2004 Nike Free 5.0
by Brendan Dunne
In the year 2000, a pack of track athletes train on the searing emerald greens of Stanford University’s golf course, their precious feet stamping carelessly through the grounds. They are free. In 1980, seven-year-old Tegla Loroupe runs—no shoes on her feet—through the west end of Kenya on her daily path of over six miles from her home to school. She is free. Well before there are dates to write down, a group of hunter-gatherers in the cradle of civilization bound after their prey, the bare anatomy supporting their newly upright bodies kicking up clouds of dust. They are free.
The men’s team at Stanford would go on to win the NCAA Outdoor Track &Field Championships in 2000. Loroupe would go on to win the New York City Marathon back-to-back in 1994 and ’95. If our prehistoric ancestors got any award for bringing the meat back to their dens, the accolade is sketched onto a cave wall in some primitive script. The idea here is not that the shod are shackled, but that barefoot running offers a distinct advantage, one that hadn’t been fully explained to casual runners in the Western world until Nike introduced its Free 5.0 running shoe in 2004.
That shoe, and the huge number of Free models that followed, owes its existence to the drills that played out on that collegiate course in Stanford. Around 2001, Tobie Hatfield, brother of legendary sneaker designer Tinker Hatfield and a Nike employee since 1990, observed the team training barefoot. Tobie had already built up an impressive résumé of his own through his work on impactful models like the Air Presto from 2000.
Stanford’s shoeless practices were implemented by Coach Vin Lananna, who believed that his athletes could strengthen their feet and avoid injuries by training in a freer fashion. “I felt that as shoes became more elaborate and intricate, the feet were getting weaker,” he told the New York Times in 2005. This feeling was supported by research—a 1987 study from Concordia University cited data that showed barefoot runners generally suffered fewer injuries across many different populations. But not everybody has the privilege of running on the crisply kempt grounds of a prestigious college. People running in New York, in Paris, in Tokyo cannot do so on bare feet.
Hatfield’s challenge, then, was to design a shoe that harnessed the physiological benefits of barefoot running while keeping its wearer safe from the detritus and underfoot hazards common in the twenty-first century. He had to trust that feet were perhaps a more elegantly functional design than footwear could ever be. “We had to take that control away,” Hatfield realized, “meaning the shoe is less in control, the foot is more in control.” This relinquishing of control came at the urging of Coach Lananna, who went hard at Nike for forgetting the foot. The input from Lananna, who cofounded the Nike Farm Team running program in 1994, gave the sportswear company its design brief. How would he feel if they could create a product that provided a protected environment while letting the foot be free? “How many can I get?” was his response to the prospective shoe.
The sneaker still had to have a sole, of course, but its movements were to be guided by the wearer’s foot. In the same way that Hatfield had to dissect the tendency for control that a sportswear supplier has over its customer’s body, he had to literally cut through the platform his new design would ride on to create the Nike Free cushioning system. The result was a shoe whose hero was its outsole, a siped foam platform that looked something like a set of sci-fi piano keys or a Cheshire Cat grin. Hatfield’s design team at Nike iterated through the process, figuring out exactly how many flex grooves they needed along the bottom to truly liberate the runner. The upper, which is far less discussed in all the literature around its genesis, was built on an inner bootie not unlike that of the aforementioned Air Presto. The number in each Free model’s name describes its level of cushioning, placing it on a scale from 0.0 (true barefoot running) to 10.0 (running in a traditional sneaker). Hatfield called the Free 5.0 “the most researched and the most peer-reviewed, white-papered product that we’ve ever done.”
Where was this sneaker research happening? Much of it came from the Nike Sport Research Lab, the group at the brand’s Oregon headquarters that establishes the science that turns into product innovation. Crucially, it also came from outside sources less inclined to be biased. A 2005 study funded by Nike and published by the German Sport University Cologne concluded that the new minimal approach of the Free increased significantly the muscle strength capacity of the parts of the foot the shoe helped activate. The control group in the study didn’t enjoy the same benefits. (Yes, despite battling Adidas for decades at that point, Nike was not averse to turning to Germans to legitimize its product.)
While this kind of sneaker science may not be first in mind for the average consumer, it is vital to the obsessive’s relationship with the world of sports footwear. These kinds of studies, these precious points of data, make real the dreams sold by brands in a way that even the sexiest of marketing materials and most colossal of athlete endorsements cannot. They prove that—under the right conditions, when used properly—these things can actually make us stronger or faster. Recent decades have heightened the cultural potential of the average sneaker. Yes, more often they are used to make us look cooler, but these items at their core are still tied to a notion of making us somehow perform better.
As Nike found success with its Free line, it carried its foot-first footwear ethos and tech into other sports. It created basketball sneakers with Nike Free cushioning on the bottom. It has put Nike Free cushioning on skate sneakers. Tiger Woods’s golf shoes, designed with the help of Tobie Hatfield, used articulated Nike Free nubs along their bottoms. Even certain beloved silhouettes born way before the advent of Nike Free returned with that contemporary treatment in an effort to earn more converts. Hatfield recalls that the shoe’s central aim of listening to the demands and guidance of the body and reacting to them was influential on more than just shoes across Nike. “That included not just footwear,” he said of the affected product, “but, like, I remember backpacks, when the backpack designer is looking at the straps and how the straps could articulate better with the shoulders.”
