that makes it personal for me. Ten years ago, I argued we were moving the other way, and I had a friendly public debate with my friend Matt Welty about it.
