What the NN Running Team Was

The NN Running Team was the first professional running team in the world: distance runners who had always been solo operators, brought together in 2017 under one jersey, one management structure and one kit supplier — Nike — with a Dutch insurer's name on the chest. For nine years the white, orange and black colours sat on the fastest distance runners alive, from Eliud Kipchoge down.

In January 2026 the name disappeared: the squad became the dsm-firmenich Running Team, and every NN-branded garment became a closed line. The team kit is its own family of issue — distinct from Nike Pro Elite proper, produced in team quantities, never retailed in race-issue form — and what escaped the athlete channel between 2017 and 2025 is all there will ever be. That is the collection this page documents, and the story behind it runs through the two most famous hours in running.

Rotterdam, April 2017: A Team Sport Is Invented

The announcement came on 6 April 2017: NN Group and Global Sports Communication presented a squad of around sixty athletes from thirteen countries, described without hedging as the first professional running team in the world. Three days later it made its debut at the NN Marathon Rotterdam. The founding names told you the ambition — Eliud Kipchoge, reigning Olympic marathon champion; Kenenisa Bekele; Florence Kiplagat; and the Dutch marathoner Abdi Nageeye.

The idea was Jos Hermens' old obsession: make running a team sport, with shared coaches, physios, pacing and planning, so athletes reach levels they cannot reach alone. Within weeks, Kipchoge was running 2:00:25 at Monza in Nike's Breaking2 experiment; within months, Geoffrey Kamworor had won the team its first New York City Marathon. The structure worked from the first season and never stopped working.

From this chapter · in the archiveNike NN Running Team Pro Elite 2019 Running ShortsTeam issue from the 2019 cycle — the season of Kamworor's 58:01 half marathon record, his second New York win, and the October morning in Vienna.120,00 €View piece →

Jos Hermens: The Man Who Built It

The founder had been fast himself. Jos Hermens, born in Nijmegen in 1950, was a Dutch distance runner who set two world records for the hour run — 20,907 m in 1975 and 20,944 m in 1976, the second of them unbeaten for fifteen years — and ran the 10,000 m final at the Montreal Olympics. When injuries ended his career he went to work for Nike, then left in 1985 to found Global Sports Communication in Nijmegen.

Over four decades GSC became the most consequential management agency in distance running — more than 150 athletes from over 20 countries, from Haile Gebrselassie and Kenenisa Bekele to Kipchoge, Faith Kipyegon and Sifan Hassan. The NN Running Team was Hermens putting his agency's core on one roster, with training camps across Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea and South Africa. Our Netherlands archive covers the Dutch running culture he came from.

The Kipchoge Years: Berlin, Vienna, Berlin (2018–2022)

The team's first era belongs to one man. On 16 September 2018 in Berlin, Eliud Kipchoge took the marathon world record with 2:01:39 — 78 seconds off the old mark, the biggest single improvement in half a century. On 12 October 2019, on a closed loop in Vienna's Prater park at the INEOS 1:59 Challenge, he covered the distance in 1:59:40. Rotating pacemakers and handed bottles made it ineligible for ratification, and it did not matter: a human being had run a marathon under two hours, and the jersey he trained in was the team's.

In Berlin 2022 he lowered the official record again to 2:01:09, and added a fifth Berlin and a record fourth London along the way to eleven Marathon Major wins and a second Olympic title in Tokyo. The record has since left the team — Kelvin Kiptum ran 2:00:35 in Chicago in 2023 before his death months later, and in April 2026 Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 in London, the first sub-two in a record-eligible race. Neither ever wore the jersey; but the door they ran through was unlocked in Vienna, by this team.

INEOS X Nike: The Double-Branded Years (2019–2025)

Vienna created a relationship. INEOS, the chemical group that financed the 1:59 Challenge, signed a long-term performance partnership with Kipchoge and the NN Running Team in January 2022 — knowledge shared with the INEOS Grenadiers cycling team, INEOS Britannia sailing and the Mercedes F1 programme, all aimed at a third straight Olympic marathon gold in Paris. The visible product was kit: team garments from the 2022 and 2023 cycles carrying both the INEOS mark and the Nike NN Running Team identity.

The partnership closed with the NN era itself at the end of 2025. That makes the double-branded pieces a line sealed at both ends — INEOS gone from the team, the NN name gone from the sport — and they are among the most collected garments in our whole archive.

From this chapter · in the archiveINEOS X Nike NN Running Team Pro Elite 2020/2021 Women T-ShirtDouble-branded INEOS X Nike team issue — the partnership born in Vienna and formalised in 2022, now a closed line on both sides.150,00 €View piece →

Cheptegei, Gidey and the Record Board (2020–2021)

While Kipchoge owned the roads, the team's track wing rewrote the distance book in eighteen months. Joshua Cheptegei took the 5,000 m world record in Monaco in August 2020 (12:35.36) and the 10,000 m in Valencia that October (26:11.00) — both still standing in July 2026, six years on. He added Olympic 5,000 m gold in Tokyo and 10,000 m gold in Paris before leaving the track for the marathon in 2025.