Although Nike Free and the principles behind it spread wide, the man most responsible for that wave points out that the shoes are meant for a specific purpose. “It was always intended to be another tool in the toolbox,” Hatfield said, explaining that the Nike Free 5.0 and its successors were never supposed to replace the other shoes athletes had access to. This narrow vision of its implementation is ironically opposite to the intent of the Nike Air Trainer, a 1987 shoe created by his brother, Tinker, that was designed as a cross-sport trainer that could do it all. The view of the Free shoe as one of many an athlete could take advantage of also came with the upside of helping Nike convince people that one pair of shoes was not sufficient for the modern athlete. The underlying logic of the toolbox metaphor is that without the proper set, your exercise regimen might still be in the Stone Age. Then again, the original studies supporting the idea of the Nike Free as a performance-tested piece of footwear were also specific about its use. “It should be an effective approach for injury prevention and performance enhancement to use minimal footwear in well-defined training regimes,” one of the papers from the German Sport University Cologne concluded.
This sort of science-backed design married with easily recognizable visual cues is what made the Nike Free line so successful. While of little concern to researchers in labs and universities, the visual aspect of the sneaker is essential. Hallmark Nike designs, like its Air Max bubble or Flyknit uppers, have relied heavily on communicating their functionality to consumers via their unique look. Were the brand not so adept at these kinds of visual design transmissions, its footwear would be nowhere near as popular. The barefoot-running trend in the 2000s has produced shoes with similar intentions, like Vibram’s FiveFingers silhouette, which launched in 2005 with barely any cushioning and a foot glove shape, but none have enjoyed the sustained popularity of Nike Free. Maybe the design lesson here is that nobody wants to see your toes.
The design insights from the Free 5.0 continue to be relevant for Nike, which still produces Free shoes regularly and will occasionally bring back the original 2004 model for a retro treatment. In some ways, the heavily researched runners were a precursor to the brand’s controversial Vaporfly line of long-distance sneakers that launched in 2017, spurring conversations around what exactly a shoe should be allowed to do for its wearer. Like the Free 5.0, the Vaporfly shoes captured public attention by promising real performance benefits that could be confirmed by science and, for the Vaporfly and related models, a whole lot of broken records. Still, the two designs are nearly antithetical in their relationship to the user. The Free 5.0 sought to let the foot be its guide and muse, minimizing how much influence the actual shoe had. The Vaporfly sought to enhance it with stiff carbon-fiber plates embedded in the soles that would spring the wearer forward during marathon runs. This difference underlines the extent to which the philosophy behind the Free line at its onset ran counter to the standard of progression-sportswear brands, which are very much invested in the idea of upgrading your foot rather than listening to it.
The very idea that barefoot running is so beneficial is in some ways a threat to the existence of a sneaker company. Rather than framing it as such, Tobie Hatfield took it as a challenge. He pushed back against what had been marked as technological advancements, questioning whether the tendency to upgrade and continually add more to our footwear actually pushed it forward. In a way, he plucked that purest form of running from thousands of years ago and placed it delicately into the twenty-first century, atop a more period-appropriate platform. “Sometimes we do lose our way, and sometimes we get enamored with just design,” Hatfield said, recalling the path of Nike when the Free 5.0 arrived in 2004. “And design tends to overtake what is actually needed for the athlete.” It turns out, all we needed was to be Free.
Honorable Mention
Nike Air Zoom Huarache 2K4
by Riley Jones
Simply put, the Nike Air Zoom Huarache 2K4 was the late Kobe Bryant’s unofficial first signature sneaker with the brand. On a deeper level, it was the return of a staple Nike design concept from the ’90s, one that had been mostly abandoned until it came back here. By using a neoprene inner bootie, the shoe stayed true to previous Huarache incarnations, but it was its combination of Phylon foam and responsive Zoom Air cushioning that took it over the top from a performance perspective.
Designed by Eric Avar—the man responsible for many of Nike Basketball’s most memorable creations, including the Air Foamposite One and several of Bryant’s groundbreaking signature models—the Air Zoom Huarache 2K4 ended up a favorite of basketball enthusiasts. The sneaker was commonplace on the college hardwood; in fact, part of its rollout included lacing players up for March Madness. It was Bryant, though, who ended up becoming synonymous with the model.
“From a functional standpoint, thinking forward to the emergence of players like Kobe and his versatility—that was the driving functional inspiration behind the product,” Avar said in a 2012 Nike.com post, during the sneaker’s first retro run. Despite not being officially considered part of Bryant’s signature line, the Air Zoom Huarache 2K4 was included in Nike’s 2016 “Fade to Black” collection to commemorate his final season in the league.
Avar remembers the creation of the Zoom Huarache 2K4 as a reaction to the loud footwear design language of the decade prior. “It was very good for the athletes and for the marketplace, but we questioned whether we were being bold and crazy for the sake of it,” Avar said in the same post. “How could we return to more purposeful and ‘grounded’ product?”
With that in mind, the brand looked back to 1992’s Air Flight Huarache, redesigning the original sneaker from the ground up but maintaining its signature exoskeleton fit. The overall shape, ankle cutouts, and inner bootie remained, but the entire model had been overhauled for modern play through the use of Zoom Air and other advancements.
Off the court, the updated Huarache lineage would eventually etch its name into modern sneaker culture. In 2008, the similar Air Huarache ’08 model was used for one of Kanye West’s earliest collaborations with Nike for his Glow in the Dark Tour. Produced only in sample form, the sneaker preceded the rapper’s Air Yeezy line.
Today, the Air Zoom Huarache 2K4 is respected for being both classic and contemporary. The model reintroduced the discontinued franchise and left a lasting imprint on the world of basketball footwear.