The Hyperdunk presentation at the Nike Innovation Summit

For the past few months, there has been a ton of rumbling about Nike’s Olympic basketball shoe, the Nike Hyperdunk. Some images were leaked on the web and we received some info in dribbles from various sources about the shoe, but the only fact that we were pretty sure of was that the Hyperdunk would feature some kind of new technology.

Yesterday on Nike’s campus in Oregon, Nike Basketball and Kobe Bryant introduced us to the Hyperdunk and its technology first-hand as part of the Swoosh’s “Beijing ‘08 Innovation Summit.” We’re not going to lie, it was pretty amazing.

Nike flew in more than 350 media members from around the world for the summit - a two-day showcase of all the new technology and products that Nike athletes will be using in this summer’s Olympics. From special footwear designed to give fencers to BMX riders a performance boost, to a metallic ice vest (seen here on Roger Federer) built to slow heat buildup in an athlete’s core leading up to competition in order to maximize athletic performance, Day 1 was full of mind-blowing presentations.

Roger in his ice vest

The heart and soul of the first day of the summit though was the Nike Hyperdunk and its revolutionary “Flywire” technology. Inspired in part by the design of suspension bridges, the Hyperdunk has thin cables that form the skeleton of the shoe and conform to the shape of the player’s foot. The cables are strong enough to hold a player’s foot in place when he makes cuts or plants in order to explode to the rim. And because the whole shoe is basically just the cables, sole and laces, the result is the lightest shoe we’ve ever played in (the Nike fam gave us a chance to run in our own Hyperdunks at the end of the day).

For the main presentation, Kobe Bryant came out to address the crowd and take questions about the Hyperdunk. Kobe swears by the shoe and claims that it’s main benefit is that he doesn’t “lose seconds” when he is planting his foot to make basketball moves.

Kobe on stage

Kobe will be debuting his Hyperdunks on Thursday night against the Clippers and they will be his shoe all the way through the Olympics.

We’ll hit you with more about the Hyperdunk and the Innovation Summit after Day 2 …