Woman power from within

BALI, Indonesia – You knew they were athletes as soon as they came out on the catwalk. They strode with purpose, with power, and at times, they walked rather shyly punctuated by occasional bursts of self-conscious laughter. It was refreshing to see athletes – their muscular arms and legs showing signs of years of practice – wearing feminine, stylish sports clothes and having fun. They may not have walked with the grace typical of models (and they certainly weren’t size 0, thank God!), but they had a lot of attitude to go with their strides.

Tennis stars Patty Schnyder, Ana Ivanovic, Aiko Nakamura and Angelique Widjaja opened Wismilak International 2006 tournament at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Nusa Dua, Bali, with a fashion show of Adidas’ fall-winter collection. You got the feeling that on that special gala dinner, their trip to Bali wasn’t just about competition but also, as one Adidas official put it, "to get in touch with their feminine side" and with their power from within.

That’s the theme that unifies the fall-winter Adilibria collection for the five sports categories: tennis, running, yoga, swimming and gym. "Power from Within" is not just a marketing campaign, but also a lifestyle statement that Adidas wants to inspire in women.

For women journalists and contest winners from Southeast Asian countries Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, Adidas hosted a Power from Within retreat at Como Shambhala Estate, a quiet mountainside resort that emphasizes wellness and health for the body, spirit, and mind.

Back at Grand Hyatt Hotel, Ana Ivanovic tells the Southeast Asian women that she got into tennis at five years old because of the Serb-born Monica Seles. "They showed her matches back home on TV and between the games commercials for tennis schools would be shown. I wrote down one number and forced my parents (her dad is an economist, her mom a lawyer) to enroll me in a tennis school. My dad bought me a racket and a month later I started playing."

Before a game, Ana says she likes to be alone for 20 minutes "to concentrate and think about what I have to do. Basically, training means gaining confidence and being clear about what to do. Power from within for me means a lot – it’s very important to have motivation and to enjoy what you’re doing, otherwise you will never reach the goals you’ve set for yourself. It’s also about being in control. Sometimes it’s hard to control your emotions, but only when you think clear can you stay calm and perform."

Be that as it may, Ana like most athletes has a bit of superstition when it comes to playing. She reveals in her website that she bounces the ball a certain number of times before serving and she doesn’t walk on the lines of the court. Her most memorable experience so far was beating fellow Adidas spokesperson Martina Hingis in the Montreal Final this year.

Off the court, the 18-year-old is a typical teenager: she listens to pop and R&B, her favorite TV series is Friends, she enjoys shopping and fashion and watching movies.

On the court, 28-year-old Swiss Patty Schnyder is all power. She reached the Zurich and Linz finals in 2005 and this year beat Justine Henin-Hardenne to reach the Charleston final, as well as the quarter final of the Australian Open and the semi-final at the Paris indoor event. Off the court, she has a soft touch – taking care of her two cats, Mister and Gizmo, back home in Basel, Switzerland. She is coached by her husband Rainer Hofmann and does other sports such as skiing, billiards, golf, football and computer games.

Ranked No, 15 in the world (No. 2 seed at Wismilak), Patty is the biggest mover in WTA Rankings. In 1995, she moved up 634 spots. She loves Australia and when she retires she says she’d like to live there.

Also at the Adidas fashion show was the now-retired Todd Woodbridge, 35.He is the other half of "The Woodies" doubles team with fellow Australian Mark Woodforde with whom he won a record 61 ATP doubles titles, including 11 Grand Slam events. When Woodforde retired in 2000, Todd partnered up with Jonas Bjorkman and they won five Grand Slam event titles in four years.

When he meets up with journalists at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Bali, Todd relates that his love of tennis started when he was young. As a boy he would be up in the middle of the night in his home in Australia to watch John McEnroe at Wimbledon. "As a tennis player, I’ve always said that my dream was to play Wimbledon, and the Davis Cup for my country, and I was lucky to do both."

