The Nike Air Zoom Spiridon’s History, From the 1997 Origi…

The Nike Air Zoom Spiridon was the biggest shoe at the 1997 Boston Marathon by a huge margin. It wasn’t the marathon-winning sneaker; while the winners of both the men’s and women’s races wore Nikes, neither was in the Spiridon. It wasn’t the most prevalent shoe, either—the Spiridon was never that popular. But it was absolutely the biggest shoe.

Just past the finish line on Boylston Street loomed a giant inflatable model of the black, silver, and red Air Zoom Spiridon measuring some 30 feet long. The pair of Nike sneakers blocked out the sun on one section of the street. The girthy laces on the prop shoes were seven inches wide, tumescent with fiber filling. The mid-air Spiridons might have looked like a mirage to delirious runners crossing the finish line after 26.2 miles, only to see a gargantuan pair of sneakers hovering above onlookers in the distance.

On race day, Richard Desaulniers rose before the sun. When most runners were trying to subdue last-minute jitters for the sake of another couple hours of sleep, Desaulniers was already up. He was out of bed at 4 a.m. on the day of the marathon to oversee the installation of Nike’s jumbo Spiridons.

Nike had contracted Inflatable Design Works, Desaulniers’ company, to create an oversize version of its new Spiridon running shoe for a guerilla marketing moment at the race. (Nike was not an official sponsor of the Boston Marathon.) Early in the morning on April 21, he watched the shoes go up. Later in the afternoon, he stood among the passersby reveling in their effect.

“There were so many people just talking about it and looking up,” Desaulniers remembers.

The actual Nike Air Zoom Spiridon never lived up to the lofty precedent set by the marathon stunt. It’s an important model, one created at the behest of Nike’s top brass to usher in a new era in footwear cushioning. It’s beloved by a small group of sneakerheads who gravitate toward its flashy upper and promise of bleeding-edge tech. But the Air Zoom Spiridon, from its arrival in ‘97 to its most recent revival, which started at the end of 2024, has always been more cult than classic.

The Air Zoom Spiridon is a showy sneaker, a sparkling piece of design. In the shoe’s most recognizable colorway—the original black, white, red, and silver—it comes decked out with metallic mesh, reflective piping, a shimmering black rand to hold the foot in place, and a synthetic Swoosh with a holographic tint. The Air Zoom Spiridon looks a bit like a piece of a superhero uniform, the glossy Swoosh indicative of latent powers.

How Christian Tresser Designed the Air Zoom Spiridon

The Air Zoom Spiridon was designed by Christian Tresser, who started at Nike in 1995. Tresser, a strong-willed guy with flowing, strawberry blonde hair, had come to Nike from Reebok, where he worked on running shoes and later oversaw all Reebok soccer boot design. He wasn’t afraid to break taboos; Tresser would show up to soccer matches on campus at Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, wearing his old Reebok designs.

Tresser began work on the Air Zoom Spiridon soon after he landed at Nike—the brand wanted him on running sneakers right when he started. He can’t remember the brief for the shoe, and says his primary focus was on the materials, specifically the mesh. Tresser spent hours flipping through fabric books collecting meshes as he put together ideas for the Spiridon.

He spent an inordinate amount of time in front of the photocopier. He sketched the model by hand, but when Tresser was gathering bits for the Spiridon, he would assemble physical swatches of mesh onto a copy machine, hacking together renderings piece by piece.

“We had computers, but we didn’t have the ability to illustrate,” Tresser says. “I didn’t know Illustrator. I didn’t know Photoshop. That stuff was so new, and nobody was versed in it at all.”

Because of Tresser’s ability to make realistic renders via photocopy cut and paste, the Nike developers who turned his designs into physical products had an easier time. If you look at Tresser’s sketches for the Spridon, you’ll notice that they’re close to the final shoe.

Unlike some of the other Nikes of the ’90s, Tresser’s design for the Air Zoom Spiridon wasn’t inspired by anything in particular. (Tinker Hatfield’s Air Jordan 5 was modeled after a fighter jet, Sergio Lozano’s Air Max 95 after human anatomy.) The designer says he picked up the pearlized spray on the midsole from a slick car he’d spotted while working in his dad’s autobody shop, ABC Body Shop, while he was in college in San Francisco. According to Tresser, that exact car from the shop, a pearl white Corvette, was used in the movie American Graffiti.

