Inside Oakley’s video-game-boss-lair of a headquarters, there’s a section called Moon Base One. It’s where tech-obsessed designers and research and development specialists interrogate the idea of performance eyewear: What is it? How can we make it better? What can we change? What can we destroy?
“It's like imagining [you're] out there on the moon, and you're just thinking outside the box,” Brian Takumi, Oakley’s VP Brand Soul and Creative (yes, his real title), tells me of this design world. “No constraints. Don't be limited by manufacturing. Don't be limited by what technologies currently exist.
“A creed we talk about is: do what others are afraid to do, do what others can't do,” Takumi continues. Oakley staffers talk a lot about creeds and mottos, which says something about the strength of the brand’s internal commandments. “We actually make machines to make new things that don't even exist. A lot of times, we are pushing the boundaries, even with suppliers, to find new ways to use equipment that they never thought their equipment would be used for.” This isn’t an empty claim, either: Oakley owns around 575 patents and 1,100 trademarks.
It was out of this maelstrom of freedom and creativity that emerged, meteoric, the Over The Top sunglasses in the summer of 2000. A piece of performance eyewear which—just as the Oakley slogan invited—dismantled and rebuilt the very idea of eyewear altogether.
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Forgoing traditional arms, the Over The Tops began at the lenses—glinting polarized lenses in holographic blue, orange or green—which then connected to iridium bands that arced over the top of the head, clamping the skull in shiny silver chrome. Totally alien, totally sci-fi, and according to Takumi, totally new.
“When you think about eyewear, and you're always going, well, here's the center front, here's the temples... I mean, what else can you do to it?” says Takumi. “Our thing was, ‘How do you look at a piece of eyewear and reimagine how you wear it?’ The idea was, instead of it wrapping this way… what if it wrapped this way? And that was kind of the genesis of starting to think of, reimagine what a piece of eyewear can be, reimagine what sport performance eyewear could be.”
It was a bold idea, even for Oakley, who had built their brand by taking risks. It was new, yes, even perhaps a little too new. Whispers of the Over The Tops began to spread beyond Moon Base One. Did people kind of freak out when they saw them? I ask.
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“Yeah,” says Takumi with a fond smile. “Our founder [James Jannard] would walk around with them. Even within the building, [people were like]... what the heck are these guys doing?”
But the Over The Tops weren’t just a piece of cyborg cosplay. They were performance wear—the area that sat at the heart of Oakley’s entire existence. “We basically invented the sport performance eyewear category,” Takumi says. “There was nothing like that before.” As part of the design process and testing, runners helped analyze the frame's shock absorption, while R&D played with bounce reduction, studying how the glasses would feel under a helmet or on different head shapes.
Usually, athletes prefer to train with their gear for months before an event to avoid any technical issues. But Oakley were on deadline. The brand treated the Summer Olympics as a North Star for its releases, timing important brand drops so that athletes could debut the designs on the world’s biggest sporting stage. From the 1996 release of the Pro M Frame in Atlanta, to the Radar Lock in London 2012 and the shield-like Jawbreaker at 2016’s Rio—keep your eyes peeled for the much-hyped QNTM Kato in 2024 Paris—the Olympics debuted so many of Oakley’s biggest successes. But none were bigger than the Over The Tops, which, racing against the clock, were fast-tracked from R&D to their berth at Sydney 2000.
Oakley had taken “bags” of the Over The Tops across to Australia. Not everyone was amenable to them, which was expected, but the brand did have someone in mind: Trinidadian sprinter Ato Boldon.
Already an Oakley sponsor, the then-27-year-old was no stranger to big style set pieces, often matching his eyewear to his suit, his chains and bracelets bouncing as he ran. But according to Boldon himself, he was more apprehensive than people realized.
Boldon, then racing in his third Olympic Games, was sitting around in the blue paradise Australians call Bondi Beach, waves crashing over white sand somewhere in the distance, when Oakley posed the idea. “Oakley came to me, and said, ‘Would you wear these in an individual race? And I said, ‘Absolutely not,’” says Boldon, laughing over the phone from Paris. “I just felt like… Look, you wear those glasses, you better win. Because if you don't win, you're gonna look like an idiot.”
