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The London Marathon took place on Sunday and Tigst Assefa of Ethiopia set a record time for the women’s-only marathon, while Kenyan runner Sabastian Sawe took first place in the men’s division. Two days later, however, the only thing media outlets are talking about is the billboards and signs Nike had up during the race that were seen by many as making light of the Holocaust.
The Nike signs featured a red background with large black letters that read “Never Again. Until Next Year.” The phrase “Never Again” is widely-known as being associated with the Holocaust as a pledge to prevent anything so heinous from ever taking place again.
“Never Again is as iconic a phrase as Just Do It. Nike should know better,” billionaire hedge fund manager and Jewish activist Bill Ackman wrote on X (Twitter).
“The idea that @Nike would make light of the holocaust using Hitler-red imagery in a post-October 7th world is stunning. Heads need to roll,” he continued.
“And yes, I assume that this was unintentional,” Ackman added, “but it is hard to imagine that there was no one at @Nike, on the marketing team, at their advertising firm, banner manufacture etc. who didn’t know or who didn’t think to Google the words ‘Never again.'”
On Monday, Nike issued on apology for the signs.
“There was no intention of causing offense. The London billboards were part of a broader campaign titled ‘Winning Isn’t Comfortable,’ built on runners’ insights and designed to motivate runners to push past what they think is possible,” Nike said in a statement.
“A series of billboards with taglines such as ‘Remember why you signed up for this,’ ‘This is bloody tough’ and ‘Never again until next year’ were placed along the route to inspire runners and the copy was based on common phrases used by runners.”
It hasn’t exactly been a great week for Nike as the company was hit with a federal lawsuit for withdrawing its support of the Clone X project and thousands of NFTs that Nike helped mint and cost people millions of dollars were briefly replaced with an error message after the project downgraded to a free Cloudflare plan.