“We used to have a guy that used to work at my dad’s shop, he was a custom painter and he had all those kinda paints, candy apples and pearlized stuff,” Tresser says.

The more overt visual reference point for the Spiridon was the gold Nike track spike sprinter Michael Johnson famously wore at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Following Johnson’s heroic double-gold-medal performance in the spike, Nike wanted an analogous running sneaker.

One of the Spiridon product line managers credits Bob Lucas, an “unsung hero” at Nike, for his work on Johnson’s cleats and the Spiridon. The Spiridon doesn’t much resemble Johnson’s spikes, but they share a sheen meant to convey blistering speed, and Johnson appeared in an ad for the Air Zoom Spiridon.

More important than the shoe’s look, though, was the actual Nike innovation used in it: the Air Zoom Spiridon had Zoom Air cushioning. It had to have Zoom Air cushioning.

Nike was in need of a refresh toward the end of the 1990s. Since 1977, the sneaker brand had captured the minds (and cash) of the public with Nike Air, the encapsulated cushioning bags embedded in its sneakers’ soles that were meant to make for a better ride. The shrewd marketing around Nike’s Air cushioning, and the visible Air Max later on, convinced consumers that its shoes involved legit technical wizardry and established Nike as a pop culture brand.

Nike Air was still relevant in ’97, but it was under threat. According to shoe dogs who were at the company at the time, Nike’s patents for Air were expiring, meaning rival brands would be free to make similar sneakers. Nike leadership implored designers and developers to use the relatively new Zoom Air tech, which put tensile fibers in cushioning bags to create snappier, more responsive soles.

Mark Parker, a product honcho at Nike who would go on to become CEO in 2006, was a major advocate for Zoom Air. (He was also the guy who could greenlight Tresser’s designs at pitch meetings.) Nike expected Air knockoffs and needed strategy for what was next.

“They were looking for something else as an alternative to Air bags,” Tresser says, “because at a certain point, once those patents were up, anybody could basically do an Air bag.”

The brief for the Spiridon asked for a model that optimized Zoom Air in a lightweight, go-fast shoe for racing and training. It needed a new, quick-looking aesthetic—hence the shiny upper and Michael Johnson reference. Ideally, the shoe would make its Zoom Air visible, letting the tech shine in the same way those bubbled midsole windows had for so many years in Air Max shoes.

Nike employees worked on how to use Zoom Air in a running shoe. Should it go under the sockliner? In the midsole? They determined the Zoom Air bags would work best for the outsole.

Zoom Air had been around for a few years at that point, and Nike had begun using it in basketball shoes like the Zoom Flight 95. Pioneering models like the Spiridon, and the Air Zoom Alpha (which had the same sole) and Air Zoom Talaria, were the first designs to put the new tech on the bottom of a running shoe.

“The overwhelming response from the wear-testing was like, ‘Man, you put it on the outsole close to the ground and that’s when you get the most feel, the most of that snap-back experience,’” recalls Fritz Taylor, a Nike product line manager who worked on the Air Zoom Spiridon. “It was really, really something unique.”

But the Zoom Air bags needed reinforcing; they were too fragile to sit right on the ground. As it built prototypes of the shoes, Nike equipped the Zoom Air bags with a layer of rubber underneath that would deflect into the Air units. At first, those rubber lugs left the side of the Air units exposed, giving the wearer a crucial, albeit narrow, view of the cushioning pods. But the protection wasn’t enough—the Air bags were popping and failing in testing.

With a little wear, the rubber would dig into the edge of the bags, an area the fibers that provide the structure in Zoom Air components don’t reach, causing them to pop and deflate. Nike had to neuter the final versions of the Air Zoom Spiridon and Air Zoom Alpha, adding more rubber to make sure the shoes could survive everyday use. The result was a shoe that didn’t feel as impressive at retail as it did in testing, according to Taylor, who started working in Nike Running in 1995.

“The rubber on the outsole had to wrap more around the Zoom Air unit itself to protect it a little bit more, to prevent this heavy deflection on the sides,” Taylor says. “So that took a little bit away from the real responsive feel that we were getting in the wear-test shoes.”