But Boldon changed his mind the moment they hit his temples. “I put them on and I thought, ‘Oh my God, these things look insane.’ But there was a large part of me that was like, ‘This is going to be really, really cool.’ I figured, man, when we put these on, everybody's going to be like, ‘What the hell is that? And are they really going to run in that?’ They look futuristic now. Imagine what they were like 24 years ago.”
Boldon was on the money about people’s reactions. Despite initially declining to wear them for his individual race, Boldon came around when his Oakley rep suggested they’d be good for the men’s 4x100m relay. After receiving two pairs from Oakley, Boldon kept one for himself and gave the other to his teammate, Niconnor Alexander. Alexander, according to Boldon, didn’t share his reservations. The relay team’s lead-off runner took one look and was ready to go. (Alexander, for all his bravery over Boldon’s hesitation, is something of a forgotten hero in the Over The Top history books. “The joke is that, 24 years later, occasionally I'll see a video which is actually him, but he and I kind of look alike, so people think it's me.” Alexander is pictured above.)
Boldon only had a couple of days to test out his new eyewear and make sure it wasn’t going to fly off his face during the race. Then, he and Alexander were stepping out onto the Sydney tracks, OTTs fitted and raring to go. The reaction — from the crowd, from the commentators, from his on-track competitors—was, to put it lightly, rapturous.
“I remember one or two people saying, ‘Those are the craziest things I've ever seen’ when we walked out there,” says Boldon. “You know, [from] the athletes who we had to run against in that heat, I remember that much. There was a female US sprinter that was not complimentary of them, but everybody else was just kind of like… ‘Wow, you guys are really gonna wear that, huh?’”
They really did. The Trinidad and Tobago team didn’t progress to the finals of the 4x100 relay, coming in joint-11th in the semis, but there was no doubt who claimed the gold medal in fashion lore.
“I was very aware that everybody in that stadium and every camera was pointed at me,” says Boldon of the hubbub. “Everybody from every country, from Sydney to the continent of Africa, seemed to have had that as the picture of the day. Unless one of their local heroes had done something fantastic. That was the picture that everybody used.”
The knock-on effect was undeniable. Oakley’s absurd eyewear debut was suddenly on the front page of every newspaper. And while the retail production was limited—Oakley only sold around 30,000 units of the Over The Tops—the cult item status did a lot for their legacy. In the years following, the Over The Tops appeared on magazine pages, on the face of Flavor Flav, made cameos in Spy Kids, Blade, and Spider-Man. They continued to prove catnip for athletes, several of which have worn them in the years since, from pro-golfer Jarmo Sandelin, NFL player Justin Jefferson, and cyclist David Millar (Takumi’s personal favorite OTT wearer).
Nowadays, you can’t get your hands on a pair for under $2,000 on eBay, and it’s likely to remain that way. When probed about a potential reissue, Takumi revealed that not only are there no plans to produce the Over The Top, they couldn’t even produce them if they wanted to. After a brief 20-pair run in 2020 to celebrate the model's 20th anniversary, the mold broke beyond repair to trigger an extinction event. The final OTTs made were the last of their kind.
“Right now, we cannot actually make even one more,” says Takumi. “It would just require so much work to be able to do it. The tool is retired. It's done.”
When I tell Boldon this, he says that he’ll be treating his pair a little bit more carefully now. Before he flew into Paris to watch the Games, Boldon had taken his pair—number one of the 20 that Oakley reissued in 2020—out of the Island Space Museum in Florida, where they had been on display. The originals he wore on the track in 2000 are currently lost. Boldon had given them to his uncle, post-race, and he suspects they’re forgotten in a box somewhere, gathering dust.
But the whereabouts of Boldon's shades has done nothing to dim their legacy. The Over the Tops continue to occupy his Instagram feed nearly 25 years later. And that is a point of pride—or, at the very least, a useful calling card.
“If somebody has no idea who I am or or what I did,” Boldon says, “those glasses will be enough for them to go, ‘Oh, yeah, okay, right. I know I've seen those.’”
It’s a similar story for Takumi. The OTTs changed the track that day—and they altered the idea of sunglasses on an atomic level. “Even if you didn't watch the Summer Olympics, or knew who Ato Boldon was, when you say Oakley, they say, ‘Oh, the Over The Tops.’”
This story originally appeared on British GQ with the title '"What the f*ck are those?" The untold story of Ato Boldon's batshit Olympic Oakleys'