Nike released a great commercial for the 2024 Olympics: Willem Dafoe is the narrating voice, and the background music comes from Beethoven.
When Nike releases an ad, the entire sports community gets involved. It’s like a milestone in the evolution of sports media that we need to know, a piece of information we don’t want to miss. Something to talk about in our next exchanges with our peers, right? If that’s true for you, well, you definitely have the right topic for the first office talk on Monday: the Nike commercial for the 2024 Olympics, voiced by Willem Dafoe.
The ad conveys an extraordinary message about the personality traits required to be a successful athlete. “Am I a bad person?” that’s what Willem Dafoe keeps asking. Getting to the top is not easy: the required determination and commitment are incredible, and the concentration needed to overcome fallbacks is so high that there is no space for anything else. So, you become obsessed with your goal. You get selfish, cold, and believe you are better than everyone else.
Enjoy the commercial below. You will appreciate the underlying perspective: winning isn’t for everyone.
Willem Dafoe is not new to the advertising world, and having him around in a commercial is a fair assurance that things will go viral. His career as a Hollywood actor has generated a unique aura around him: hearing his voice in the Nike commercial reminds us of that scene in Lars von Trier’s movie Antichrist, where the fox says, “Chaos reigns.”
Moreover, the background music picked for the Nike Olympics commercial can be considered another famous movie reference: it’s Symphony No. 9 In D Minor, composed by Ludwig van Beethoven in 1822-24, the beginning of Movement II. We are talking about one of the most famous compositions in the history of classical music, but we are sure that most modern listeners remember it as the musical protagonist of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Yes, now you want to watch that scene again: you have it below.
Those are just a few aspects that make the Nike commercial so cool. You can add to all that the number of sports stars you see in the ad, with all those facial expressions focused on their personal performances. The complete list of athletes is in Nike’s Youtube video description: Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kylian Mbappé, Serena Williams, Sha’Carri Richardson, Sophia Smith, Bebe Vio, Qinwen Zheng, Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Cristiano Ronaldo, A’ja Wilson, Ixhelt Gonzales, Victor Wembanyama, Vinicius Junior, Sabrina Ionescu, Eliud Kipchoge, Alexia Putellas.
Now we are all ready for the Olympics and watch what a “bad person” can achieve in sports.
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