Letesenbet Gidey matched him record for record: 5,000 m (14:06.62, Valencia 2020), 10,000 m (29:01.03, Hengelo 2021) and the half marathon (1:02:52, Valencia 2021) — the first woman since Ingrid Kristiansen in the 1980s to hold all three at once. Beatrice Chebet has since taken both track records, but the half marathon mark still stands: no other woman has ever broken 63 minutes. Gidey remains on the 2026 roster, alongside a squad that still includes Almaz Ayana and Genzebe Dibaba.

The Squad: Kamworor, Nageeye and the Depth Chart

Geoffrey Kamworor is the team's longest-running winner: three world half marathon titles, a 58:01 half marathon world record in Copenhagen in 2019, New York wins in 2017 and 2019, and — after injury years — the 2025 Rotterdam Marathon in 2:04:33. Abdi Nageeye, a founding member, took Olympic silver in the Tokyo marathon in 2021 while waving his training partner Bashir Abdi home for bronze, then won New York in 2024 — the first Dutch winner in the race's history, at 35.

The depth behind them is its own record book: Victor Kiplangat won Uganda's marathon world title in Budapest 2023; Yalemzerf Yehualaw won London 2022 at 23. Not every line of the story is clean — Kenenisa Bekele, after running 2:01:41 in Berlin 2019, two seconds off the record, left for a Chinese brand deal in 2023; and Philemon Kacheran, one of Kipchoge's Vienna pacemakers, was banned for three years in 2022 after a positive test. A team that size carries its sport's whole reality, and the record board carries more weight than both footnotes.

January 2026: The Name Comes Off the Jersey

On 18 December 2025 the team announced that NN Group — title sponsor since day one — would step back to Founding Partner, and on 5 January 2026 the squad made its global debut as the dsm-firmenich Running Team, named for the Swiss-Dutch nutrition and health group. Nike stayed on as main partner and kit supplier, as it has been since 2017. Cheptegei gave the new jersey its first win within weeks, at the Dubai half marathon in February 2026, and Kipchoge — done with the Majors after completing his Six Star in New York — carries the new colours on a seven-continent world tour.

For the kit this archive holds, that date is a hard line. Everything printed “NN Running Team” belongs to a nine-year era that is over: 2017 to 2025, Rotterdam to Vienna to the last Berlin. No re-issues, no restocks — a closed catalogue whose supply can only shrink.

From this chapter · in the archiveNike NN Running Team Pro Elite 2024 Storm Fit TracksuitTeam issue from one of the final NN-branded cycles — the name left the jersey in January 2026 and no more will ever be made.400,00 €View piece →

Anatomy of the Team Kit

A team allocation covers the whole day around the race, before and after the 42 kilometres: racing singlets and shorts, camp training layers, call-room half-zips and podium tracksuits. Each card below is one garment family from the NN cycles in our archive, with a real team-issued piece from the collection.

Distance Singlet

The racing layer itself — the white, orange and black colours the team wore from Rotterdam 2017 to the last NN cycle. Race-issued, not the replica shop version.

Nike NN Running Team Pro Elite 2020/2021 Women Distance Singlet100,00 €View piece →

Racing Shorts

Split-cut shorts issued per cycle to the marathon squad. The lightest bottoms in the allocation, built for 42.195 km of stride.

Nike NN Running Team Pro Elite 2024 Racing Shorts180,00 €View piece →

Long Tights

Training and warm-up tights for altitude camps in Kaptagat and Kapchorwa — where the racing actually gets built.

RARE INEOS X Nike NN Running Team Pro Elite 2022 Long Tights200,00 €View piece →

Arm Sleeves

Cold-morning issue for record attempts and championship rounds — worn in the early kilometres, discarded at speed, rarely surviving.

Nike NN Running Team Pro Elite 2022 Arm Sleeves150,00 €View piece →

Half-Zips & Jackets

The layer the cameras catch before the gun: call-room half-zips, lightweight jackets and storm shells over race kit.

INEOS X Nike NN Running Team Pro Elite 2023 Women Lightweight Jacket180,00 €View piece →

Tracksuits

Full team-issue suits for travel and podiums — the most visible NN garments and the fastest to disappear from the channel.

INEOS X Nike NN Running Team Pro Elite 2023 Women Lightweight Tracksuit240,00 €View piece →

The NN Cycles in Our Archive (2018–2024)

Elite Athletics Clothes holds 44 team-issued NN Running Team pieces spanning seven cycles from 2018 to 2024 — racing singlets and shorts, arm sleeves, tights, half-zips, jackets, tracksuits, caps and the double-branded INEOS X Nike issues, plus training-line rarities. Every piece left the team channel once; since January 2026 the line is closed for good.

The pieces below are the eight most recent arrivals in the NN collection. When one sells, the closed catalogue gets one piece smaller.