As novel as the Spiridon, with its fancy Zoom Air pods, was, the name suggested it belonged to a lineage of Nike shoes. The Air Zoom Spiridon was not the first Nike Spiridon. There was a 1984 Nike running sneaker called the Spiridon, and a Spiridon Gold spinoff that came after Portuguese runner Carlos Lopes won the marathon gold medal at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles in Spiridons.

Taylor, a longtime running geek, owned a pair of Spiridon Golds.

“I loved ’em,” he says. “They were a beautiful racing shoe. They were one of those where I kept them in their box. I would race in them and then I’d put them back in their box.”

Those earlier Nike Spiridons were named after Spyridon Louis, the Greek runner who won the first modern-day Olympic marathon at the 1896 Summer Olympics. It’s safe to say the ‘97 Air Zoom Spiridon took its name from the ’80s Spiridons, although the people who worked on the shoe’s design couldn’t recall why Nike ported over the name.

The Nike Air Zoom Spiridon in 1997

The Air Zoom Spiridon had plenty going for it when it released in 1997. The moniker would have been a signal to diehard Nike fans that this was a serious running sneaker. Anyone who put the Spiridon on their feet could feel the effect of the springy Zoom Air. And the shoe was eye-catching enough to appeal to the layperson who didn’t have a clue about the tech behind it. It had its marketing moments: the Michael Johnson connection, the inflatable pair at the Boston Marathon, a spot in Nike’s beloved phone number ads. Something about the shoe didn’t translate, though.

Per listings in old Eastbay catalogs, the Air Zoom Spiridon in ’97 retailed for $125, a somewhat bold price for a shoe without any overt visible tech. (The Air Max 97 came out that year at $150.) The work that went into the Air Zoom Spiridon guaranteed it would not be a budget shoe; Zoom Air was costly to produce. The extra measures to protect the bags on bottom added to the cost—Taylor says the pods had to be laid by hand so their positioning was perfect and they wouldn’t blow out. The pearlized midsole ticked the production expense up, too.

One former Nike exec recalls that the Air Zoom Spiridon sold well but wasn’t a big hit during its original run. Those Eastbay catalogs had the shoe’s price slashed by the end of ’97. Sales of the Spiridon were dwarfed by the Tresser-designed Air Max 97, which debuted the same year. Tim Slingsby, who took over from Taylor as product line manager on the Air Zoom Spiridon, says that its reception was very average—nothing to jump around about. 

“Honestly, it never really caught on,” Slingsby says of the Spiridon. “It was one of those shoes—it lasted about nine months in our line, and then we moved on from it.” He even gave a caveat that some of his recollections about the shoe’s inception are hazy because the Spiridon just was not that big of a deal.

Nike would have loved for the Spiridon to be a mainstream success, but there was not great pressure to make the shoe a cash cow. For the bigwigs who sat on the fourth floor of the McEnroe building at Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton, the priority was bringing Zoom Air to market in a high-end running sneaker. When the edict came from that far up, the people tasked with carrying out the orders could avoid some of the typical guidelines around making profitable product.

“Back then, if Mark [Parker] is telling you to go deliver on this type of shoe, you kind of have some leeway to maybe take a shorter margin on the shoe than you normally would,” Slingsby says.

And, Slingsby says, mediocre sales aside, the Air Zoom Spiridon was a stepping stone that advanced Nike’s use of its new cushioning. The Air Zoom Spiridon provided a spark, laying the groundwork for future Nike innovations in Zoom Air, despite never catching fire with the general public.

“It seemed to resonate more with the in-the-know sneaker folks,” Tresser says.

There were small pockets of footwear savants who co-signed the Spiridon. The rapper 60 Second Assassin (of Wu-Tang affiliate group Sunz of Man) made the shoe look incredible when he perched on an outdoor chess table in Brooklyn for a photoshoot in 1998 with the “Metallic Silver/Concord” colorway on feet. Ronnie Fieg, who built his Kith empire partly off his taste in sneakers, was an early fan of the Spiridon.

