NEW YORK – With a fresh white graphic look and roomy pockets, the uniforms that Team USA would wear at the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in Tokyo were unveiled on Wednesday by official outfitter Ralph Lauren.
The uniforms, along with Ralph Lauren-designed Olympic Village attire for the American athletes, were ready to go when the Games were postponed last summer due to the pandemic.
“Looks like we’re all going now,” David Lauren, the company’s chief branding and innovation officer, told The Associated Press. “They were designed, produced and ready to roll.”
The Games are now scheduled for July 23 and the end of August 8, as organizers continue to figure out how to hold them while the pandemic is still raging and only 100 days to go. In the meantime, Ralph Lauren has finished opening and closing parade gear for Team USA’s more than 600 athletes, those competing in the Paralympics, and Olympic-themed items for sale to the public.
Opening ceremony uniforms will be unveiled in July.
Lauren, the son of the fashion giant’s founder, said sustainability was a top priority during this Olympic round.
Ralph Lauren, who has been equipping Team USA since 2008, worked with Dow on a dyeing process to pretreat cotton that uses less water, chemicals and energy than more traditional methods. The process was used for a navy blue polo shirt that every athlete will receive.
A leather alternative with plant materials and agricultural byproducts without synthetic plastic was used for a patch on the white stretch denim pants of the closing ceremony, which are made from US-grown cotton. And like the lightweight drawstring jacket, a striped red, white and blue belt to be worn by the athletes comes in part 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.
The zip jackets in white feature navy blue collars and hood, and striped red, white and blue cuffs. An American flag patch is on one arm and “USA” on the other, the latter also on a trouser leg. The athletes will wear a classic white polo shirt, white sneakers with a stripe pattern and also navy American cotton masks.
The company’s Olympic retail collection will be available Wednesday at RalphLauren.com and in June at select Ralph Lauren stores, select US department stores, and online at TeamUSAShop.com. All revenues support Team USA.
“We want our athletes to be true ambassadors for American style, culture and sportsmanship,” Lauren recently told Zoom from Manhattan. “We also understood that the message for the Olympic Games was about sustainability, that this would be the most sustainable Olympic Games in history and an opportunity for the team to show ingenuity around new ways of thinking about our environment.”
Daryl Homer, a silver medalist in saber fencing at the 2016 Games, hopes to make his third Olympic appearance. He was one of three contenders in Tokyo to model the closing uniforms for the AP at the Polo Ralph Lauren store in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood.
The Olympic delay, 30-year-old Homer said, was difficult at times, with a year free from competition.
“I feel quite prepared,” he said. “I’m just preparing as best I can, given the situation. I’m just glad there are games.”
Homer, who lived in Harlem during the pandemic, used his spare time to “ be a normal person and get out of the sport a bit. I read, I went for a walk, I ran, I tried to stay in good shape. be present where I was. “
Jordyn Barratt, a native of Honolulu who now lives in San Diego, was also on hand to show off the uniforms. The skateboarder hoping to become the Olympic team for the first time now that her sport has been added said, “It’s all starting to feel real in 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 to go for the Olympics with no competition since November 2019.
“It’s done great things for women’s skateboarding. It’s a very male-dominated sport,” said Barratt, a park skateboard specialist, of the Olympic nod to her field.
And Barratt is excited about the opportunity to potentially go to Tokyo with her childhood friend, fellow skateboarder, Olympic contender and 2019 World Champion Heimana Reynolds, a Honolulu resident who moved to San Diego in November 2019, before the pandemic struck.
“I was probably 8 or 9 years old, I just saw her at the skate park, and we just went skating together all the time,” said Reynolds, also 22 and a park skateboarder. “We never really thought we’d get this far in skateboarding. It’s really cool that we’ve gone from childhood skateboarding buddies to a world tour of competing, and now to this.
“She was probably like the first skateboarder I’d seen,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool that there are girls out there skating.”
Reynolds, Barratt joked, was the “good boy” who grew up.
Lauren noted that the Olympics will be the first time since the start of the pandemic that the “world has come back together.” He called the Games a “coming-out party” with a “sense of hope that we all need in our lives.”
Like other Olympic fans, Lauren is disappointed to miss the Tokyo Games. The organizers have decided that foreign spectators will not be admitted. He has attended the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games in Beijing, Vancouver, London and Atlanta in the past.
“It’s been one of the great experiences of my life, to see all these teams come together, to see the energy. It’s like you’ve never seen it before,” he said. “When you are there in person, it is electric.
“There is a feeling,” he said, “we are all one.”