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Adidas doesn't actually stand for 'All Day I Dream About Sports'

Home> News

Published 15:31 14 Apr 2023 GMT+1

Adidas doesn't actually stand for 'All Day I Dream About Sports'

People are only just discovering what the name 'Adidas' actually stands for

Joe Harker

Joe Harker

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People are only just discovering that the brand name Adidas doesn't actually mean what they thought.

There's a rumour going round that the sportswear manufacturer's name stands for 'All Day I Dream About Sports', but that's just an urban myth.

It sounds like a pretty cool idea behind thinking up a company name but it's just not true no matter how much your mate tried to tell you it was.

Adidas is a German company, so it would be a bit odd for them to make their name an acronym of an English sentence.

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A bit like realising that Santa isn't real, everyone must at some point realise that the urban myths they assumed to be true are actually false, and the sportswear brand's name actually comes from somewhere else.

Adidas is one of the biggest sportswear brands in the world, but the name doesn't stand for 'All Day I Dream About Sports'.
GOIMAGES / Alamy Stock Photo

The name Adidas is actually a portmanteau of the name of the company's founder, Adolf 'Adi' Dassler, who first started out repairing shoes in a post-First World War Germany.

With supplies low he used leather from soldier's helmets and silk from parachutes as materials, while he also started making sports shoes in his mother's laundry room.

He also tried working with the likes of shark skin and kangaroo leather, and by 1925 he was making football boots and running shoes.

Along with his brother Rudolf, he operated what was then known as the Dassler Brothers Sports Shoe Factory, which ended up being rather successful as by 1928 they were supplying international athletes with shoes.

The brothers joined the Nazi Party in 1930s and started supplying kit to clubs in the Hitler Youth.

During the 1936 Olympic Games (the one the Nazis held), Dassler managed to get his boots onto the feet of iconic US athlete Jesse Owens by just walking up to him and handing him a pair of shoes.

Jesse Owens competed at the 1936 Olympic Games with shoes given to him by Adi Dassler.
World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Dassler was conscripted into the Wehrmacht during the Second World War, though was released a few months later on the grounds that he would be more useful to the war effort by running his business.

The shoe factory ended up producing military equipment before total mobilization in 1943 turned it from making boots into a weapons plant manufacturing Panzerschreck rocket launchers.

When US forces approached the factory near the end of the war they decided not to destroy it, in part because Adi's wife convinced them it made shoes and partly because Dassler had given his shoes to Jesse Owens at the Olympics nine years ago.

In the immediate post-war period Dassler's shoes became popular among American soldiers stationed near the factory, Dassler himself went through denazification proceedings.

He was initially put in the second most serious category of Nazis and facing 10 years in prison as he was considered to be a war profiteer.

Adolf 'Adi' Dassler, the founder of Adidas, started his career repairing people's shoes with leather scavenged from soldier's helmets.
IanDagnall Computing / Alamy Stock Photo

However, several people testified in Dassler's defence - including a half-Jewish mayor who said Adolf had hidden him from the Gestapo after warning him that they might be about to arrest him, while a communist testified that Dassler had not been involved in politics.

He was also able to argue that being forced to switch over to making weapons had actually lost him money.

Dassler was then moved to a lower category and after the war he went back to making shoes, using rubber from fuel barrels and canvas from tents.

He separated the business from his brother in 1948 (Rudolf would go on to found Puma) and most of the employees chose to work for Adi, who in 1949 designed the company's iconic three stripe logo and used the combination of his own name to create the company name.

Featured Image Credit: Pixabay

Topics: Adidas, News, Weird

Joe Harker
Joe Harker

Joe graduated from the University of Salford with a degree in Journalism and worked for Reach before joining the LADbible Group. When not writing he enjoys the nerdier things in life like painting wargaming miniatures and chatting with other nerds on the internet. He's also spent a few years coaching fencing. Contact him via [email protected]

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@MrJoeHarker

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