Nike Shox Took Sixteen Years to Build and Still Sounds Like a Spring

On Saturday, October 31, a hall in Harajuku opens its doors for two days so that people can buy a running shoe from 2000. The shoe is the Corteiz take on the Nike Shox R4, and the London label is selling its royal blue pair at a pop-up at The Hall Harajuku on October 31 and November 1, ahead of a wider holiday release. Sneaker News lists the retail price at $190, and Nice Kicks lists it at $180.

The collaboration is the newest chapter for a shoe that should not have worked. Nike spent the better part of two decades trying to put a spring under a runner's heel. When it finally did, the result looked like four little pillars of foam holding up a shoe, and for a few years it was the loudest thing on any high street.

A spring under the heel

The Shox project began in 1984, and it began with Bruce Kilgore, the designer who had already drawn the Air Force 1. Nike had built its name on air cushioning. Kilgore wanted something mechanical instead, a cushion that would push back.

The idea, according to the Wikipedia history of Nike Shox, came from watching indoor sprinters who seemed to bounce off the track. Sport Showroom's history of the line places that track at Harvard, with its polyurethane surface. The first working model was built on the bones of a Nike Internationalist running shoe, in Nike's workshop in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Nss magazine, in its history of the shoe, says the team looked at space suits and astronaut gear, and that the pistons borrowed from the round boosters of the space shuttle. Early prototypes looked like the suspension fork of a mountain bike. Sport Showroom adds that steel leaf springs were tried in the midsole and failed.

The problem was the material. Early versions gave back too little energy to be worth the weight. Polyurethane was the answer, shaped into hollow columns that compress on landing and spring back. Sport Showroom dates the first workable prototype to 1997, and Sergio Lozano, who drew the Air Max 95, worked on the later stages.

Four columns and a dunk

Nike released the first Shox shoes in 2000. The runner was the R4, named for its four columns set in a square under the heel. The basketball shoe was the BB4, designed by Eric Avar, and it became the first Nike signature shoe for Vince Carter.

Carter wore the BB4 at the Sydney Olympics. On September 25, 2000, in a group game against France, he stole the ball, drove to the basket and jumped clean over Frédéric Weis, a center listed at 2.18 meters. Carter is listed at 1.98 meters. The United States won the game 106 to 94, and French reporters called the play le dunk de la mort, the dunk of death. A week later, on October 1, the Americans beat France again, 85 to 75, for the gold.

Weis had been drafted 15th overall by the New York Knicks in 1999. He never played a game in the NBA. Carter, meanwhile, had handed Nike the best advertisement a new cushioning system could ask for, a man in the air in its shoes.

The adverts that followed leaned on a sound. Both nss magazine and Sport Showroom say the bounce of the columns made the word boing the heart of the campaign.

Bodybuilders, football terraces and grime

The R4 found its audience in odd places. Nss magazine reports that in Italy it was first sold in gyms to bodybuilders, who were told the pistons helped with heavy lifting. In northern Europe it became a shoe for football fans, and in Britain it was taken up by the grime scene. The same piece reads it as a reaction against the Air Max 97, which by then had gone mainstream. Like the Reebok Pump a decade earlier, it sold a technology you could see from across the street.

Nike pushed the idea in every direction. Sport Showroom lists the R4+ and the Shox NZ in 2001, the Shox VC 2 in 2002 as the first with full length cushioning, and the Shox TL with twelve columns along the sole. Serena Williams wore the Shox Glamour at the 2004 US Open. Nss magazine argues that some of the experiments of that decade, the XT, the Griffin and the Stunner among them, carried too much plastic and kept the line from a wider audience.

There was also a legal fight. On February 17, 2006, BBC News reported that Nike had sued adidas, claiming its rival's trainers copied the technology. Sport Showroom says the case settled in 2007.

The second life

The columns never quite went away. In 2016 Nike made an Air Force 1 prototype with Shox cushioning that was never released. Wikipedia records that a former employee later sold the testing sample on eBay. Nss magazine marks 2018 as the year Nike relaunched the technology, and a Comme des Garçons edition followed. On June 29, 2019, Nike reissued Carter's BB4, including an Olympic colorway.

The revival has been driven by people who wore the first pairs. Kendrick Lamar wore the R4 on stage at The Pop Out: Ken and Friends. Sport Showroom notes a retro OG R4 in 2024, and the Corteiz shoe now builds on that.

The details on the Corteiz pair, as Sneaker News describes them, are a rework rather than a new shoe. Raised horizontal ridges run across the toe and sides. There are carbon fiber accents, a tongue that reads CRTZ SHOX under a red C, R419 lettering inside the clear heel, insoles printed with engine graphics, and a branded bolt washer in the box. Yanko Design confirms the four heel columns are kept. Corteiz has worked with Nike before, on the Air Max 95 and the Air Trainer Huarache, which is part of why the sneaker resale market watches these releases closely.

The Shox timeline, by our count

We lined up the dates from Wikipedia, nss magazine, Sport Showroom and this month's release coverage. The gaps are our own arithmetic.

Two numbers stand out. Nike spent 16 years getting from the first idea to a shoe on sale, and that shoe has now been around for 26 years, which is ten years longer than it took to build.

What to look for

If you are buying an R4, the columns are the whole story. Look at them from the side and check they stand straight and even, with no splits where the foam meets the plates above and below. On older pairs, look closely at the foam for hardening or cracks, since a shoe that has sat in a box for twenty years has still aged. Newer pairs from the 2024 retro onward are the safer buy if you plan to wear them.

The Shox were sold on the promise of a spring. They never made anyone jump like Vince Carter, but they did something rarer for a running shoe from 2000. They came back. For more of the lineage, see our histories of the Nike Cortez and the Nike Air Max 1, and the whole Sneakers section.