For Belgian Ath-leisure Brand 42|54, Slow and Sustainable Wins the Race

PARIS — Winning Olympic gold didn’t quite happen the way Olivia Borlée expected. “I think we learned about it in the newspaper,” laughed the 33-year-old Belgian athlete, who saw her team’s silver win in the women’s 4×100-meter relay at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing turn into gold in 2016, when the Russian team was officially disqualified in the wake of a doping scandal. Eight years after competing, Borlée and her three relay team members Élodie Ouédraogo, Hanna Mariën and Kim Gevaert stepped back up on the podium during a public ceremony in their hometown of Brussels to receive their hard-earned gold medal — which got them thinking about the whole concept of “clean athletes.” “We’ve always fought for clean sport and clean athletes, but at the end of the day no one really cared about what we were wearing to compete,” Ouédraogo said. “Sportswear focuses on performance without regards to environmental cost. As sports ambassadors, we realized it was our responsibility to put out the right message.” The pair launched 42|54 three years ago, a line of ath-leisure wear that takes its name from their winning time at the games, a national record of 42.54 seconds. Inspired by Eighties athletes such as Florence Griffith-Joyner, or “FloJo,”

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