Running shoes

The young baker made the first pair for himself

Adi Dassler (Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, November 3, 1900 – September 6, 1978)

Adi Dassler was born as Adolf Dassler in 1900 in Herzogenaurach in Franconia, northern Bavaria. The town was best known for its production of felt slippers. The largest factory had more than seven hundred employees. One of them was Christoph Dassler, Adolf's father.

Father Dassler had already had one of his sons trained as a shoemaker and insisted that Adolf learn the baker's trade.

According to family legend, from the age of fifteen, young Adolf had to go to work at the bakery every night at a quarter past two and had eighteen-hour working days. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but it cannot have been really pleasant. Mother Dassler earned some extra money as a laundress and the boys had to take the washed goods to the customers after their day's work. During the weekend the Dassler brothers did a lot of sports: they played football, ran through the woods and even had a hockey team that played hockey on the local pond in the winter. Dassler biographies show how the small, muscular Adolf plays hockey, runs wild or jumps high. He also made some name for himself as a center forward. He went with the head through the wall, that's what it was called, he was unstoppable.

In October 1917, Adolf had to do military service and was sent to the Belgian front on the Yser. When he returned to Herzogenaurach two years later, he no longer wanted to know anything about the baker's trade. He wanted to make shoes, like almost everyone else in town.

He started in 1920 in his mother's laundry kitchen, twenty square meters in size. His father, still working in the shoe factory, provided the necessary knowledge.

The first machine can still be seen in the Adidas Museum: a kind of bicycle whose pedals moved a flywheel that was connected to a leather mill. There was no electricity yet in mother's laundry room.

The young Adi Dassler as an athlete One of his first products was a pair of running shoes for himself, with spikes that a blacksmith friend had made for him. He would only produce those shoes on a large scale from 1926 onwards, weighing 223 grams, and still with hand-forged spikes.

In 1923, a year of deep inflation in Germany, Herzogenaurach's largest factory closed. The town promptly had more than seventy percent unemployed, the highest figure in all of Germany. But Adolf did well, he made a profit of 3557 reichsmarks.

It was time for someone to take care of the business side of the company. His older brother Rudolf presented himself. Adolf was a silent, taciturn man; Rudolf was a talking point, someone who could easily win over customers.

Sales increased, as did profits, and the Dasslers were soon able to employ twelve men. In those days, Adi proudly rode through the streets on a Triumph motorcycle. Rudolf already had a Mercedes two-seater.

In 1928, the year of the Olympic Games in Amsterdam, eight thousand pairs of football and running shoes came from the Dasslers' workshops. Adi had already reduced the weight of the running shoe to 153 grams, a sensation. Half of the German athletes in Amsterdam wore Dassler footwear.

Unfortunately, none of them won a medal.

Despite the Wall Street crash at the end of 1929, the Dasslers' success continued. By 1932, Adi realized that he had insufficient education and went to a technical school for shoemakers in Pirmasens for a year.

As a 32-year-old, he learned to make shoes from scratch, cutting, punching and sewing. He learned to resole both mountain boots and fine women's boots. And received lessons in accounting, tanning, anatomy and orthopedics.

Moreover, he fell in love with Käthe, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the local last maker. They married in 1934.

The Berlin Olympic Games were approaching. He worked from five in the morning to ten at night. Berlin had to be the breakthrough. Jesse Owens was in the spotlight.

Owens should only walk in Adi's shoes, he thought. "What will Hitler say about that?" those around him wondered, because Owens was a black athlete. But Adi said: 'Sports are my politics.'

He made sprint shoes for Owens from brown glove leather with six spikes, with only the toe and heel lightly reinforced. They hugged the foot like a second skin, Adi said, and Owens was thrilled.

He won four gold medals wearing Adi's shoes, the 100 meters and 200 meters, the long jump and the 4 x 100 meters hurdles. All German athletes wore Dassler shoes. And Hitler turned Owens' success into a publicity stunt for himself.

The Second World War broke out and the two Dasslers had to return to military service. The Nazis requisitioned their factory for military purposes. When Rudolf later returned from captivity, the Americans imprisoned him again on the spot.

After his release, things no longer seemed to work out between the two brothers. What followed "is one of the darkest episodes in the family's history," according to a biographer. The two brothers had become estranged, it was said.

No one ever knew what caused the rift that developed between the silent Adi and the talkative Rudolf. The inhabitants of Herzogenaurach believed that a woman was involved. Anyway, they cut the company in two.

Rudolf moved into a building a mile away and got the sellers with him. Apparently the workers chose Adi.

Adi named his company Adidas and introduced the now famous logo with the three stripes. Rudolf called his company Puma with the agile animal as its mark. The power stations of the two companies are still there today.

Without their hatred and deep rivalry, the two firms might never have become so great. At its peak, in the mid-1980s, Adi employed 40,000 people and produced 280,000 pairs of shoes every day.

The always smaller Puma then had 15,000 employees and delivered no fewer than 200,000 pairs every day. The two brothers would never speak to each other again, not even that strange day at a leather fair in Cologne when the two of them unexpectedly found themselves in an elevator together.

Life after the war was not easy. Farmers received shoes in exchange for sausage, bacon and ham. And Adi was able to exchange it with the leather manufacturer. The first soles were made with the rubber covering of American fuel tanks. For the 1954 World Cup in Bern, Adi designed the 'Mannschaft' shoes whose studs could be unscrewed and adjusted. He went to the World Cup as a technical advisor and adjusted all the shoes during the break of the final. The Germans became world champions. And the media proclaimed the small, unknown man who was in all the photos "the nation's shoemaker."

Adi may have been satisfied, but he continued to work like crazy. Always looking for improvements and adjustments. During his lifetime, Adidas would patent more than 700 inventions, improvements and models.

Anyone who made a name for themselves in sports was welcome at the villa in Herzogenaurach, and Käthe welcomed them like a king or queen. Adi Dassler's hospitality was legendary.

Käthe pampered the athletes – and also the sports experts – and Adi had them run or jump laps on a special test track until they dropped. “Adi does not give a person peace,” they complained.

If a hurdler said she got snagged easily when taking the hurdles with new spikes, she got slightly rounded spikes.

One day Adi suddenly saw a high jumper on television flying backwards over the bar. That was a challenge. He sent shoe after shoe to the American Dick Fosbury with a spike implant that allowed him to turn lightning fast before repelling.

Fosbury won a gold medal with his legendary 'flop' in Mexico in 1968 with a jump of 2.24 meters and traveled especially to Herzogenaurach to thank Adi.

The spectacular popularization of the sport grew along with the company in the 1970s. Adi got to experience it all. He died in 1978. His only son Horst took over. Horst was exceptionally good at making connections in sports at a world level.

Shortly before his early death in 1987, he indicated that he would have liked to be president of the International Olympic Committee. The company had already moved away from the technical basis, from Adi's thinking.

Adi's four daughters sold the billion-dollar company in 1990.

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