NEW YORK: With a blank graphic look and wide pockets, the uniforms that the USA team will wear at the closing ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics were unveiled on Wednesday by official designer Ralph Lauren.
The uniforms, along with the Olympic Village costumes designed by Ralph Lauren for the American athletes, had been ready when the Games were postponed last summer due to the pandemic.
“It looks like we’re all going there,” David Lauren, the company’s head of branding and innovation, told The Associated Press before the revelation. “They had been designed, produced and ready to roll.”
The Games are scheduled to open on July 23 and end on August 8, as organizers continue to figure out how to keep up with the pandemic that still lasts and is only 100 days away from ending. Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren is gearing up to open and close parade teams for Team USA’s more than 600 athletes, who participate in the Paralympic and Olympic-themed games to sell to the public.
Uniforms for the opening ceremony will be announced in July.
Lauren, the son of the fashion giant’s founder, said sustainability was paramount in this Olympic event.
Ralph Lauren, who has been equipping Team USA since 2008, worked with Dow on a cotton pretreatment dyeing process that uses less water, chemicals and energy than more traditional methods. The process was used for a blue polo shirt that each athlete will receive.
A leather alternative with plant-based materials and agricultural by-products free of synthetic plastics was used for a patch on the elastic white denim pants of the closing ceremony, made of American-grown cotton. And, like the lightweight lace-up jacket, a red, white, and blue striped belt that athletes must wear is partially derived from recycled plastic bottles.
The patches are already a reminder of the historic Olympic delay: they say “Team USA” with the year 2020 printed in red.
White zipped jackets include marine collars and hoods and red, white and blue striped cuffs. There is an American flag patch on one arm and “USA” on the other, the latter also lowering a leg of trousers. Athletes will wear a classic white polo shirt, white sneakers with a striped design and blue masks also made of American cotton.
The company’s Olympic retail collection will be available for purchase starting Wednesday at RalphLauren.com and in June at some Ralph Lauren retail stores, some US department stores and online at TeamUSAShop.com. All admissions support Team USA.
“We want our athletes to be truly ambassadors of American style, culture, and sportsmanship,” Lauren said recently via Zoom from Manhattan. “We also understood that the message for the Olympics was about sustainability, that this would be the most sustainable game in history and an opportunity for the team to show ingenuity around new ways of thinking about our environment.”
Daryl Homer, silver medalist in saber fencing at the 2016 Games, hopes to make his third Olympic appearance. He was one of three candidates in Tokyo to model the AP closing uniforms at the Polo Ralph Lauren store in Manhattan’s SoHo district.
Homer, 30, said the Olympic lag was tough at times, with a year off from the competition.
“I feel pretty prepared,” he said. “I’m getting the best I can, given the situation. I’m glad there are some Games.”
Homer, who lived in Harlem during the pandemic, used his downtime to be “a normal person and get a little out of sports. I read, I went for a walk, I ran, I tried to stay fit. form. be present where I was “.
Jordol Barratt, a native of Honolulu who now lives in San Diego, was also on hand to wear the uniforms. The skateboarder who hopes to make the Olympic team for the first time now that his sport has been added, said: “Everything is starting to feel real over the last month or so. It feels a lot more real and a lot more. stressful “.
The 22-year-old has nationals, a pro tour stop and a world championship before the Olympics, with no competition since November 2019.
“Fantastic things have been done for women’s skateboarding. It’s a very male-dominated sport,” skate park specialist Barratt said of the Olympic gesture at his field.
And Barratt is delighted to have the opportunity to head to Tokyo with her childhood friend, skateboard companion, Olympic contender and world champion Heimana Reynolds, a Honolulu native who moved to San Diego in November 2019, before the success of the pandemic.
“She was probably 8 or 9 years old, I only saw her at the skatepark and we were going to skate together constantly,” said Reynolds, also 22, and a skateboarder from the park. “We never thought we’d get this far in the practice of skateboarding. It’s so much fun to go from children’s skating mates to traveling around the world competing, and now to that.
“She was probably like the first skate girl I had ever seen,” she said. “He would say to me, ‘Wow, it’s great to have girls skating.’
Reynolds, Barratt joked, was the “good boy” who grew up.
Lauren noted that the Olympics will be the first time since the pandemic began that the “world has come back together.” He described the Games as a “departure party” with a “sense of hope that we all need in our lives right now.”
Like other Olympic fans, Lauren is disappointed to lose attendance at the Tokyo Games. Organizers have decided that overseas spectators will not be allowed. He has attended opening ceremonies of the past Olympic Games in Beijing, Vancouver, London and Atlanta.
“It’s one of the great experiences of my life, to see all these teams come together, to see the energy. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before,” he said. “When you’re there in person, it’s electric.
“There is a sense, he said, that ‘we are all one.’