When Fieg was a teenager running stock up and down the stairs at David Z, the New York City retailer that gave him his entree into footwear, the Zoom Air cushioning had a performance benefit. Fieg remembers having a pair of Spiridons when they first came out and feeling like their cushioning kept him from being fatigued while on his feet all day, sprinting between the floor and the stockroom.

“The Zoom bags in that shoe were the most remarkable change in comfort,” Fieg says. “It went from Air Max to this Zoom technology, which felt very different.”

Fieg agrees that the Air Zoom Spiridon was a niche shoe rather than a doorbuster. He says it was sought after by the same shopper who would buy a Clarks Wallabee or the similarly technical Nike Humara, other models that footwear nerds appreciated. 

“The Spiridon was this very heady shoe for the guy that didn’t want to wear Air Maxes and wanted to spend the most on what Nike had to offer,” Fieg says. “That was a pinnacle product for Nike at the time.”

The Nike Air Zoom Spiridon’s Retro Releases

Although the general consensus is that the Air Zoom Spiridon was not a prominent shoe at its onset, it’s returned as a retro a few times. The shoe came back in 2005, when Nike reissued a handful of the first-generation colorways and added a few new ones to the mix. This writer remembers those pairs rotting on clearance tables a few seasons later.

The Air Zoom Spiridon had another, more successful retro life starting in 2016. Nike again brought back the original red-Swoosh colorway, this time as a limited release under its NikeLab banner. The shoe had aged well—during that run, some pairs were going for well over their retail price on the secondary market (although that might owe to their artificial scarcity). Nike pumped out a load of inline colorways through 2018, breaking up the flow with collaborations with the likes of graf writer Stash and Dutch artist Parra.

Nike put the shoe to rest at the end of 2018 and then revived the Air Zoom Spiridon again last December, starting the latest retro offering with the return of the original red-Swoosh colorway. It’s no smash, but the latest Spiridon has been well received. (The most devout Spiridon fans may have gripes about the accuracy of the ’24 retro, which skimps on the reflective accents on the ribbing.) Longtime Nike collaborators Fragment and Undefeated have been tapped for collaborations. Now, the Spiridon’s sole is spreading to other Nike models—Travis Scott’s Zoom Field Jaxx shoe uses the Spiridon’s tooling.

The guys who birthed the shoe haven’t been involved in the later chapters of the Nike Air Zoom Spiridon. Slingsby gets a chuckle out of the retros, but never worked on them. Tresser doesn’t have input on the retros, but he does have a pair of the ’24 Air Zoom Spiridons. That said, the designer hasn’t held on to much sentimental footwear and can’t get a lot of use out of any Nike shoes right now, anyway, given his current employment at Adidas.

How has the Air Zoom Spiridon lived so many lives despite the sometimes tepid response it received from the wider sneaker-buying public? Fieg feels the shoe nailed the rare one-to-one ratio of performance benefit to aesthetic appeal, a balance that can yield classics. And the glossy, reflective upper still reads high-tech. The Air Zoom Spiridon arrived a few years before Y2K, but it can pass as a contemporary of any number of the meshed-out, turn-of-the-century runners that are on trend right now.

“The Spiridons really do look like a departure from the rest in how futuristic the shoes looked,” Fieg says. “And I thought that it was very much ahead of its time, so much so that I think today the shoes look proper for 2025.”

The Nike Air Zoom Spiridon looks even more impactful in light of the other Tresser-designed shoes it informed. Tresser’s Air GX soccer boot used a similar shiny Swoosh that was embroidered to the upper. Tresser considers the Spiridon an older sibling of the first Nike Mercurial boot and the Air Max 97, two iconic silhouettes he created.

“The Spiridon definitely led me to the Air Max 97,” he says.

Tresser never put much stock into the sales of the shoes he designed—maybe he didn’t need to after the extended run of the 97. For him, a sneaker’s success isn’t always measured by the units it moves. The Spiridon, a model that was more audacious than it was popular, and a sneaker that’s still something of a connoisseur’s choice, proves this. It wasn’t a volume shoe or a high-margin shoe, but the Spiridon nonetheless stood the test of time.

“It wasn’t about how many were sold,” Tresser says. “I mean, sometimes the most popular shoes are the ones that aren’t the biggest numbers.”