Adi Dassler first created spikes for Olympic athletes in 1928. Eighty years later, American Erica Kerner is overseeing a new extension of the Adidas brand in China. A former international marketing executive for Nike, Kerner has lived in Taiwan and China for 17 years. She is the director of the Beijing 2008 Olympics Program for Adidas China, which is the official sportswear partner of the Games. SportsBusiness Journal correspondent Jay Weiner caught up with her this week as China’s athletes kept winning medals and appearing on podiums wearing the Adidas logo on their uniforms.

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I think I’ve read you’ve got 5,000 stores in China already. How and why did you decide to sponsor BOCOG? And what are your plans going forward?
Kerner: We entered the China market in the early 1990s, actually founding the Adidas China company in 1997. So we’ve been in the marketplace for more than 10 years building from a zero base to more than 4,500 stores now, and we’ll have more than 5,000 stores by the end of the year.

Where are all those stores?
Kerner: We have stores in more than 500 cities across the entire country and opening two stores a day every day of the week.

What part of the China team do you outfit?
Kerner: Every single time the Chinese are on the podium, that’s an Adidas suit. Nike has sponsored a number of the individual federations, as have we, but the official Team China partner is Adidas. Here at these Games we’re sponsoring the Team China uniform as well as all of the 130,000 volunteers, technical officials and staff of the Games, as well as the 22,000 torchbearers as they ran all around the globe. In my understanding, it’s the largest single product commitment to an event in the world.

In the history of the world?
Kerner: In the history of sporting events in the world. 130,000 volunteers is the largest. We’ve given more than 3 million pieces of footwear and apparel to the organizing committee.

Nike has the Chinese track team, though, right?
Kerner: Yes, but we have the Chinese volleyball team and Chinese football (soccer) team. There’s a mixture of sponsors within the different federations.

Have you been able to measure your sponsorship’s effect on sales?
Kerner: Absolutely. We are the only official branded licensee of the Games. So we’ve been selling licensed products in the marketplace since 2006. Licensed sales are phenomenal. Right now, we can’t keep the products in the stores, they’re selling so fast. All the Beijing 2008 T's, all the pictogram T's, all of those with three stripes. We also have replica products of Team China. You can buy a replica of the uniform they’re wearing when they win. It’s up to (46) gold medals (as of Thursday), so we’ve gotten incredible exposure by being the official outfitter for the Chinese Olympic Committee. It’s really, really selling successfully.

What have the sales been in numbers or dollar amounts? Do you know them?
Kerner: I do, but unfortunately, we’re not authorized to talk about sales.

Oh, come on, I’ve known you for, what, minutes now?
Kerner: I’d love to, but my PR person would kill me.

What are the growth possibilities here? How many stores can you have? How much can you grow?
Kerner: We still have significant growth plans. In the first half of this year alone, we’ve had over 60 percent sales growth, year over year. We’re already the second-largest market for Adidas in the world, behind the United States, and we plan at some point in the future to overtake them as the No. 1 market for Adidas worldwide. We plan to have more than 1 billion Euro in revenue for Adidas China by 2010. (Annual worldwide revenue for Adidas now is about 10 billion Euro.)

And market share?
Kerner: We recently announced we’ve overtaken the competition and are the No. 1 brand in the Chinese marketplace.

Let me ask you about the image that’s on the side of your building on the Olympic Green and that’s part of your advertising campaign. It’s the most striking image I’ve seen in advertising these Games, of the Chinese athletes being almost pushed forward by the Chinese people. Who did that and how did it come about?
Kerner: We actually briefed that campaign more than two years ago with our agency TBWA/China. We wanted to find out: “What do the Chinese consumers feel about the Olympics Games and what do the Chinese athletes feel about the Games being in their country?”

We found out that the Chinese consumers were so excited about the Olympics, but a lot of them felt far away from Games, felt that their chance of going to the Games and getting to Beijing was very limited, so they didn’t know what their role in the Games was going to be. So we talked to the athletes and asked, “How do you feel about competing in your own country?” They said they were most excited about competing in front of their fans, that it really helped them to achieve their “impossible,” as we like to say it.

This campaign is really to show the consumers that athletes aren’t these unapproachable icons, but they’re only there because they’ve gotten the support and the help of the people themselves, every single Chinese person is a part of Team China.

The tagline is “Together in 2008, Impossible is Nothing.” We won a Cannes Gold Lion for that campaign, the first ever for a Chinese campaign. It’s the largest single campaign Adidas has ever run in a single country. Created in China for China by a Chinese creative team.

I’m no art historian, but isn’t there a bit of Socialist Realism in that image?
Kerner: I don’t think so. I’m not an artist either, but I saw it as a striking execution that would break through the clutter. You’ve got a lot of sponsors and non-sponsors using clichéd Olympic imagery. We wanted to do something that had its own visual language and cut through the clutter.

Olympic gymnastics great Li Ning was the final torchbearer and lit the Olympic flame during Opening Ceremony. He owns a shoe and apparel company here. How much did that upset you that a competitor got all that exposure? Was that the ultimate ambush?
Kerner: Absolutely not, Mr. Li Ning was a great Olympic champion. Obviously, Adidas has supported many Olympic champions. I’m sure he wore our products when he was competing. We were very happy for him. It definitely was a nice move for his company. But lighting the flame was Mr. Li Ning himself, it wasn’t our competition. It was an Olympic champion.

What about their slogan from their stores, “Anything is Possible.” Isn’t that a knockoff of your “Impossible Is Nothing”?
Kerner: “Impossible Is Nothing” has much more of an edge and much more of a brand attitude. It’s not something we look at as a threat in any way.

A few nights ago when Usain Bolt won the 100 meters, he took off his Puma shoes on the track and made sure every photographer in the world got a picture of them. Your thoughts?
Kerner: We’re a sports brand. We’ve been in the business a long time. It’s not the first time it’s happened. He ran a great race and deserved to win the gold medal He celebrated how he wanted to celebrate. It would have been great if it were one of our athletes, but that’s just how it is in the sporting goods industry.