Flyknit got its shot at fame at the 2012 Olympics in London. Nike’s sponsorships put the shoe on the podium in nearly every event. While the whole world watched, the heroes of the summer donned a shoe that was largely untested in the wider market. It created a cosign roster that proved impossible to beat. When Michael Phelps won his 22nd medal to become the winningest medal-earner in Olympic history, he laced up Flyknits to stand on that podium. That was the summer that the Flyknit found its sure footing.

Using the sneaker as a podium shoe associated the sneaker with cultural heroes, but it wasn’t a performance-based association exactly. Phelps wore Flyknits no fewer than six times on internationally syndicated television, but he didn’t wear them in competition, he wore them as a winner. They were tied to his success, not to his athletic ability. This is how you make cultural heroes, not how you make an athletic icon. (It didn’t help that the dopest Flyknit of all time, the multicolored IOA pairs, were only given to the four Independent Olympic Athletes competing without a country, under the Olympic flag. When multicolored Flyknits like the IOA pairs eventually became available to the masses, they proved to be the most valuable pairs on the market.)

Nike invited fans to be a part of the shoe’s history, introducing the FSB Chukka immediately after the games in celebration of all the U.S. wins. Buyers could own a piece of the technology they saw on the podiums. They were not buying a game-winning cleat, or the sneakers a championship winner wore during the game-winning dunk, though. At $200, it was an exorbitant amount of money for a shoe, and still is, and the shoe made no gesture to even pretend it was a tech shoe. It was a lifestyle shoe. Nike continued to find new ways to incorporate it into running programs, but it seemed that the Swoosh had put most of its effort behind selling a Flyknit lifestyle.