“Red and white as usual?” asked newspaper Blick, fearing another predictable Swiss sports kit. “No! The new team clothing for Swiss athletes at the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games is a veritable festival of colours.”
One thing was clear at the unveiling in Zurich yesterday by Swiss Olympic partners On and Ochsner Sport: “never before has an Olympic collection been so colourful”, Blick reckonedExternal link. The 2024 Olympic Games take place in Paris from July 26 to August 11.
The basic colour for most of the garments is white or dark blue for the trousers, “which as a basic Swiss colour takes some getting used to”, Blick said, but it added that it was the so-called layers – splashes of colour prominently displayed on most of the outfits – “that create the wow effect”. “Yellow, red, blue, green all flow into each other in this colour spectrum as if it had been sprayed on with a can.”
Head of design Thilo Brunner explained that this palette was the result of the colours of all 26 cantonal flags being mixed together. However, the 20-strong design crew in Zurich added a touch of red and white, “probably for the purists”, Blick said. The jackets worn at the opening ceremony and on the podium contain significantly more red than the rest of the collection.
The new kit was unveiled in the presence of On co-owner Roger Federer, who said he still had various items of clothing from his four Olympic appearances “in his archive”.
The entire collection comprises 24 items, from sports bags and T-shirts to training equipment. Most of the items were made in Portugal, Blick reported. In this article, we asked whether On was getting too greedy for its own good.