With two great players retiring at the US Open this year in mind (Andre Agassi and Martina Navratilova, the latter winning in the doubles event a month short of her 50th birthday), I ask Todd what he did after his last match when he retired at Wimbledon last year. Did he get drunk and indulge in debauchery? He laughs and says, "No, no. I had a quiet dinner with my wife. It was sad, because you’re ending something you had been doing half your life." For Todd, it was a 17-year career that gave him a total of 83 ATP tournament wins in doubles.

Today, he is on the other side of the court – as an annotator – and says with a laugh, "All of sudden you become a complete expert and never make the mistakes that they make."

Adilibria is all about performing and looking good while doing it because, let’s face it, even in this day and age where women put much more value in substance, there’s that part of them that still wants to look pretty. Nobody wants to go back to wearing men’s T-shirts or sweat pants! And thankfully, we don’t have to.

Represented by world-class athletes from different sports, Adilibria offers a complete range of women’s apparel, footwear and accessories. You will find unexpected details and silhouettes (an empire line for a sports jacket and crisscrossing stripes mid-leg, for instance) in colors that are traditionally reserved for feminine blouses rather than sports apparel. Soft orange and peach are complemented with different shades of blue and gray.

The fabrics, construction and technologies are a breakthrough as well: Adidas’ labs have created fabrics that give the body what it needs, whether it’s heat or ventilation. ClimaCool and ClimaWarm provide heat and moisture management through ventilation, as well as thermal insulation in cold weather. ClimaLite features soft, lightweight fabric for moisture management while ClimaProof is for wind protection. ForMotion ensures enhanced power movement and performance.

ForMotion is probably one of the best things to happen to sports-specific apparel since women stopped wearing triple-oversized men’s T-shirts to do sports.

Angge Suiza, Adidas head for category management of Southeast Asia, says: "The beauty about Adidas is that it is backed by specific technology according to women’s anatomies. We are an avenue for expressing their power from within. We realize that women are more sophisticated; they don’t want to be lumped with the men. The Adilibria fall-winter is very much about the fusion of performance and style. That’s what we are as a brand. When Stella McCartney came along, we began depicting what the Adidas woman is all about."

Part of Angge’s job is to put together the collections for the SoutheastAsian countries, which requires understanding the commonalities of women in this part of the world. "We create the range for Southeast Asia from the global range because we have so many to choose from. We know that not all the products have to be in the stores all together all the time, so we choose the categories for the markets. It’s a lot of matching from our end. With Singapore leading the pack, we will see more and more the full execution of the collections. The first thing to find out was if there was such a thing as homogeneity among Southeast Asian women, are we together, are we alike? Surprisingly, there are a lot of similarities. For one, our built is the same and we all feel the need to express ourselves in terms of what we do."

Angge is excited about the rise in sports activities across the countries, especially running. "Women enjoy this sport; it’s a fuss-free activity, and in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, it’s it’s a family activity. Women in the region value their health, and yet we thought they wouldn’t be too concerned about specific health issues but they are. They pay particular attention to their knees and ankles, they know that the kind of shoes they wear has an impact on their back, knees and hips."

A runner herself who has conquered the streets of Singapore, and Manila when she’s back home, Angge says there is a growing need for women to stay fit. "In fact, there was a survey done in Singapore that asked women whether they would rather have a good face or good body, and the majority answered a good body. Women are now spending to keep their body fit and get the body they want, and they are changing their sports apparel per season."

Angge chooses the Adidas collections that will be brought to these markets and says that while there are no designs specific to Asian women, they have the "technology to understand the type of Asian body and from there we draw the pattern to guide the progression of sizes."

Angge adds, "Starting with this season’s collection, we are using body mapping, meaning we recognize that not the entire body sweats a lot at all times, that there are heat zones we have to concentrate on. So the construction has changed since different areas require different kinds of fabrics."

Next year will see even more advanced technologies that deal with cooling. The best news of all is that for the Philippine market, we will see a lot more products at Adidas stores.